Mix-Used

This is mixed use along Franklin Blvd:


Click on the photo...the sign on the left actually reads: "Mix-used development 25,00 SF retail & 17,000 SF office...Coming soon in Spring 2008." So it's mix-used. And let's humor your author for a moment; let's pretend it's supposed to say 2,500 instead of 25,000 sq ft retail.

Well, spring of ought eight has come and gone. The area looks nothing like Sharon Vu's artistic rendition. And what you can't see is that the parking lot is actually the lot used for the motherbunker, Security Public Storage, the shopping center-turned-suburban warehouse:

(Note: Bike included to show scale)

Let's flip a sand dollar, heads or tails; heads, public storage is retail, tails, it's office space. Seeing how there's only 2,500 sq ft of retail, it must be classified office. I can see it going either way on the ledger rolls at county, and either way it doesn't make any fucking difference. It's a neighborhood killer.

Not only is the one vacancy sign tagged, the second one was shattered by spring winds and never repaired. Never repaired...hmmm...will this too be the fate of the half square mile of now unused parking? All that asphalt, all the vehicle lane striping, all the illumination stands, all the trees and bushes, for all the suburban morons who can't live without or with all their consumer shit...will proceeds from their rents pay for the eventual need to chip-seal that surface? To trim those trees? To re-stripe the parking lanes for the phantom vehicles?

Here's the real rub...this motherbunker sits inside the burnt out center of a suburban doughnut. The city, in an effort to attract another tenant into this strip mall, provided development fees and long term maintenance contracts to the motherbunker to subsidize their building. This is chemotherapy, folks; the cancer is spreading and we've gotta stop it. An empty shopping plaza attracts riff-raff, copper thieves, and pot-smoking teens between the berms of the Morrison Creek canal, and it's gotta stop. Put in a self storage! Yes! That will bring in taxes and revitalize the neighborhood!

This is vibrant, mix-used planning?