More ugly
This is a picture of the tree that was at the center of a "heated debate" recently. The City Commission gave the owner approval to cut the tree down at 2840 Shipping Avenue. I say cut the ugly townhouses down or plant more trees in front to mask them. Matilca Street architecture is proliferating through the Grove. It must be stopped.Photo by Harry Emilio Gottlieb
posted by Tom Falco at 7:55 AM
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8 Comments:
I agree completely with the sentiment of your comments but you are much too late. These cookie-cutter town homes are EVERYWHERE in the grove.
Yes, they are boring, unimaginative and they ruin the charm of the grove. Not to mention all the trees the developers massacred to make space for them (except for that one tree pictured that they forgot to kill).
So what can we do? NOTHING. It's done. You can't "protect" the existing grove homes, that isn't fair to their owners. If their neighbors were able to demolish homes and build ugly townhomes then they should be able to too.
You can thank your commissioner, Marc Sarnoff, for this mess. As president of the Village of the Center Grove, he told the Planning Advisory Board that the residents of the Center Grove did not want or need the Neighborhood Conservation District (NCD), an ordinance and addendum to the building code put together by the number one town planning firm in the world, DPZ, that would have set appropriate guidelines for all new development AND save our tree canopy. It would have prevented the Kendall-like mini Mac-Mansion mess we have now.
It's so sad. We had a chance to prevent this, Sarnoff and his ignorant supporters blew it. And they will also have you believe that they care about protecting trees. This is proof that they, especially Sarnoff, are full of shit!
We need REAL leadership in the Grove. We need to start thinking about who amoung us could make a real difference in our neighborhoods. I'm so tired of bigoted, slick-talking elitists with their own agendas.
Any ideas?
Grapevine should call the Planning and Zoning Director and ask them "Where is our NCD?" The city paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for it. Your commissioner does not care.
Why don’t we show all of the facts? No one wants to mention that the developer is planting 12 new trees in the grove in order to get the permit to remove this one DYING tree.
This should excite the entire tree mob in the grove because now they will have 12 possible chances to fight for a tree!
They have been purposely killing the tree little by little so that they can take it out. It's not dead yet - they should not be able to get away with this. Besides, there is no place to plant 12 new trees. Even if they find a small green spot to plant a tree, it will never have the space to grow as big as the one that they are killing.
They don't need to remove the tree. I live in a Center Grove townhouse with a similar configuration. Our builder left the tree in place and put the gate on the side of the yard where the tree isn't. Not a big deal. It takes a little maneuvering to get in the garage, but that's fine. Our house looks much better as a result.
This developer should not have been given a break after he submitted plans without the tree on them for his building permit. Also, the tree's on City property. As for those of you who hate the townhomes, the fact is they're nice to live in, and in the 50s, when the concrete boxes a lot of the townhomes are replacing were built, those houses probably didn't look so hot either. No house looks good without landscaping, and not everyone can afford a half acre lot in the South Grove. By the way, the NCD hasn't been such a resounding success ... how many McMansions have gone up since it was adopted?
If you read the version of the NCD Marc Sarnoff objected to, and you lived in the Center Grove, you would have objected also. It had some really ass-backwards ideas that didn't fit in a community where you can't get through a season without your bike being stolen, like a prohibition on gates over 3 feet high, and a requirement that the houses be close to the street. DPZ's ideas are wonderful if you are building a community from scratch, but have little place in the reality we call Miami.
There are several homes around the Grove who's drive ways accommodate mother nature.
Does any one remember what the SW quadrant of
Shipping and Virginia looked like before that particular McMansion was built.
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