Saturday, November 10, 2007

Wanna Take A Ride In My Charger?

Benjamin Briggs and Ed Cone are covering the Lawdale-Cornwallis rezoning like syrup on pancakes, so I don't have much to add. Both have good photos of the stately corridor of willow oaks that would be lost.

A Walgreens + condos wouldn't add any value at that intersection, where -- do I need to say it? -- the transportation challenges are already immense.

I hear from city planning staff that big-name consultants have been brought in to try to make sense of the Battleground-Lawndale-Cornwallis nexus as it is now, and they've just thrown their hands up in despair. A drive-through pharmacy would only make things worse.

I kept hearing during the city council campaign that we need to be more business-friendly. But we don't need to be friendly to every business, unless they're going to be friendly to us.

Recruiting businesses is like searching for a spouse, and this Walgreens looks to me like the guy with the toothpick, pompadour, and cheap sunglasses who wants to take Greensboro for a ride in his primer-gray Charger.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Prof: "I kept hearing during the city council campaign that we need to be more business-friendly."

Being business-friendly doesn't mean pandering to small-ish businesses (an individual retail store) that employs about 3 FT and a bunch of high-school-aged PTers. That's a hole in the anti-biz friendly argument. Rather, city-level business friendliness means pandering to entrepreneurial businesses, businesses that grow their FT employee base (with career- or family-supporting level wages) and cutting through red tape to enable the above (as well as pandering to the bigger businesses that move here with the opportunity hire bunches of folks AND bring related business here).

Business-friendly does not mean clear-cutting historic trees to build a pharmacy.

Longer-range planning in coordination with traffic and road people might just be a novelty around these parts. Can anyone say "Wendover @ 40?" [I've been to four different meetings about that area and all four groups running the meeting told us whose fault it was: not theirs. We should get them all in the same room and find out why GSO never heard of access roads.]

David Wharton said...

Do I remember rightly that Wendover-I40 was developed in the county, and later annexed?

Guilford County says, "Planning? We don't need no stinkin' planning!"

Anonymous said...

Guilford county planning is at least that, planning not reacting. This type of land use cannot be allowed to continue , stupidly increasing our traffic count in some places while starving other parts of the city to death.