Thank you!
For initial responses to the plans, please see:
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Your Comments Here
On April 29, at the Claremont Hotel, Safeway presented lots of drawings but very little information about their proposed development. One of the vital missing pieces of information was the fact that the proposed expansion remains over 60,000 sq ft, despite months of input from many individuals requesting a small store or a renovation of the existing one. The irony is that Safeway continued to ask for comments, in the form of little slips of paper stuffed into a box. Safeway will try to claim that the majority of public opinion stands in favor of the project. From what I heard, that night, and for the past two years, most people think otherwise. Here is your chance to take the comments out of the box and share them with your community. Please share your impressions of the proposed expansion in the comments below.
The Building Block of Rockridge
The following is a very insightful response to the April 29th presentation of Safeway's 62,000sf expansion, by Jerome Buttrick, a local resident and key member of the Local Architects and Planners Guidelines Group. It succinctly describes why this outsized development is so antithetical and detrimental to the Rockridge and Elmwood communities:
Neighborhoods are defined by by architectural paradigms,or what we architects call 'typologies.' The dominant typology of College Avenue is crystal clear: small, ground-floor retail, 1200sf typically—that zoning allows to go to 7500sf—on the ground floor with one or two levels of offices or apartments above, such as Market Hall. At its most basic level this IS the building block of our neighborhood. It defines the neighborhood + the more we stick with it, the more alive the neighborhood becomes, as it puts people at home or at work above shops. By inserting a shopping center, as we saw on April 29, with more trips-oriented parking, 60,000sf of shops, no offices, or housing, glass 'bridges' and two-story undifferentiated walls into this neighborhood, you kill the dominant paradigm and therefore kill the neighborhood--'Walnut Creek Comes To Rockridge'. Accepting this will make IT the paradigm. Then what?
On April 29, Safeway got it exactly backwards. On the zoning side--remember Safeway owns a lot in a OUR neigborhood, not vice versa...
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