Form Based Code planning is a great idea . . . for those in authority. It allows for an autocratic control of planning to exclude or mandate any type of community development those in power desire. The “college town” is a city that preserves its downtown wood frame houses and tree lined streets as a “historical” necessity, and will use Form based planning to add green spaces, parks, and upscale shopping and restaurants to “one of the twenty most expensive cities in the country to live in.”
The same planning shows that “Affordable Housing” Nodes should be placed in rural towns; where “historical” has no cachet, and the woods and fields are bulldozed for tract homes, condos and apartments. It’s the “form based” place to dump their poor and homeless in affordable housing complexes, and place a drug treatment and outpatient facility at a safe distance.
The county’s mass transit buses, which are so thick around the college that people have difficulty driving cars, don’t enter the Ag ghetto; but if I walk 2 ½ miles to its border, and stand by pole at the side of a ditch, they pass by several times a day.
