Make some noise.
At tonight’s Planning Board meeting, the board will make a recommendation to the City Council as to whether they should rezone a part of Harbor Bay from commercial to residential in order to build 104 houses. As this is a rezoning, the city council has to make the final decision and so, the board’s vote will only be advisory.
At the end of the day, there is one big question being asked. Do we want to build housing in an area that is not conducive to housing? Anyone who has actually read the Final Enviornmental Impact Report (FEIR) will know that the amount of overall traffic being generated has little impact (even given the jive-y answers on LOS Averages, etc.). The number of actual trips are low and the impact on the routes they are expected to take palce on are low. (Which isn’t to say non-existent, under the current design, they are actually as high as absolutely possible.)
The oddest part about the transportation info is the insistence that this project is somehow Transit Oriented Development (TOD) or nearly when it has absolutely none of the hallmarks of being such. (It’s not within a ½ mile of a transit corridor, it isn’t designed to encourage transit usage, it relies on high parking ratios.)
The FEIR does not look at the project layout (streets, parking, bike paths, etc.) only at the general placement and possible issues. Which allows for a lot of tap-dancing on what it plans to propose. The staff responses to issues surrounding incompatibilities between the General Plan’s bike and other transportation issues as being a part of the project design discussion, cause the overall discussion to slide past critical planning issues like orientation of the new streets, connectivity for bike paths, and whether the project can even meet one of the 5 overall goals of the city’s General Plan, the de-emphasis of the automobile.
Instead of mitigations proposed to make sure that these policies are met, the FEIR tells us to just wait, we can deal with that after you’ve approved the idea of the project, thus slipping the project forward without dealing with key, deal-breaker types of issues. Ones that tie directly into the issues of traffic impact, a key EIR concern.
But I digress.
At the end of the day, this FEIR asks the question, is this where we want to build housing? Just ½ mile for the OAK runway? The noise impacts from the airport have decreased over the past years, I checked out the noise maps from the airport itself and the new housing is outside the key “noise zone” (I think I’m making terms up) now, showing that the airport is making significant gains in noise impacts. But the FEIR also makes it clear that this is not a great place for housing. It’s darn noisy.
As we continue to discuss development, there are some key issues to watch (and continue chatting about). IF it is decided that housing is needed in the region and Alameda should provide some of it, is this the place? It’ll be interesting to see how council members like Frank Matarrese, who have not been warm to the idea of housing at Alameda Point because of their interest in building more commercial development will vote with respect to this housing proposal, which put housing in an area that’s not quite criminal-loud, but in the words of the FEIR (in respect to TOD) is “nearby” criminally-loud.
Should we be looking to decrease the land available for commericial and light industrial development at Harbor Bay so that we can turn around and insist on more commercial and light industrial at Alameda Point? Isn’t that a shell game, where only the new homeowners and their unusable backyards lose?
Personally, I have always wondered why city’s allowed housing to be built so close to airports. The recent lawsuit that was settled by the city was mostly about whether the HB had to follow new development requirements, or whether their decades old requirements still held. The council (three of them at least) said that the old requirements were the standard. It’s probably the same argument the city is making over the Beltline property. There was no promise that this new housing project would be accepted or that the re-zoning would occur.
HB Isle Associates made their decisions long ago and it appears that while they have a contract allowing them to build 3,000 some-odd houses, they chose to give land to the city and build other things in those locations. They also chose to build larger lot houses on their available land. These were market and regulatory decisions that they made to get thei earlier projects approved. The city should be making their decision about this latest proposal based solely on the ideas of 1) does it want to reduce the commercial footprint in Alameda? And 2) if we build housing here, is ½ mile from the Oakland International Airport runway the place to do it?
Given all the discussions in this town I can’t see how the answer to either question is “yes.”
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