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Comment 18 for Land Use Comments for the GHG Scoping Plan (sp-landuse-ws) - 1st Workshop.


First Name: Mark
Last Name: Dempsey
Email Address: dempseys3@yahoo.com
Affiliation:

Subject: Land Use is Primary
Comment:
In reading the comments of others about your draft plan, I can't
agree more with them: A plan without adequate land use provisions
is worse than no plan at all.

The following points need to be in any working plan: 

1. The standard for local planning must be form-based, rather than
use-based land-use planning. Zoning as it exists now is unworkable.
When rezoning occurs more frequently than following an existing
plan (true in Sacramento County now), it exposes the folly of
trying to anticipate uses decades in advanced. 

The only feasible planning is form-based. Such plans specify
intensity of use rather than whether a specific parcel will be
commerce, residences, etc. Otherwise you can anticipate an
epidemic of rezoning that essentially discards any land-use plan
that would support pedestrian- and transit-friendly, mixed-use
neighborhoods.

2. Street design. 

The City of Houston has literally no General Plan, but manages to
produce sprawl because the streets are auto-centric. Unless land
use planning addresses Street design, then developing more
C02-producing sprawl highly likely.

3. Financial incentives. 

Unless your plan addresses the financial incentives for sprawl,
we'll get more sprawl no matter what. Whenever a land speculator
can literally make a hundred times what he spends on agricultural
land after getting development entitlements -- and that return is
un-taxable(!) -- there is going to be enormous pressure to develop
an ever-wider swath of sprawl around cities. Removing this
incentive is essential. 

The Germans have their developers sell the land to the local
government at the agricultural price, then re-purchase it at the
up-zoned price. They seldom develop 20'-under-water floodplain
surrounded by weak levees like Sacramento's North Natomas in
Germany, too.

If the above provisions are part of the plan, then you'll have a
shot at effective public policy. If not, then we can expect more
of the same.


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Date and Time Comment Was Submitted: 2008-07-24 12:28:47



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