Yesterday’s N&R Sunday editorial expressed a fair amount of skepticism over the next boodoggle coming before the Greensboro City Council —- the proposed taxpayer-funded hotel on the corner of S. Elm and Lee streets, although the paper concludes that “if supporters of this project can present a plan that clearly benefits all parties, it may deserve the endorsement of city and county leaders.”
In my ongoing effort to be fair and balanced, I’ll also note the the N&R expressed support for the controversial College Hill development that would put a 750-unit student housing complex on the site of the former Newman Machine Co. Meanwhile, the Rhino’s John Hammer calls out the City Council, saying if it’s truly concerned about economic development, then they’ll lean on the Zoning Commission, which denied the rezoning request.
Hammer also makes the point about ‘infill development’ that I’ve been making for some time now.
For Greensboro to grow, to have economic development, to create new jobs, property has to be rezoned. Infill development is something that is encouraged by the highly touted comprehensive plan, and once again is an issue that the candidates running for City Council seemed to overwhelmingly favor. If there was a candidate in favor of sprawl, they didn’t make a lot of noise about it.
But judging from its votes, the present Zoning Commission doesn’t believe in infill development because most of the time infill development requires some rezoning. It hasn’t been really pronounced because the city has had relatively few rezoning cases in the past year.
Infill development is something that people are in favor of in theory but, when a developer starts talking about building something on vacant land, the neighbors usually want things in their neighborhood to stay just the way they are. It seems to be pretty universal that most people are in favor of infill in somebody else’s backyard but not in their own.
As my buddy Keith Brown at Triad Watch notes, this is a tough call, and he’s certainly no friend to developers. I guess reaction is to note that students can be real pigs —- I should know, I once a student —- so I understand the concern among College Hill residents that they’re neighborhood would get trashed with the influx of hundreds of students living a stone’s throw down Spring Garden Street. I also watched the Zoning Commission meeting on cable access and noted that many College Hill residents were acknowledging that the Newman Machine property would eventually be developed and didn’t necessarily oppose it. But a student housing complex just wasn’t the right development.
Remember, that was the strategy of residents concerned about the proposed development at the corner of Elm and Cornwallis. They realized the property was prime for development, but opposed the developers’ original plan until he came with a plan they could support. But guess what —– the City Council failed to support the revised plan.
Let’s hope the council doesn’t establish a pattern whereupon it favors developers using taxpayer-money while making it difficult for developers using their own money. That’s not a sound economic development strategy.
