HomeMy WebLinkAbout10/21/2019 Item 2, Papp
Wilbanks, Megan
From:James Papp <jamesralphpapp@hotmail.com>
Sent:Monday,
To:Scott, Shawna; CityClerk
Subject:Correspondence on 545 Higuera Street for ARC
Dear Architectural Review Commissioners:
As a current member and former chair of the Cultural Heritage Committee, I feel the pain of any
city advisory body that has to apply the complex of city guidelines to individual projects. Yet the
guidelines are there for a reason. The reason the Community Development Guidelines are there,
as Jan Marx affirmed to me in a conversation yesterday, is that a glass box was proposed for Court
Street. That glass box was never built.
Zoning is a broad brush that shows what size of blank boxes can be built in different parts of town.
The Community Development Guidelines recognize that humans with normal human sensitivities
live in those parts of town. The expanding discourse on zoning is beginning to come to terms with
its racist and classist roots. Zoning has turned the second oldest part of the city, the area that was
built on Tomás Higuera’s property, the Fields of Carrasco, and what I will call for convenience the
Higuera District, into a dumping ground of large apartment buildings of the size and kind that are
not allowed in the neighborhoods where members of the city council and planning commission
have traditionally lived. Quite a different area was given the name “Old Town Historic District”
that was not, in comparison, particularly old but happened to have members of the then city
council living in it. So the “Old Town Historic District” has been accorded protections of review by
the CHC that have not been accorded to an area much more historically sensitive.
Cue the Community Development Guidelines. These are quite stringent in their protections
regarding multi-family projects in residential neighborhoods. The Higuera District is a residential
neighborhood. The neighbor of the proposed development, Jean Martin, has lived in her single-
family home for eighty-four years. She has a renter in a cottage in back. Her next-door neighbors
live in a small apartment building that Jean’s grandfather, the notable local architect-builder E. D.
Bray, converted from a nineteenth-century racing stable that, since the burning of the Spectator
Barn, is the last relic of horse racing in the city (Gabby Ferreira, “Horses and Cars Used to Race in
San Luis Obispo. Why Did They Stop?,” Tribune, 16 Sep. 2019).
Yet the ARC has so far shown a lack of interest in applying these same guidelines to 545 Higuera
and Jean Martin’s neighborhood as it has imposed on previous projects, including other
projects within the same hearing. Commissioners continue to talk about what they “like” and
“don’t like” rather than what the guidelines do and do not allow. The legal term for this approach
is “arbitrary and capricious.” Commissioners are not required to have empathy for residents,
though that would certainly help their work as a commission. But they are required to apply the
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guidelines in a fair and consistent fashion. I know, from experience, how difficult this is, but I
would encourage my fellow advisory commissioners to redouble their efforts, both for the sake of
the city and the residents of this city. Everyone knows we need more housing for future residents.
But the city’s statutes and precedence recognize that that can and must be done without
destroying the environment of current residents.
James Papp
Architectural Historian, Secretary of the Interior Professional Qualifications
Member, Cultural Heritage Committee
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