Letter to the Editor:
Building height potentiates the indoor rooms of vertically projecting cities. Burbankers do not systematically benefit from vertical dimension escalation, the city’s 100,000+ suburban population (single-family home owners and plentiful renters) have not, and cannot, significantly enjoy tall buildings. Burbank’s housing and business stock should be planned to accommodate the city’s urban resident taxpayers, not Sacramento regulars like fake developers and fakir-like realtors.
Currently, our publicly revealed Planning Dept.’s colorful urban development mappings show scads of unimaginative squarish blotches that detract from our city’s visual attractiveness, even on its own cartographies! The dramaturgy and political theater that IS our existing City Council, overseers of Burbank’s childish planner coterie, must eventually approve/disapprove their presented plan’s terms with the inevitable private-sector developments. I think there has been significant planning distortion in Burbank, perhaps even un-democratization, peculiar displayed socio-institutional beliefs, and other corrupting influences.
For example, a METRO-painted BRT dedicated vehicle lane might be mistaken for some “Martian Canal” when viewed from a vertical perspective. When viewed from a horizontal perspective, it would appear as a glaring blood-engorged stain on Olive Avenue and Glenoaks Blvd. With one-storey housing, tenanted by renters and home-owners, being disparaged by Burbank’s Planning Dept. and its City Council in favor of ADUs and skyscrapers, it is not difficult to imagine worse to come visually speaking.
With apologies to H.G. Wells.
“No Burbanker would have believed that in the first quarter of the 21st Century that their affairs were being monitored keenly and closely by minimal intelligences lesser than real Burbankers and yet as mortal as their own, that so-called planners busied themselves (at enormous public expense) about their affairs to “modernize” the City of Burbank for a “piffling” $150 millions. Yes, intellects shriveled and cold and with unsympathetic callous academic outlooks, regard Burbank as a place to be displaced, replaced by unleased/rented boxy junk, volumetrically enormous, unpleasing roomage. Ugly to see, ugly to touch, helping only to increase the city’s heat-island effect.”
Richard B. Cathcart
Burbank
