Hang on, be with you in a second. Must. Suppress. Giggle. There.
Bwa-hah-ha-ha! Sorry. OK. Really.
So the folks in Dilworth have finally gotten a close look at transit oriented development and they don’t like it? Who can blame them, but what did they think light rail meant? The South Blvd. line especially is a $500 million redevelopment engine targeting everything in that corridor, including the edge of Dilworth. Put it this way, if you like anything along any of the proposed transit lines as it currently exists, prepare to be outraged because it is all going to go away. That is the plan.
That is why we can feel the confusion in the words of city officials who must be perplexed that residents of Dilworth — smart, chic Dilworth at that — do not like the idea of mid-rise towers with little added parking erupting from the ground smack against their homes. Yet that is what light rail does, that is what it demands — higher density, more commerical, operationally anti-car.
Once the snickers die down, here’s the important thing: Whatever the city does with regard to the zoning concerns of Dilworth should be the baseline for the rest of city as well, be it a politically wired neighborhood or not. No one wants mid-rise towers next to their homes, not just the folks in Dilworth. Let’s see how that notion, for one, is applied elsewhere as our collective train hallucination unfolds in the coming months and years.
