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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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