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Dear City Councilmembers:
I urge you to oppose the comprehensive planning bill Intro 2186. While our city may need some kind of comprehensive planning over a 20-year horizon for physical infrastructure, this is the wrong bill. It empowers a new, Robert Moses-like figure to set Soviet-style housing quotas in the already dense and over-developed core of our city, takes away Councilmember deference, and makes a mockery of any attempt to democratize land-use decisions. Worse, it is a product of trickle-down supply-side theorizing about housing which has proven itself to be a failure already. The law pre-judges where to add new density and embodies that in law, rather than making the distribution and upper and lower bounds of density the object of discussion and planning. That is planning exactly backwards! The law also relies on unscientific indices of “displacement risk” which is extremely dangerous, as displacement is as much a political phenomena of bad laws on the books (or the lack of good laws) as much as it is problem of the housing market. Please vote no and develop a better law that includes more self-determination for. local communities and is not so biased and focused on assigning housing targets to predetermined areas.
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