.Letter to the Editor: Just Build Anywhere?

Re: “Constructive Arguments” (GT, 4/21): Branciforte and Water Street is not a properly thought-out location for such a project—just build housing anywhere?

One of these developers has ideas and plans taken from a large metropolitan city—stackable garage with a bar on top? Are those low-income families and 18-year-olds who want affordable housing going to get drunk every night at a bar in their own building? How about the rampant theft, drug deals and vandalism already happening in our neighborhood? Do we want to add more problematic situations in “our own backyards?” I think we have had enough of that already.

This housing project is literally crammed into a small area where emergency vehicles will have problems turning around. The unstable cliff for this project is composed of organic material that was under the ocean decades ago. Occasionally the remnants of the cliff crumble and fall below onto the sidewalk. Do you really want to put a heavy building on that cliff along with a strip mall? These big builders have big expansive ideas. 

With this project going through to completion, we will need more grocery stores, physicians and new hospitals that all bring with them problems of waiting in lines for doctors and appointments. A lot of people already go over the hill to get medical care.  We just don’t have the physicians here to help everyone. Several of my physicians have already moved on. How much can you cram into a neighborhood?

Do these builders, architects and advocates for affordable housing and growth ever think of these problems at all, or do they just want to plug in people anywhere they can squeeze them in?

Michele Philibosian | Branciforte Neighborhood, Santa Cruz

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