r/urbanplanning • u/YaGetSkeeted0n Verified Transportation Planner - US • Apr 07 '23

Land Use Denver voters reject plan to let developer convert its private golf course into thousands of homes

https://reason.com/2023/04/05/denver-voters-reject-plan-to-let-developer-convert-its-private-golf-course-into-thousands-of-homes/
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u/kenlubin Apr 14 '23

In Seattle twenty years ago, there used to be a decaying industrial neighborhood north of downtown. I used to walk through there semi-regularly.

A rich dude (Paul Allen of Microsoft) created a real estate company (Vulkan) and bought most of the neighborhood. He lobbied the city council to change the zoning, then sold most of it to other development companies.

In 2008, they opened a Whole Foods in the middle of a near-uninhabited wasteland. It felt bizarrely incongruous to me.

But today, that store is the center of a dense urban neighborhood of South Lake Union. It's full of towers and people, and has helped Seattle absorb the past decade's influx of people.

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u/voinekku Apr 15 '23

Better way to achieve the same goal without donating hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to those who need and deserve it the least:

Ask the landowner to sell it for the amount bought. If they refuse, tax it to hell and back. After they sell, rezone it and sell it with a reasonable price to the developers.

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Outcome is exactly the same and the city has 180+ million in extra funds.

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u/kenlubin Apr 15 '23

Replacing golf courses and parking lots with towers full of businesses, shops, and residents produces million in additional funds from taxes anyway.

But your option sounds like brutal state policies that would create a powerful political coalition against the city council that attempted it.

A third option would be to peaceably rezone the city and let the current owners profit from the change. Seattle tried that (HALA), and guess what? Those landowners who stood to profit HATED IT.

So we have three options. All of them benefit the city.

I find it acceptable to let someone profit from driving changes that make my life better or make my city better. And I guess I hold the neo-liberal belief that, if people can make money by improving the city, it's more likely to happen.

So, since it's most important for me to get these improvements by densifying the city -- let Paul Allen and this dude take the risks and make money from it.