Re: Weiner wants TOD tenements in Larkspur
Author: Cocoa Moe
Date: 02-13-2018 - 14:12
That would be funny after all the hard work the citizens of Larkspur put in to forcing their city government to decline to certify the EIR on the Larkspur Station Area Plan which would have pretty much opened the door for developers to redevelop the area into dense housing, most of which would have been market rate and filled with people plugging up the local roads to go to San Francisco.
Novato--you could come down on either side of this bill. If you're Eric Lucan you are patting yourself on the back because that sweet little rental property you picked up a few months before spearheading the construction of a downtown SMART station at a cost of millions to the taxpaters of Novato and casting the deciding vote to authorize it before getting sidelined due to conflict of interest complaints to the state for two years on all later votes, including votes at the SMART board meetings. It's a win-win.
But if you're a homeowner near downtown Novato, and have no interest in selling your home to a developer, you are starting to sweat. As the alleged "Napa of Marin" which the Novato Chamber of Commerce downtown interests call themselves in the hopes of it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy is truly turning out to be a mirage. Instead of a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow Novato will find itself with massive apartment blocks totally killing the downtown area. To be fair, there isn't much character there to begin with. But local homeowners won't happy with the traffic, the loss of their views and light and perhaps even some eminent domain cases robbing them of their homes so they can go buy a new one but not in Novato--they'll be forced to move to Fairfield probably in order to avoid the huge increase in property taxes for their newly purchased homes.
Well, they got what they asked for. They tied themselves to a development horse, thanks to that SMART station, and it looks like they are about to be dragged out of town behind it.