Posted by
Playful Walrus on Wednesday, March 05, 2008 3:09:07 PM
Sarah Tully of the Orange County Register has two articles on subjects I’ve blogged about before.
The first involves a lawsuit seeking to impede a development.
A citizens group is suing the city of Anaheim for refusing to hear an appeal of a major expansion of the Platinum Triangle development area around Angel Stadium.
On Monday, Citizens for Responsible Equitable Environmental Development filed papers in Orange County Superior Court, claiming that the city approved the expansion without allowing time for an appeal.
In the Platinum Triangle, developers are bringing jobs, businesses, and housing to an underdeveloped area. And these people have latched on and are trying to ride the coattails, and are suing to try to get something for nothing.
Briggs described his San Diego-based group as "activists" concerned about housing, environmental and development issues throughout Southern California. The group is challenging the Platinum Triangle expansion because of the lack of transportation infrastructure and workforce housing near jobs.
In other words, they are a bunch of people who, instead of buying their own land and doing things they way they like it, try to force other people – people who actually make things and build things and are productive contributors to society – cater to their desires. “Workforce housing” means they want subsidized housing. They want other people to pay for someone else’s housing.
In the other story, Anaheim’s tourism industry won a victory when the City Council decided to adopt an initiative that otherwise would have had to go on the ballot.
A Disney-led group urged the council to adopt the language of the initiative, which requires that future housing proposals in the Anaheim Resort area must go before voters. In doing so, the council took the measure off the ballot.
To make a long story short – Anaheim zoned a part of the city as a Resort District for tourism businesses. A couple of housing developers wanted to chip away at the Resort so they could build housing. Ideally, I’m all for private property rights, but if you’re going to have zoning, especially zoning that involves certain obligations and requirements placed on the tourism businesses tied to the performance of that district, you should stick with the zoning.
One developer actually bamboozled people into thinking that they were going to bring housing to them at much less cost than market rates, and thereby got those people to push for removing the land from the Resort District so the housing could be built. It was a total farce, but a lot of people fell for it.
This was a good vote for Anaheim.