My independent study this summer is under the heading of “politics and land use.” I’ve been looking at a local hospital’s plans for high-density and mixed-use expansion around their campus and between two transit stops. It is a form of what some folks call “transit-oriented development.” What I’ve uncovered is that when it comes to these kinds of land use, indeed there is lots of politics involved. Interest groups are digging in on issues like zoning ordinances, public hearings, and eminent domain. And at times, it has been quite contentious.
As a good friend of mine at work said when I told him about my paper, “next to religion, land is what people fight about.” He’s absolutely right. His comment got me thinking about the
I like to read my fair share of scholarly papers on metro issues like land use, and am even using a decent number of them in my paper. But when I read them now, I read them a little differently. For their rhetoric on what makes sense from a birds-eye view, which sounds so neat and tidy, needs to be filtered with the messier political dimensions that are happening on the street level.
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