A house divided

Abstract

For 15 years, Ramirez and other members of the Sawmill Advisory Council fought industrial pollution and noise caused by the mills and factories in their inner city community near the city's 300-year-old Old Town. Today, most of the factories are shuttered. In their place, Ramirez and his neighbors would like to see a mix of soccer fields, housing, light industry, and neighborhood-oriented commerce. The principal author of the 750-page planned growth strategy (PGS), agrees that empowering neighborhoods could be a most important achievement of the new document, adopted by the city in September 2002. A big point is to breathe some life into the neighborhood planning process. If the city as an institution creates a partnership with those neighborhoods to make them safer places, where kids are better educated, where local businesses are supported, it will lay the foundation for positive implementation of the ideas in the planned growth strategy. The PGS commits the city to using impact fees, zoning changes, capital expenditures, concurrency requirements-mandates that schools, parks, roads, and so on be developed along with new housing-and other tools to encourage infill construction in the older city and to change the way development takes place on the rapidly growing West Side.