SLO’s current City Council, with the exception of Andy Pease who’s a totally decent person, inherited the happiest place in America and quickly turned it toxic.
Mayor Heidi Harmon, who calls herself a community builder, is a community splitter, pitting her tribes against everyone else.
This council’s heartless disdain for the old and infirm is well illustrated by their approval of idiotic cycletracks through the Anholm district that Harmon’s city-subsidized bike tribe demanded, no matter the harms to residents. In fact, they knowingly chose the design that maximizes resident harms.
Anholm is an early 20th century subdivision lacking the off-street parking of recent subdivisions. Many residents are old, frail, or disabled, and they depend upon on-street parking, seven blocks of which will disappear.
When residents told the council this, the city said they could park within 1,000 feet of their homes and carry groceries. For the disabled, the city said this could be “inconvenient.” Really?!
Councilman Dan Rivoire, a fox-in-henhouse-lobbyist for his old employer, BikeSLO County, had no qualms promoting tracks experts have called more dangerous to bikers than the status quo of bikes mixing with traffic, dismissing resident concerns as “rhetoric” from those “fearful of change.”
Sure, he said, elderly and disabled people will suffer, but it’s a “trade-off worth making.”
This is called ageism, and it has no place in a good city. We need a new mayor who gets that, not one who promotes tribalism and strife.
Richard Schmidt
San Luis Obispo
This article appears in Sep 13-23, 2018.
We should be asking ourselves why the older generation is disproportionately represented among area homeowners. The older generation found housing and then priced out younger generations through restrictive zoning. It’s the younger generation that’s getting a raw deal in San Luis Obispo.
RA237 –
There is no need to invent “conspiracy theories”. Here are the facts. Over 35% of homes in SLO County are purchased cash on the barrelhead…these purchasers by definition are very wealthy. This means that the old (and the young) wealthy, high-paid employees migrating here, the wealthy American and foreign investors, the wealthy parents of students and wealthy 2nd home purchasers are buying homes here. These home purchasers are inflating the price of housing. Don’t blame the restrictive zoning. The zoning and subdivision regulations currently add a “whopping” 3.1% to the cost of a house (see: https://www.nahbclassic.org/generic.aspx?genericContentID=250611). Where does the majority of the cost lie? In the land. Those of us who have lived in our neighborhoods for decades did not conspire to “price your generation out”. If you want someone to blame, blame Howard Jarvis who back in 1978 managed to get nearly 2/3rds of California’s voters to reduce property taxes through Proposition 13. Low property taxes necessarily resulted in the inflation of property values, particularly within the most desirable areas in the state. Why didn’t we move? Because we liked the quality of life here, the very same quality life that our Council is putting at risk.
Answer to ra 237: The “older” generation had to struggle to purchase a home in SLO years ago and many of us had to purchase a home elsewhere–Los Osos, AG, Atascadero– wait 5-10 years, sell it for a profit, and then finally purchase a home here in SLO . Salaries have historically been too low for the cost of living here so we were in the same position that you are in now. The difference is that we lived where we could afford. Your “entitlement” attitude is not flattering, and your claim that you are in a unique situation, is just plain false. We have all been there and resent it when we hear the accusation that we got ours and now we don’t want you to have yours. We struggled and found a way without ruining the quality of life of this lovely city by cramming it with more homes than our infrastructure can handle.