Strawberry fields forever

So, I finally got around to watching the City Council meeting of last night and holy hell I guess everyone who had been asleep during the whole time the Park Street North of Lincoln “Gateway District” discussion which has been seven years in the making finally decided at the 11th hour to get up and try to get things to change.

I’m teetering between being sympathetic to the people of “the Wedge” and feeling like they are a little too late.  And they keep talking about the old Island High site as though the City of Alameda has some control over it.   I’m not quite sure why they keep bitching about this to the City Council but the School District owns the property.   If they want to negotiate a land lease or something, go there.   AUSD has done it before, they gave a land lease to the Boys and Girls Club, go to the correct agency.   I guess my sympathy wanes when members of Wedge, not all, but some, imply that the City should be purchasing the old Island High site or force the School District to give them the space, just because they come to the City Council meetings.

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On the other side

At the last City Council meeting the Council was supposed  to hear an agenda item about the Park Street North of Lincoln (Gateway District) plans (EIR, new zoning, blah blah blah).  However that item was continued to tonight’s meeting because the attachments didn’t get loaded on to the website, so essentially no one who wanted to could review the materials before the meeting.

There’s some mild disagreement on how the height limit for the Gateway District came about and what it should be eventually settled out, so hopefully that will all become clearer after tonight’s meeting.   I know that the Alameda Architectural Preservation Society (AAPS) is concerned that if the height limit is set to 60′ it might create a “canyon-like” effect on that stretch of Park Street because a bunch of developers will all of the sudden decide they want to max out the height limits even though the height limitation was a whole lot higher for decades and no on ever built anything even coming close to 60′, let alone 100′ tall.

Another argument is that the higher height limit will cause the landscape to be uneven with buildings of different heights.

Gateway drag

On Tuesday the City Council will be considering the Park Street North of Lincoln (Gateway District) rezoning, update of design manual, and certification of the EIR for the project area.    Just quickly to review, back in 2008 the City Council approved a plan for the Gateway District and since then City Staff has been working on zoning fixes and form based codes to essentially streamline the process of developing that area.

In the comment section there was a mention about the height limits for the area that I just want to touch on for clarification purposes because I think this may come up during Tuesday night’s meeting.   There has been some suggestion that the original plan for the Gateway District was to set the height limits at 40′ but that the Planning Board — or someone else — hiked the height limit to 60′ instead.

In the Staff Report, there is clarification on this whole height limit discussion:

Height Limits: The draft Zoning Ordinance reduces the height limits on Park Street from 100 feet to 60 feet. (The height limit along the rest of the Park Street commercial district is 60 feet.) Some speakers requested that the Planning Board reduce the height from 100 feet to 40 feet to reflect a 1990 General Plan Land Use Element policy, which reads as follows:

It’s NoLi

I heard that initially someone in the City wanted a catchy name for the Park Street North of Lincoln area and one of the names that they were juggling around was NoLi.  Like SoHo, or SoMa.  But someone’s better judgement won out and now they are calling it the “Gateway DIstrict.” 

The first of a series of meetings discussing the Strategic Plan starts on Wednesday with the Economic Development Commission, moved on to the Historic Advisory Board in Septmeber, then to the Planning Board, and finally the Transportation Commission.  Also, if anyone is interested, there are two openings on the EDC, one is a community-at-large position.