The saying used to be "fences make good neighbors." The continuing saga of the proposed Neighborhood Conservation District (NCD) ordinance proves that some people just can't let go of the belief that ordinances make good neighbors.***image1***
Watching the March 26 City Council meeting on television gave it the effect of closed-circuit surveillance: grainy, bleeding images, the potential of forensic information everywhere. An alert security guard, or a federal agent reviewing the tapes in the aftermath of a terrorist incident, would have instantly marked former City Councilor Karen Heldmeyer as a "person of interest." As people spoke both in favor of and opposition to NCDs, Heldmeyer fidgeted endlessly, her eyes darting back and forth across the room, or, in the event that she didn't like what someone said, rolling dramatically with flabbergasted exaggeration. Tabled from the February Council meeting, the NCD ordinance received a 3-1 favorable vote from the Public Works Committee on March 24, with councilor and committee member Ron Trujillo being the nay vote. Also on the Public Works Committee, Heldmeyer's District 2 successor, Rosemary Romero, voted to recommend approval to the full Council.
The Council won't vote on the NCD ordinance until its April 9 meeting, but heard comments and asked questions on March 26.
Having roused her supporters through an e-mail blitz prior to the meeting, Heldmeyer opined that NCDs were not only endorsed by the city's general plan, but also in the Railyard master plan and described the ordinance as a longtime dream of many Santa Feans. Heldmeyer also charged that critics, presumably including this one [
Zane's World, Feb. 27: "My Own Private Santa Fe"
], who have suggested that the ordinance could result in neighborhood styles being controlled by small minorities or that wealthy neighborhoods would be more inclined to pursue the ordinance are "not grounded in reality." Both in her e-mail and in her testimony before the City Council, Heldmeyer emphasized that the "boundaries and characteristics of an NCD would be arrived at by an open and democratic process."
Apparently the former councilor perceives no problem in supporting the general and Railyard plans when it suits her purpose (NCDs) while lambasting those plans when they are less useful to her (infill, density). Also, if Heldmeyer believes that theoretically open and democratic processes are free from the influence of small minorities and wealth, one wonders, despite her eloquent pleas in favor of engaging the political process, if she's bothered to pay attention to any election larger than the District 2 scramble in the last 10 years.
Although effectively rallied proponents of the ordinance outnumbered opponents, one hopes that the Council was not so sleepy as to notice that only Heldmeyer approached logic when defending the ordinance. The "many" who have been allegedly dreaming of NCDs offered largely incoherent rambling ("our neighborhoods need this in order to be, uh, neighborhoods") while the outnumbered spoke intelligently about the problems posed by attempting to legislate charm (too many overlays, spot zoning, potential city vulnerability to massive lawsuits, sheer expense of staff time in dealing with the issue). One of the outspoken opponents was a practiced neighborhood rights activist and a mediator for Albuquerque's inclusive and communicative Early Neighborhood Notification process, which Heldmeyer held up as a model during her term as a councilor. Heldmeyer herself nearly gambled away her coherence when she tried to draw a parallel between the Law of the Indies-Spanish King Phillip II's 16th century guidelines on the planning of colonial towns in the Americas-and NCDs. How a precise and universal planning document laced with racial bigotries, compares to neighborhoods as small as two-square blocks enforcing arbitrary regulations, is hard to imagine. Except, of course, in terms of racial bigotries.
The crux of arguments in favor of NCDs always comes down to the idea of good neighbors and friendly neighborhoods. "People came together during the big snowstorm in 2006 and really helped each other out," one NCD supporter claimed, intending to imply that neighbors with homes legislated to be stylistically similar would be more likely to be neighborly and generous in times of need. If it sounds like the day that common sense and keen thinking died, that's how it sounded over the crackling TV speakers as well. The camera only focused on the person testifying, but I sure hope someone in the room was rolling his/her eyes. Of course opponents of an NCD ordinance also believe in strong neighborhoods, in preserving character and in encouraging community; they've just realized that, No. 1, such things cannot be legislated into existence and, No. 2, the proposed ordinance will be more fractionalizing than uniting.
People, not rules, make livable, vibrant neighborhoods that retain charm and resist, as Heldmeyer calls it, "inappropriate development." The truth is that fences don't make good neighbors, and neither does regulating fence height and color. The idea of protecting one's neighborhood with a conservation district appears to be empowering on the surface-it's easy to understand why many citizens would be intrigued-but once a frozen moment in a neighborhood has been legislated into a series of regulations, the power is gone from the neighborhood's hands and ensconced in the bowels of city bureaucracy. Not such a good dream anymore, is it?
