Cohousing-L Mailing List: eliminating future streets through project

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

Some ideas from our experience at RoseWind Cohousing, Port Townsend WA:

Eris Weaver writes of discovering that a town Master Plan has a big 
street right through the middle of their projected community, and how 
they are trying to get a variance. 

Check the master plan or similar documents and find if there is somewhere 
that they speak of the value of "non-motorized" transportation --ie 
pedestrians, bikes--and read it back to them. That helped us in areas 
where we had street rights of way through our property that we wanted to 
vacate*, and we showed that we were adding a number of public-access 
pedestrian pathways in the project, sort of in trade.

Research will also turn up what the technical carrying capacity of the 
existing streets in the area is. In our case, it was much more than the 
traffic they were currently carrying, making reasonable the argument that 
the existing streets were sufficient, and more were not needed. 

"Vacating" a street right of way means getting them to let go of future 
rights to open it (barring Eminent Domain, which you can never avoid). In 
our town, if agreement can be reached that nobody present or future will 
need a street there, then one can buy it at a reasonable price from the 
City and that's that. Typically they then require that you give them back 
a utility-line easement on part of the width. We actually pulled off a 
deal where we only bought the part that they didn't need a utility 
easement on -- since the right of way is legally a sort of easement 
anyway. We saved a lot of money that way, as we were vacating about 6 
blocks of streets. 

Anyone who is looking for land: be sure you have full understanding of 
what easements, street rights of way, utility access, etc are invisibly 
on that nice whole-looking field you have your eye on. 

And of course you'll need to meet local requirements for emergency 
vehicle access, fire truck turnarounds, sewer clean-outs and utility 
company access thereto....

Good luck from RoseWind, where those of us who played developer in our 
"spare" time learned more about city planning jargon and requirements 
than most of us will ever again need to know.