Two weeks ago, the City Council held a public meeting on a zoning change. The purpose was to rescind the tougher setbacks that they had passed in June. They were doing this because the developers are complaining that they are too tough to comply with.
What that means to me is that it didn't allow them to cram an extra unit on a lot. To me, it is time to toughen up zoning some more, not a time to backpedal.
Zoning ordinances are not to make development easier. They are to protect neighborhoods from being destryoed by bad development. Front setbacks should be measured from the street. Believe it or not, that's not always the case in Waltham. If the Building Department had interpreted the ordinance that way, or the coucil moved quickly to clean up the ambiguous language, Bacon Street would have been ruined by sideways condos.
Basically, what the council is now proposing is that any development needs only the amount of frontage that any building within 200 feet has. Look at the the new construction on Myrtle Street. It has no setback. That means if you build within 200 feet, you need no front setback either. Eventually, no one will have a front yard. To me this is called urban blight. Is that what we want the future of Waltham to look like?
It is time for us all to envision what we would like our City to look like 20 years from now. Do you envision Waltham as a city with evey inch of land built on, or do you see it as an attractive place with open space, grass and trees? Also, the environmental impact of over-development will mean water runoff will have no place to go but into our basements.
Don't let anyone tell you that tougher zoning will stop building. What it will do is force developers to build quality projects. Remember the doomsday predictions when the city passed the six month zoning moratorium on permits? The sky didn't fall then, and it won't fall now if we pass tougher zoning ordinances. It's time to make a choice, before it is too late to do anything about it.