by Will Nolan First of all, I am very sorry to hear that you lost your business. As such I think yours is an important voice in this conversation - you make a clear and strong point, especially with regard to the incentive for developers to buy up and combine lots. I can't say what the solution is, except to say that I think the city and all of us are responsible to work with you and other local small business owners to ensure not only your right but also your capacity to rebuild. So the question is, what is a plan that will support you AND add green space to the city. I don't want anymore midtowns, I want mcfarland and fifteenth to have businesses like yours without looking like a strip mall highway, with shared green spaces that people actually want to be in instead of drive through as quickly as they can. Wouldn't this also be better for your business? I don't know the answer, I think our best bet is to charge our city's leaders and the citizen's council to solve precisely this problem.

by concernedcitizen For example, one landowner owns a 70' x 150' parcel. If another owner of a large adjacent property were to purchase this parcel, he doesn't have to plant a single blade of grass on that new property, as long as he has a 10-foot wide perimeter around the entire collective property. Our infamous large landowners are very aware of this ordinance and they know they can snap up property at extremely low prices from the small owners who have been put in this position by our local government. I am one of these small owners who who not only lost my livelihood, but stand to lose my family's property. It's like being hit with the same tornado twice.

by concernedcitizen I am talking about small business property owners. The people who own land on which these destroyed businesses stood. The landscaping ordinances hidden in this Greenway development require a 10-foot wide perimeter around the land parcel. There are many small parcel owners who have insurance and the funds to build a beautiful and strong building. They can afford the structural codes. But it would take a miracle of physics to plant a 10-foot perimeter and sustain the proportions of parking to square footage of building.

by Will Nolan I think that the way things were headed, small business owners were already in jeopardy by things like midtown. Eminent domain is much less of a threat, I would argue, than unchecked development. But I don't think anyone's talking about taking land. If that is the case, then it certainly deserves discussion. Promoting greenways and insisting on the beautification of our city - turning this disaster into an opportunity - is, however, simply not equivalent to forcing small business out. It may be difficult in some cases for small local businesses to meet new codes, so the solution is to help them, to call upon our city (and the taxpayers) to work with them and not force them to sell to a developer. I believe that we can have both - protection of locally owned small businesses, and a beautiful new, green, sustainable city.

by concernedcitizen People just aren't understanding that small business property owners are at great risk of losing their land by order of IMMINENT DOMAIN. The promotion of the Greenway and the newly-imposed landscaping ordinances will force locally-owned business who own the small land parcels on which they have worked to be deleted from the equation. That is the long-term AND the short-term. This is Disaster Capitalism.

by Bama P True Will, I understand you also. But many of the ideas and concepts presented here actually have little or nothing to do with those who lost all in the tornado path. So its actually apples and oranges.

Someone mentioned adding flowers at intersections up town and at the University. Nice idea ....

Someone mentioned adding bike and pedestrian lanes uptown and at the University is a great idea ...

Someone mentioned wanting more condos uptown. Sure, a great idea ... BUT NONE OF THESE IDEAS have anything to do with rebuilding Rosedale, and Holt and getting those folks back up and running in business and back in their homes.

So yes ... there are at least two areas being presented here. I'm just hoping people who need to get their lives back in order ... do not get lost in the shuffle, while people concern themselves so much with NON-AFFECTED areas.

by Will Nolan I can certainly understand the concern here. How can people plan for long term if they don't know how they're going to live in the short term? And plenty out there are concerned with just that. However, I strongly disagree with your post. Just as much as we need to worry about people getting back on their feet today, we can't afford not to think long term. Short sighted solutions would be tragic for this city, and I think it's no less compassionate to look after this city's future.