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Louisiana
Baton Rouge Proposed Mixed-Use Project Faces Daunting City Code Hurdles
Eager for a quality Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND) to
compliment the nationally known New Urbanist downtown plan in Baton
Rouge -- ''one of the most suburbanized towns with a tradition'' not
of neighborhood but ticky-tacky cheap development, where
Mayor-President Bobby Simpson's long-standing smart-growth task
force produces ''little action'' -- the Baton Rouge Advocate
hopes the River Ranch TND proposed by planner Steve Oubre and
builder Richard Carmouche for the old Kleinpeter farm will
convincingly demonstrate the advantages of mixed-use,
pedestrian-friendly development over car-oriented sprawl.
Noting that ''building a neighborhood is much more difficult
that just laying another cookie-cutter subdivision to yield the
quickest profit,'' the daily's editorial says true ''new urbanist''
projects require ''a real mix of housing prices,'' since ''the people
who work in the neighborhood coffee shops ought to also be walking
to work.''
All this poses problems. River Ranch needs 119 waivers of
the city development codes, the editorial finds, also citing Miami
New Urbanist Andres Duany's observation that ''exquisite -- and
expensive -- areas such as Georgetown in Washington, D.C., or
downtown Savannah cannot be legally built in the typical American
city.'' That's ''just nuts,'' but changing it, the editorial points
out, requires some demonstration project that people can look at
and see'' the difference from what ''they live in today.'' --
Advocate
12/8/2003
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