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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What "the people" want are sfh or duplexes with some room around them (lawn, play area). That's literally what people are clamoring for. For apartments, they want larger apartments. Some of the rabbit warrens on Wisconsin and Connecticut could probably be overdue for conversions/retrofitting to three bedrooms and more community space amenities. That's "what the people want". Not tiny holes/boxes.[/quote]
This is exactly right! So why is Hans Riemer and his fellow YIMBY nuts intent on preventing the county from being able to offer people what they want? I literally saw a presentation from the Planning Department that argued that townhouses were bad and that “stacked” four-plexes were a preferred housing type. I would love someone to explain to me who wants to drag a stroller and groceries and everything else up four flights of stairs? There’s a reason the traditional walk-up has always been considered typical tenement housing. There’s a reason it’s associated with slums, it’s not clear why they don’t seem capable of learning from history and are intent on turning our county into a slum. If we don’t offer the market what it wants, people will get it elsewhere and we’re going to be left with slums and poverty. The situation is totally insane. [/quote]

Planning’s main clientele is deep-pocketed developers who only do big projects. They don’t seem to have an interest in enabling development that competes with spacious two-bedrooms in glass towers. The glass towers use land more efficiently, but there’s a lot of land not suitable for the glass towers, and we could post big housing gains if the county made it easy to build duplexes or triples in those places. Planning was lukewarm when one councilmember suggested doing just that and also wanted to saddle these small projects with a lot of red tape that would not apply to building a single family home. The whole approach is incoherent if you want more housing but makes sense if you just want to maximize profits for big developers. [/quote]

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