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Council begins work on Lamar/Justin Station Area Plan
Monday, April 28, 2008 by Kimberly Reeves
By the time Council got to the Lamar Boulevard/Justin Lane Transit-Oriented Development Station Area Plan at last week’s Council meeting – the third to make it to the dais so far – the core issues raised by Council appeared to be well defined.
Council members agree on the basics:
- 25 percent affordable housing;
- a commitment not to upzone potential parkland acquisitions;
- the creation of a tax-increment finance (TIF) zone to fund public space upgrades;
- some type of funding vehicle to pay for utility improvements;
- no fee in lieu of affordable housing from developers; and
- a requirement for city departments to approach the Council if they intend to do anything that would alter the plan.
Those were the agreements on the Plaza Saltillo and
TIF zones are a tool to use future gains in taxes to finance the current improvements that will create those gains.
Station area plans, however, do appear to be getting progressively tougher to resolve. Plaza
But take a look at the
To turn this area into a friendly pedestrian-oriented location – even with the assistance of the Crestview Station Plan, is going to be quite a trick.
The biggest challenge to this
Resident Chris Kite said the current proposal – to connect Easy Wind to
“As a real smart traffic engineer once told me, a lot of connectivity is good,” Kite said. “You have multiple ingress and egress and a lot more flow. The problem is that a little bit of connectivity is really bad; it’s even worse than nothing. It funnels all these crazy chokepoints and funnels traffic into a few locations.”
Affordable housing also may be tougher at this location. With the exception of the
And while the plan presented to Council implied a commitment of 10 percent affordable units with a more nebulous goal of 25 percent of the units on-site being affordable, Council did lock in the 25 percent affordability commitment.
Planner
Council Members Mike Martinez and
In an ancillary presentation,
The current flow of traffic around the development worked,
“It’s definitely a complicated intersection,”
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