Today at 1pm there is an Emergency City Council Meeting. It is not certain what this meeting is about but it is clear that as many home owners as possible should be in attendance. This is the first phase in the effort to rebuild our community. We want to make sure the Stan Pates of the world will not be allowed rezone the city to create more Mid-Town Villages.
Come and be a part of rebuilding Tuscaloosa. Lets not let what we have be turned into condos. The meeting is at City Hall, City Council Chambers on the second floor. 1pm.
This is exactly right. For too long, Tuscaloosa’s growth has been for the benefit of a few and at the expense of most homeowners. Forest Lake, for example, was a struggling neighborhood encroached on all sides by commercial development. Those who lived around the lake struggled valiantly to maintain that neighborhood despite all the odds, giving the destruction there an extra tragic component.
This can change now. After Katrina, architects and city planning types offered their services and a vision for recreating communities in the form of the new urbanism: compact, walkable, mixed-use development.
As a former resident, I know dozens of stories of people who tried to keep their property values from being destroyed by nonexistent and poorly enforced zoning ordinances. This is an opportunity to end those practices. Take a look at the college towns that get the highest marks for livability: Chapel Hill, Ann Arbor and Berkley, for example. Let’s learn from those cities’ successes and recreate Tuscaloosa in a similar mold.