Hey little girl . . . wanna survey my neighborhood?

This afternoon five or six of us from the neighborhood association’s* planning committee got together to assemble packets to be used in conducting a Cultural Resources Survey in my section of our neighborhood”the part north of 45th Street.  Half a dozen of us got all the packets assembled and ready to use in two hours, which is fairly quick work for that sort of thing.

The survey will be used to create an animal called a Neighborhood Conservation Combining District for the part of HPNA that lies between 45th and 51st.  (The area below 45th had an NCCD created for it back in 1990.)  In my area, we’re being overrun with developers coming in and buying lots, doing teardowns of small single-family residences, and throwing up over-large duplexes with utterly inadequate (or sometimes non-existent) parking, which they then rent to students who park their SUVs in front yards or block the streets with them.  The tacky modern throw-up duplexes and the over-dense use they create are slowly chipping away at the neighborhood’s feeling and character (most of the area contains single-family houses dating from about 1925 to 1955).

I’m one of the five area captains managing the volunteers doing the actual survey work; my area covers twelve blocks, and I’m hoping to get four or five volunteers besides myself.  Each volunteer will walk around the block with a topographical map, marking it up to show houses, sheds, garages, commercial buildings, major trees, sidewalks, street and traffic signs, dumpsters, curb cuts, and street lamps.  After that, he fills out a second form for each structure on his block(s), noting residential or commercial, single-family or multi-family, number of units if it’s an apartment or commercial building, number of stories, driveways, fences, and general site condition.  At some later point we’ll have people go around and take pictures of each building surveyed (useful to architectural historians for telling the age and character of a building), and assemble the whole mess into a huge database we’ll give to the City’s planning department so they have a baseline to compare future development against, and we will have ammunition to use in future zoning fights against inappropriate infill construction, as well as the basis for evaluating whether we have enough material to apply for a historic-district designation.

I rather expect I’m going to end up playing the part of a sheepdog as well as a coordinator, nagging my volunteers into getting the damn work done, and trying to keep their interest and enthusiasm up so I don’t end up having to do all the field work myself.  I’m of no mind to make this a solo project”I already expect I’ll have to come along behind them, doing the clean-up and touch-up work on sketchy material.

* Please note this is a neighborhood association, not a homeowner’s association.  We don’t go around enforcing mowing regulations or finicky points about what color of paint you can use on your house’s trim.

The dictator from Toledo will go to the bathroom.  Fnord.