Mayor Adler on housing

#1

“If we do nothing except preserve our beloved two-bedroom bungalows, we’ll soon have a bunch of $1 Million two-bedroom bungalows.” Amen. And we’ll soon have no neighbors who work for the government or are artists or musicians.

Heritage has quite a bit of aging commercial and multi-family. Can we agree that 34th Street would be better if its lots had street-level retail with several stories residential above? And smaller parcels had zero-parking requirements so they could feasibly be redeveloped as apartments or microunits? (I’m looking at you, ugly old medical office on stilts at 34th and King!) And what about some rowhouses, like we see in the northeast and San Francisco?

#2

While I agree that 34th is an excellent candidate for low-rise vertical mixed use, I think it is hard to argue, now that ADUs are an option for SF-3, that the Heritage neighborhood doesn’t already have a healthy diversity of housing options & land use that serves as a model for other less diversified neighborhoods.

#3

@davidkennethmichael I agree. Unlike many neighborhoods, only a relatively small part of Heritage is single family and even less is owner-occupied SF. But I would love to see the offices in our neighborhood redeveloped as mixed-use with residential. We have a lot of aging offices, especially medical, and now that the Dell Medical Center is opening that part of downtown is now the more attractive place for medical offices. And in contrast Heritage is a much more desirable neighborhood for residential now than it was when the medical offices were constructed in the previous decades.

I’d love for Friends of Heritage to lead a conversation among neighbors about what we’d like to see. These older commercial and multi-family properties are going to get redeveloped – there’s just too much development pressure – and if our neighborhood has a consensus about what we’d like to see there, it could help guide the redevelopment. I know Heritage made a neighborhood plan, but Austin and has changed quite a bit since then and it was also high-level. We could get specific about a vision that we as neighbors can agree would move it to a more walkable, bikeable, human (not car)oriented neighborhood.

#4

I too would love to see more people housed and also interacting along 34th.

I’m not a big fan of the houses that eded up across the street from Salvation & Food Heads more specifically, because of the fences and driveways / curb cuts that face 34th Street - It’s got great potential for being a very walkable street with sidewalks and bus service and retail, but those back fences on those houses ended up looking like an afterthought which kind of wall off those houses to that kind of community interaction on 34th, and the multiple drive ways can interrupt safe pedestrian and cyclist patterns.

I’d wager that the folks buying into those houses don’t want to put that kind of vibe out to the neighborhood or passersby, but we can certainly partner with professionals to do some better place-making initiatives that make Heritage’s main streets more inviting to walk down and creates social opportunities to interact with our neighbors and community members.

This video goes over some of the tenets of “complete streets” and what makes them such an important part of community building.