Someone in our town is proposing to rip down a single-story office/light industrial building in our downtown and build a suburban-style cul-de-sac instead. The existing building is no great shakes, but I find the light-bulb style proposed roadway (50-foot right-of-way; 120-ft diameter of asphalt at the bulb, just for 3-4 house lots) just such an aesthetic shocker - so out of scale and character with the traditional downtown street grid - that I wonder what arguments can be made to stop it - or at least build it differently.
Land use law in the US affords little scope for fitting developments to their particular circumstances. Our town could have adopted a different set of regulations for areas like downtown (this is what the neo-traditional planning codes are all about) but we haven't. So we get one-size-fits-all regulations, in which applications MUST be approved, because what is required for a 1000-lot subdivision out in the countryside is the same as what is required for a 3-lot, one-acre property smack in the middle of land that's been developed for the last 300 years.
The hearing for this sucker is next month. I'll be interested to see if anyone shares my views on this.
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