City seeking input on Crosbie Heights small area plan

[Tulsasaurus Rex]

The City of Tulsa wants feedback on a developing small area plans for the Crosbie Heights neighborhood.

Crosbie Heights sits just outside downtown. It has a great view and a long history.

The neighborhood thrived in Tulsa's earliest days but now needs some reworking – better sidewalks, better streets.

That's why City planners are coming up with some big ideas for Crosbie Heights - a new plan still in the early stages of development.

The city has put up a display at WaterWorks with some of the big ideas for the neighborhood: housing, trails and beautification. This would create a document for city planners to give guidance to the city on what residents want - and what they don't want - for the neighborhood over the next 20 or 30 years.

City Planner Martha Schultz said, "We try to think of, imagine how things will look in the future. We're asking people to visualize the neighborhood with certain kinds of improvements."

The plans, so far, call for a lot of basic infrastructure improvements and preservation of the few blocks of old brick buildings - expecting they could be both businesses and apartments.

Residents told the city they want trail improvements and transit options as their neighborhood rebounds.

Small area plans are important because they guide city spending on infrastructure and influence private development by putting down on paper what residents want for their neighborhood.

"It lays the groundwork for the decision makers, when a development comes through, they can see the community either supports it or does not," Schultz said.

The Crosbie Heights plan can influence what happens for decades. That's why the city thinks it's so important for people who live there to look over the plans now.

"Big Ideas" is on display at the WaterWorks Art Center in Newblock Park, 1710 West Charles Page Boulevard, through April 29.

Crosbie Heights is located south of Highway 412, west of Interstate 244, and north of the Arkansas River with South 25th West Avenue on the western boundary.

Accompanying video and feedback form here: http://www.newson6.com/story/31774339/tulsa-has-big-ideas-for-crosbie-heights-wants-feedback

I'm inclined to say "who cares?" if the small area plan will suffer the same fate as Cherry Street's. Maybe this is an opportunity for someone to write in the feedback form "when we pass this plan, we mean it!"

[TulsaRufnex]

Really could use some resident input... there are some open plots of land that have sat for months and months, after a few boarded up houses were bulldozed.

[DowntownDan]

My observations on small area plans after the fight with CVS is that they aren't entirely worthless, but not worth the extraordinary effort it took to draft the 200+ page plan.  INCOG pushed back against the CVS developer and got the building to the corner, the height of a two story building, better landscaping, brick, and sidewalks.  Basically, aesthetic stuff.  Without the SAP, we'd probably have the same crappy design as 21st and Harvard.

So my observation is that it's worth some effort to draft 10-15 pages of aesthetic recommendations and desires, but not worth going to the extraordinary effort to cite studies on urban design, land use, density, walkability, types of development, etc.  Those turned out to mean very little in the long run.

[swake]

My observations on small area plans after the fight with CVS is that they aren't entirely worthless, but not worth the extraordinary effort it took to draft the 200+ page plan.  INCOG pushed back against the CVS developer and got the building to the corner, the height of a two story building, better landscaping, brick, and sidewalks.  Basically, aesthetic stuff.  Without the SAP, we'd probably have the same crappy design as 21st and Harvard.

So my observation is that it's worth some effort to draft 10-15 pages of aesthetic recommendations and desires, but not worth going to the extraordinary effort to cite studies on urban design, land use, density, walkability, types of development, etc.  Those turned out to mean very little in the long run.

No, not wasted, those other pages can be a template reused in other plans with 10-15 pages specific to the needs of each area.