Getting the most out of rare time off the corporate VPN so I can actually post here.
There’s an interesting bit of symmetry in the Friends of the Grove / .BCRC battle that some of you might not be aware of. Jason Meeker was one of the key figures in Responsible Growth for Northcross six or eight years back. The group that made up their own plan and pushed it as the ‘alternative, urban vision’ for the property, instead of the Walmart (which was originally supposed to be a 2-story ‘urban’ (ish) design (with parking deck)).
They (RG4N) were dead wrong on the merits - you can’t try to get involved in a site planning process (normally administrative approval) just because you don’t like a new tenant (the mall had sufficient zoning for several Walmarts had they wanted to). They still cost the city about a million dollars in legal fees defending city code (and made me and several other people hold our nose and publically support Walmart, who I generally loathe).
The funniest thing, though, is that one of the people who was on ‘our side’ (Me, Chris Bradford, Shawn Shillington; it was this writing at this time which ended up contributing to our 3-headed Austin Chronicle award for “Best Urbanist Echo Chamber”) at the time - making absolutely correct points in the comments about how the neighbors had no legal right to stand on and how they didn’t get to plan the developer’s project for them?
Chris Allen.
Seriously.
So that’s kind of why I haven’t gotten involved in the FotG fight in a nutshell.
Chris Bradford and I still have content up from those days if you look through our archives. Shawn’s writing at the austinist is mostly gone unless you’re good at navigating the Internet Archive.
Just thought some might find this interesting.