Bikies,
You may have read about the Midvale Plaza redevelopment in the
newspapers. Below is a letter to the editor with my take on it. For those
of you who live in the Midvale Heights or Westmorland neighborhoods and are
supportive of transit oriented development, please come to the July 18 City
Council meeting and speak in support this project. The opponents of this
project are many and well organized. The council meeting starts at 6:30 pm
in Rm 201 of the City-County Building. The Midvale Plaza redevelopment
will probably come up after 7 pm. If you are interested in more
information, please contact me.
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Dear Editor,
To read the letters to the editor and Sound Off, you would think everybody
in the Midvale Heights and Westmorland neighborhoods is against the Midvale
Plaza redevelopment. Nothing could be further from the truth. As a
fifteen year resident of the Midvale Heights neighborhood, I speak for a
number of my friends and neighbors who like this mixed-use development and
think it is a good design.
The neighborhood steering committee points to numerous passages in the
Comprehensive Plan that talk about fostering "neighborhood involvement in
all development decisions
that will impact the neighborhood." However, involvement does not mean
veto power. For example, would we allow the neighborhood to block the
installation of sidewalks if that were the neighborhood's position? The
development should be in the interest of the City as a whole.
As chair of the Pedestrian/Bicycle/Motor Vehicle Commission and the Long
Range Transportation Planning Commission, I helped review and approve the
Comprehensive Plan. This development is an example of what I and others
with whom I serve had in mind. The steering committee points to parts of
the Comprehensive Plan that state developments "should be compatible with
the scale and intensity of the adjacent neighborhood." Unfortunately, they
don't put such phrases in context with a discussion of the undesirability
of post-World War II auto-centered development and the numerous discussions
of transit oriented development also found in the Comprehensive Plan.
I also find many of the complaints of the steering committee to be
incongruent. They want more retail space and fewer residential units while
complaining about the projected increase in traffic, not realizing that
retail creates more trip generation than residential development. They
want more parking yet want the development to be more pedestrian and
bicycle friendly, without realizing that large surface parking lots are
inherently pedestrian unfriendly. They want less density but want to keep
existing retail, not understanding that higher density can spread fixed
costs over more units which would aid retention of existing retailers.
If one looks at areas of the City that are pedestrian friendly, you will
find that they are among the most densely populated. There is a reason for
this: the density provides a large population of pedestrians and numerous
destinations in close proximity to those pedestrians. Far from being a
detriment to pedestrian, bicycle, and transit friendly neighborhoods,
density is a requirement.
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Mark N. Shahan ------ __o
607 Piper Drive ------- _`\<,_
Madison, WI 53711-1338 ---- (*)/ (*)
(608) 274-9367
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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