how many people on the panel here have read the late, great, jane jacobs book "the death and life of american cities"? can i see a show of hands? if you have not, please read it. what everybody is speaking here tonight is directly relevant to that book. she was revolutionary. she says when you bulldoze a community and build a new community and move strangers into it, you lose the fabric of community. it integrates into a slum. i fought a project like this when i live in a silk mill in massachusetts. they wanted to turn this beautiful building -- an art historian wrote a beautiful book about it. they wanted to turn it into 26 apartments. the little village got a lawyer. we fought at city hall. we came close to stopping it. i got them to reduce its to 19 apartments. it is now an incredibly depressing slump. one of the most beautiful buildings in massachusetts. it is going to happen here again. we can keep the community that is here and not destroy it. please do not do this. [applause] commissioner miguel: before the next speaker, because we have been here this length of time, we are go

i've read jane jacobs and "life and death of great american cities" and it seems to me that even the most well-intentioned large-scale projects can go awry. maybe the lots could be divvied up just a little bit smaller? you could have more of a real neighborhood, like you see in certain parts of new york city, where clearly there are tall residential buildings, but they're smaller and next to each other. and it creates more of this vibrant neighborhood with different interests, where you have museums and residences and commercial interests and all different things are right there. that's what keeps a community vibrant. my worry is... what if it doesn't work? what if one of them doesn't work so well? what if it doesn't sell out? what if they end up being kind of empty? what if they're just totally filled up with yuppies? you end up with a very one dimensional neighborhood and that's kind of my great worry. chris: well, i think we're going to get two things. we're going to get new market rate housing in densities that are actually going to impact supply and demand in terms of market-rat

if you've ever read some of the people talked about tonight like jane jacobs or others, it takes a local community focusing on that. i know a lot from different projects across the city, stay involved and come to these events and put some of your energy and expertise in the program moving forward. family, there was a lot of talk about the role of city departments, traffic engineers, landscape architects, those issues. something different has happened toapt and i would like to acknowledge it. it eve been to a lot of lectures like this, planners talking about these issues. but we have a lot of people from our traffic from dpt here tonight, a lot of people from the bicycle planning program, we have our head of planning at the nta bill lieber man with us tonightt landscape ark technical ts from public works. there's a real focus on how to breakthrough a lot of this frustration that was talked about. as we move forward, i hope we can find the streets to role out the piece of paper and not only be creative for neighborhoods but to kinds of free up the city staff to really engage and to use the