Citizen Comment:
There were ZERO people at Citizen Comment on Tuesday! Probably because of this:
and the freezing temperatures.
Hope you all stayed warm!
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Item 1: Blanco Gardens Area Plan
This is basically the only item of the meeting.
What is an Area Plan?
An area plan is a big study of your neighborhood. It’s supposed to document what makes your neighborhood feel special, so that it will keep feeling special over the next few decades. This is a really complicated topic, because there are both good reasons and dangers here.
(We’ve discussed these before, when the Dunbar/Heritage plan got split into two separate plans.)
Good reasons: Does your neighborhood need more sidewalks? Better safety? Park improvements? Community space? These are great things to put in the plan.
(Also, historically, developers have seen low-income neighborhoods as cheap real estate to plunder. Low-income neighborhoods get gentrified, or bulldozed for a highway. Area plans can deter this by encoding the current vibe.)
Bad reasons: Are you trying to micromanage everyone’s home appearance? Are you trying to prevent affordable housing by nixing things like small-scale apartment complexes, small houses, subdividing big houses into smaller rentals, condos, townhomes, 4-plexes, etc? These are bad things to put in a plan!
(Really, these rules already exist. They’re generally built into a city’s zoning rules and HOAs. An area plan can just lock down the class segregation for another generation.)
In addition, if you nix all the affordable housing, you’re left with only big, spread-out houses. This is sprawl. It’s bad for traffic, bad for the environment, and makes it way more expensive for the city to maintain pipes and roads and telephone lines.
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So the planners have to thread the needle here: let’s capture what’s special, but without preventing affordable housing from being built in city limits ever again.
This is a really nice presentation about the San Marcos area plans. It’s got this map that shows how vulnerable each neighborhood is:
I know that’s tiny, but you can zoom in on the map to anywhere you want:
(There are a ton of interesting maps in that presentation – maps of rental houses vs. home owners, maps of area of stability vs change, maps of historic districts and maps of environmental sensitivity, etc. It’s worth a scroll.)
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First up is Blanco Gardens!
Blanco Gardens is a great choice for an area plan, because of The Woods apartments:
(Now it’s called Redpoint.)
In 2012 the city had to decide whether to allow this apartment complex to be built. Blanco Gardens was furious.
In November 2012, there was a non-binding referendum on the issue:
Wow, 75% of the city wanted us to purchase the park land! Nevertheless, P&Z and Council greenlighted the apartment complex.
Then Blanco Gardens was massively flooded in 2015. Tons of residents lost their homes. At this point, the apartment complex was half-built. The widespread belief is that the apartments made the flooding much worse. (The flood also destroyed Cape’s Dam, which lead to a whole ‘nother saga.)
Bottom line: Blanco Gardens has gone through it, and deserves an area plan.
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So how do you do an area plan?
They form a committee of eight residents, and then also do a ton of outreach:
One note: At P&Z, one of the commissioners (Lupe Costilla) said, “I live in this neighborhood, and I had no idea that any of this was going on.” And she’s very plugged in to the city.
This is what I mean when I say that outreach is really, really hard. Even when you do all of those things, even people who are paying attention still fall through the cracks. You’ve got to dedicate time to relationship-building with community leaders.
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So what’s actually in the plan?
Here’s the actual plan draft. In the presentation on Tuesday, they gave a few examples of actual Blanco Gardens content, but mostly they talked more generally about what area plans are.
Examples:
If you want to read all the recommendations, by each topic, you should go to pages 17-72 here.
Final notes: There’s not any automatic funding that comes with all these recommendations. It’s just guidelines for the future. So if the city has money, they’ll follow the recommendations, and if a developer wants to build something, it has to be compatible.
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Here’s the timeline for approval:
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One final note: Who gets an area plan?
Here are the first five plans:
In Blanco Gardens, here’s one recommendation under “Building types”:
I think that’s really great! But notice who does NOT get an area plan:
Nobody is ever going to go to Willow Creek or La Cima and say, “Consider and support gentle density”. Those neighborhoods have entrenched protections that make sure that affordable housing will not be mixed in. This drives me batty.
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Literally nothing else happened at the 6 pm meeting. It was only 24 minutes long!
(We were supposed to discuss the Kissing Tree TIRZ and Downtown TIRZ, but those got postponed until February.)
Keep going for the workshops!
The San Marxist 