Citizen comment: Pro-arts master plan, anti-Posey road development.
Item 15/16: Annexing and zoning a neighborhood adjacent to Trace.
This property is adjacent to Trace, and runs against a cemetery. The developers want to make a little neighborhood out of it. I was annoyed during the presentation, because Shannon Mattingly included statements like “They’re going to include an activity center,” and generally made it sound like a planned community with amenities. This is a zoning case – none of that stuff is binding. If you zone the land as CD-3, the developer can do anything allowed under CD-3. You should never trust any beautiful mock-ups or plush amenities unless they’re spelled out in a contract.
[As an aside: private neighborhood amenities are bad for a city. If you decrease the number of people that use public pools and facilities, your city will not invest as much in public pools and facilities, and the slow decay and disinvestment hurts the have-nots, not the haves. I don’t feel so strongly about apartment complex amenities, but neighborhood amenities rub me the wrong way.]
Back to this development: it runs adjacent to an old cemetery, which Mark Gleason helpfully tells us is known as Crying Baby Cemetery because so many children are buried there. So folks: this is straight out of your favorite haunted tale. He floats the idea that burials may extend beyond the perimeter of the cemetery. (Carol-Ann! Carol-Ann! She’s in the TV!)
The developer helpfully says that to the best of his knowledge, the grave sites are properly contained within the cemetery grounds. And there’ve been surveys. Mayor Hughson points out that surveys don’t detect underground caskets. Eventually everyone agrees that surely the row of old growth trees must be the boundary of the grave sites. (But don’t look at me when your swimming pool starts bubbling.)
Max Baker is concerned that these houses are stealth rentals. He wants them sold individually to San Martians, not sold off in bulk to an investment company who will rent them out. I bristled a bit at the implied anti-rental sentiment. (Max does turn up the that this developer is self-financed. He runs an investment group. On his Linked-In profile, he uses the unfortunate phrase “…focused on opportunistic real estate acquisitions”. Max alights on “opportunistic”, noting it’s generally cynical and maybe a touch greedy. Personally, I’m impressed with Max’s google-fu.) My guess is there won’t be a neighborhood pool and center.
Saul Gonzalez speaks up – many members of his family are buried in that cemetery, including his brother, and his uncle used to help run the place. So I do feel a little bad for the Poltergeist jokes above.
Eventually council settles on a development agreement, which will put a 15 foot buffer and a wall between the cemetery and the neighborhood. They’ll finalize it at the second reading, in two weeks.
So that seems to be that, for now… or is it?? (cue skeletal hands playing a janky keyboard.)
The San Marxist 