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View Winners → Dear Editor: Keep the Neighborhood Quaint
Arcadia Weekly Dec 04, 2014
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Dear Editor:
I live in the neighborhood just north of Recreation Park. I’ve recently learned that a developer has plans to demolish a 1940 single-family home at 725 East Lemon Ave. and replace it with a 4-unit two-story PUD (Planned Unit Development) structure.
If you are not familiar with our neighborhood, it consists almost exclusively of single-story, single-family homes. It’s neighborhoods like ours that make Monrovia quaint, classy and highly desirable to live in. This PUD structure and others like it threaten to take this away.
Which brings me to my next point. Who benefits from this? Our neighborhood certainly doesn’t. This type of construction threatens to bring down property values, make parking more difficult, cheapen the look of our street and produce fear that this will happen again next time a home in our neighborhood goes up for sale. Have we not already learned this lesson from the other PUD developments in our City? PUD should be an example of what not to do, not a precedent on how to proceed.
Honestly, I’m shocked that the Design and Review Committee has recommended this for approval. With no disrespect, would the members of the DRC approve a PUD structure next to their homes? If we are honest with ourselves, we all know somewhere deep down that this development plan is bad for this neighborhood, bad for our City and just plain wrong.
It really comes down to this: Do the members of the City Council and The Planning Commission value our wishes to keep our neighborhood’s aesthetics quaint and charming or do they value this developer’s desire to make a buck?
And here’s one more thing to consider. We as a neighborhood have put a lot of love, work, and money into our homes to make our collective blocks as beautiful as they can be. When you weigh all sides of this debate, this should count for a lot, because it certainly will count for a lot in this developer’s advertisements if he gets a chance to build his PUD development in our community. And does this not make this developer’s plans parasitic to our efforts of beautification? This is a healthy, vibrant neighborhood that doesn’t deserve to be tarnished this way.
I sincerely hope the right thing is done here and this hit-and-run profit developer and others like him are stopped from ruining this special neighborhood and others like it in our City.
Sincerely,
Very concerned citizen of Monrovia
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