Another RCG re-designation failed at the council hearing today. The applicant ran up against a common Calgary phenomenon, the more educated and civilized style of NIMBY'ism where planning principles are misinterpreted to masquerade the NIMBY'ism as legitimate community based opposition to a project.
The property in question is in Windsor Park, a nice inner city area with some really good spots to transition the R2 areas to a higher density. The neighbours came up with all kinds of rationale to oppose the proposal. What it really came down to is they just wanted any density or land use changes to be made 'somewhere else'. As is common, 'somewhere else' is on a busy street far from their own property.
The trend to view a row house project as an undesirable urban form is common among many community objections to RCG re-designations. Since the RCG is deemed to be a lower grade of unwanted, character destroying land use, the community quickly attempts to assign all such applications as inapropriate unless located on the most marginal peripheral location in the community. More often this is a street so heavily damaged by cross through traffic, commercial access points, bus lanes, trains, etc it is already considered defective and not really part of the community. In this way the community can offer up a poster site for densification, as in, go there, to the spot we already don't care about. The idea to ring fence the 'good' parts of the community with 'undesirable density' is also a part of the community submission.
I reject a lot of this as basic NIMBY'ism, however, what surprises me is the lack of thought put into some of the community submissions. When the project opponents are questioned by Council, often they lack coherent answers to issues they haven't thought through. The highly emotional and knee jerk dislike of a project is really all that is discussed thoroughly. For example, a question from Council to the community was something like 'what is so wrong about having four doors, with porches, windows, etc facing a side street, yet having the unadorned flank of a semi-detached building in the same location is acceptable'. To this question, no satisfactory response was forthcoming.
Only a few members of Council, and the Mayor are showing a consistent progressive voting record on supporting these minor re-designation applications. I know where my campaign donations will be going...
Calgary has an endless supply of its own homegrown NIMBY talent