A public forum for those concerned about the proposed expansion to the College Avenue Safeway in Oakland, and its irrevocable harm to Rockridge and Elmwood
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Your Comments Here
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...