LogFAQs > #979319821

I bought a house in the town where I grew up about 4 years ago. It's a split home (I dunno what that's called where it's like a rowhome but you only share the building with one family) at the edge of a grid of blocks. Across the street is the old state hospital, a mental facility that in its heyday had like 30 functioning buildings across a fairly sizable campus. These days, it's still open, but they're only using like 4 of those buildings and the rest are either in disrepair or torn down, which means it's land just sitting there, asking to be developed. The state hospital occupies about a quarter of a major square of land nestled between three municipalities, with the other three-quarters being mostly a park.

Here's my artist's rendition of the local map so I don't have to dox myself:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/8/848e7188.png
Red dot is where I live. Pretty much everything surrounding the southern half of that park/hospital complex is housing, some of it the not-rowhomes I live in and some being small single homes. The rest of the county is all quintessential American suburbia.

I knew they were planning to redevelop some of the land in the state hospital, but I thought it was just a small chunk of it on the eastern end. I had heard something about building apartments, and given that my experience over the last two years with Cities Skylines has led to Youtube feeding me a steady diet of urbanism videos, I figured that's probably a good thing. So hey, good for them. Go for it.

Today I received a notice in the mail giving notice of a proposed plan that is going to redevelop sixty-eight acres into 69,000 ft^2 of commercial space, 230,000 of industrial, and 728 new residences -- about one-third apartment and the rest town homes. And I'm like :surprisedpikachu:.

Needless to say, this is way more than I ever imagined them building. I can imagine developments elsewhere that look something like this and...it doesn't fit the character of the area at all. The state hospital currently is rustic and idyllic, with lots of forested area on the border between there and the park. The hospital grounds themselves are full of tall, old trees and wide open spaces between buildings. It's nice to walk around, aside from all the poorly-paved surfaces. I'm not exactly fretting my "walking space" because I can walk around developed blocks and the park is right behind it, so I'm not all "not in my backyard, mister!" Also, I'm not one to stand in the way of progress, however, I do have a few concerns.

The first is that, as I said, it doesn't fit the character. Or at least I assume it doesn't. I only have this notice, and will be heading down to Municipal Hall when I can to look at the development plan. I'm not worried about the commercial -- that's probably a few corner stores and one medium-sized grocery store, and the industrial probably accompanies the existing facilities along the east edge of the area. I can't precisely picture how much 230k ft^2 is, but given what's already in that area, I'm not too worried with one notable exception.

The second is that a project this size is going to be long and noisy, right across from where I'm living. We already have so many roads torn up with construction projects right now. This will be a major nuisance. But also temporary. I can manage.

However, the third issue is traffic. The road right along the edge of the property is used by locals as a quick access from one side of town to the other, given that the other roads that run parallel have tons of stops and lights along them. Despite that, it's not a big road. Two lanes and enough space for cars to park on one side. It can handle existing traffic just fine, but it's already handling a pretty heavy load. Add another, I dunno, 1200 cars just for the residential, plus a slew of business and light industry, and it's going to be atrocious at certain times of the day. And as near as I can tell, there isn't a reasonable way to add carrying capacity. Even if they widened the road, which they could do, the roads it connects to aren't any larger, and the intersections where they meet are very contentious during rush hour. Or when school lets out since to the west of the park is the high school and an elementary school.

I'm really kinda blown away by the scope of this project. On one hand, I'm sure it would bring tons of revenue to the town, which is really strapped compared to the surrounding areas for a variety of reasons I won't go into. And I do generally support what I imagine is probably decent land use (at least compared to building a billion unaffordable giant single homes like most developers in this area do.) But man, I dunno about this project.

There are two meetings where the public can attend a presentation and offer comments. One is when I work, so I'm hoping I can attend the other, next week, and learn whatever I can before then, but yeah, this is so above and beyond what I expected that even I'm inclined to dig in my heels a little. Any recommendations?