Well, well, well. Yet another city has succumbed to the comprehensive planning rage, this one fortunately is our rival City up I-45. In response, I will merely leave gentle readers with this story from the Dallas Morning News. Amongst the exerpts:
The Cityville apartments just east of Parkland Hospital offer more than 260 new rental units in a row of brightly colored buildings.
One look at the parking garage shows that the apartments have leased well.
But so far, not much is going on with the ground-floor retail space. Only one space, containing a small sandwich shop, is occupied in the 42,000-square-foot strip along Medical District Drive.
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Such mixed-use developments with shops and apartments are all the rage with developers.
Although the apartments have been a hit, somebody forgot to check with the shopkeepers.
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Often it's not the developer but city officials who want to include shops in apartment complexes.
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"We are really seeing the city planning departments pushing for those types of projects," Mr. Willett said.
"It's a good idea to have multiple uses with a property," he said. "But you still have to have the critical mass and population density to support it."
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"There are areas that deserve urbanization and areas that don't," Mr. Ashmore said. "This romantic notion of creating all these mixed-use villages all over the city still comes down to demand."
One wonders whether some of these developers will try to fob off their failures on the taxpayers.
So what is the Wizard's solution? It should be a requirement that planners, City officials, and other interest groups who push to create these failures should be required to pay for those failures out of their own pocket books.
Wizard
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at April 13, 2008 10:09 PM