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Home Resource Center In the News Home Greenbelt Alliance in the News |
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Greenbelt Alliance In the News
June 6, 2003 IDEAS FOR COYOTE VALLEY DEVELOPMENT WOULD MAKE IT A WALKABLE, PARK-FILLED COMMUNITY
Preserving the green EditorialANDRES Duany, the controversial architect, town planner and author, often butts heads with environmentalists over preserving open space. Duany says it's fine to build on pristine land -- as long as what you build is better than what was there before. In a place as beautiful as San Jose's Coyote Valley, where rich farmland nestles up to oak-studded hillsides, that's a high standard. But the Greenbelt Alliance has taken up the challenge. The report it released Tuesday, "Getting It Right," sets out a vision that would make Coyote a lovely community. The city has its own task force working on a plan for Coyote, and most of the concepts described in the Greenbelt report are already part of city guidelines for that plan. "Getting It Right" fleshes out the ideas and shows how they might translate into a community design. The point is to build a town center and some village clusters -- places like Lincoln Avenue in Willow Glen and Castro Street in Mountain View -- instead of separate industrial parks, housing tracts and strip shopping centers, which require cars to get from one to the other, and which require paving over more land. Not surprisingly, there's a lot of green in Greenbelt's plan. Nearly everyone would live within walking distance of a park. But there's also room for at least 50,000 jobs and some 25,000 homes, as the city is requiring for the valley. The plan shows how to accommodate that level of development and still have pleasant neighborhoods. Two elements of the plan are particularly interesting. One is flood control. Instead of building retention ponds, Greenbelt proposes restoring Fisher Creek to a natural channel in a greenway wide enough to contain a 100-year flood -- and provide wildlife habitat the rest of the time. Another is the idea of preserving some agriculture, particularly in the strip of land between Monterey Highway and the Coyote Creek park chain. Earlier city plans have called for shopping centers and big-box retail in that area, but the backs of those buildings would be ugly neighbors for the creek trail. Keeping productive farms on those fields would be a brilliant solution. "Getting It Right" doesn't claim to be a final plan. But it's a collection of good ideas that can be a useful resource for San Jose's Coyote Valley task force. ### |
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