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City council now wants to control what I do with the six trees on my lot. This is the same council that is trying to change the zoning in established areas to increase density.
I have seen many established trees removed from R1 lots to squeeze in two houses or four townhouses, with remaining grassy areas so small there is no room for a tree.
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Is this the same city administration that allows black knot and pine blight to spread though all the parks and along the boulevards without doing a thing to remediate it before it spreads and destroys the trees?
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Please do what you are supposed to do: manage my tax dollars to ensure the city we live in is safe and parks and infrastructure are maintained, and stay out of my yard.
Dave Gray, Calgary
Single-family homes don’t define luxury
Re: Gondek and her council pals give Calgarians the shaft — again, Opinion, March 15
A moment of silence, please, for Rick Bell and the Stodgy Six, who have just communicated to the world that they have never visited Park Slope in Brooklyn — median townhouse price C$2.3 million — or Paris, where a 300-square-metre Haussmann apartment ranges from C$6.6 million to $11 million, or my own hometown of Boston, where a townhouse in the Back Bay averages $4.4 million.
I’m glad this decision wasn’t put to a plebiscite, because I imagine Bell, et al, are not alone in their misapprehension that row houses, townhouses and other dwellings that are not single-family homes somehow represent a downturn for a neighbourhood.
My advice: take some of that misplaced angst and travel, walk around Brooklyn’s leafy brownstone neighbourhoods, while contemplating your lack of knowledge regarding how much of the rest of the world lives.
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Sarah Stelfox, Calgary
City hall lacking in logic
City hall seems confused about a lot of things these days. On one hand, it is pushing blanket rezoning to allow multiple homes on lots originally occupied by one. On the other, they are proposing fines for cutting down trees on private property. It’s pretty difficult to build high-density on a small lot without removing trees.
Councillors want to increase public use of transit by discouraging private vehicles, while encouraging public parking by removing parking restrictions on residential streets.
They required signatures from a majority of residents on a street to impose parking restrictions, but will now consider removing them at the request of a single citizen.
Now a fine for shovelling snow from sidewalks onto the street, while allowing developers to build so close to the property line there is nowhere else to put sidewalk snow.
What are these people thinking?
Christine Stone, Calgary
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