Micah Posner.
Op-ed in the SC Sentinel, 4/14/2022
The Our Downtown Our Future Ballot Initiative is exactly what it claims to be, an effort to stop designing OUR downtown via a series of back-room deals that would demolish our library and displace our farmers market to an inferior location. It’s a chance to build for a different future, wherein we take global warming seriously and stop subsidizing automobiles.
Affordable housing, which is supported by both proponents of the Initiative and its detractors, is not the issue.
It’s all the other stuff in the “mixed use” development proposed to be built on the downtown farmers market lot.
Specifically the issue here is the parking garage, the rotten heart of the city of Santa Cruz’s proposal and a $30 million subsidy of global warming. The city staff have been trying to build a huge concrete parking garage on the farmers market lot for decades but have had no community support for it so they added a library and affordable housing to try to sweeten the deal.
Micah Posner is a resident of Santa Cruz and served on the Santa Cruz City Council from 2012 to 2016.
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