Tacoma, Design Review, and Online Dating
The TNT’s Dan Voelpel today focused on the City of Tacoma’s movement toward a design review process. He compares it to online dating. Not everybody is a perfect match. What we’re being offered for new development isn’t always what we want or need as a city. So, we should continue looking… or at least raise our standards a bit.
< wink >
Sassy McButterpants would be proud.
Link to The News Tribune
3 comments
D Douglas Tooley February 27, 2008
I attended the workshop in the Whitman neighborhood last week – as a bit of a sceptic.
In Seattle neighborhood stuff, including design review, was often just an excuse to expand the bureaucracy at the expense of the plebians.
Certainly it could be a bad thing here. However the upside is a system that should be how it works. Typically design review is undertaken by experts who, theoretically, can apply good judgement to a specific site. For it to work good relationships between those experts and informed members of the community must also exist.
With that it is not just another layer of bureaucracy for a developer to go through but also a place where informal assistance can be gained, both at the permit stage and in creating a buzz for the final, well designed, product.
Of particular concern to me is the business district at 34th and Pacific – which would include the Oscar Condo at it’s north end and broadly stated would include the Hawthorne Condos and Stanley/Seaforts.
The Whitman neighborhood is looking at implementing a historic district. Design review in this context could be a great tool for historic AND neighborhood preservation, especially in dealing with those difficult issues of transition to existing ‘historic’ residential neighborhoods.
I for one am supportive of new developments on South Pacific Avenue – but a process by which that development can be insured to be good, and not cheap stuff – no matter who the developer might be, is essential.
Sure, Design Review in the end might just be gossip – but in the hands of functioning, individuals connected to their community and its future it COULD be a very, very good thing.
R Reuben McKnight February 29, 2008
For those who are interested:
Please consider attending the next Design Review Project Workshop, to be held March 10, 6 pm at the Evergreen State College Tacoma Campus at 1210 6th Ave.
The workshop will run from 6 until 9 pm.
For more information, and to participate in the City’s online design review survey, please visit www.cityoftacoma.org/designreview.
R Reuben McKnight February 29, 2008
Pardon, that should be from 6 until 8 pm.