HBA Newswatch
April 4, 2008
TWEAKED PLANS FOR ROHO CONSIDERED
By Cheryl Allison
ARDMORE- After several false starts, Lower Merion is ready to take to public hearing zoning ordinance amendments for the two areas it has targeted for growth. In a meeting March 26, township commissioners voted to authorize advertisement of the draft ordinances for formal public hearings and possible adoption April 30.
One incorporates the latest changes to the Rock Hill Overlay District or ROHO ordinance, intended to, at long last, get development of the former quarry area off the ground.
The other would newly permit residential development in the township's manufacturing district along the Schuylkill in Bala Cynwyd-reimagined in this initiative as a lively River District of apartments and town-houses stretching along a riverfront promenade.
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PENN SUPERVISORS PREFER PUMP STATION
By Marcell Peyre-Ferry
Supervisors prefer a sewage pump station over individual grinder pumps for the proposed 240 homes in the Big Elk subdivision between Old Baltimore Pike and Corby Road.Fifty of the proposed homes are on a lower-lying portion of the parcel.
The sewer lines that will serve the development call for gravity-feed lines and at least one pumping station, but the 50 homes on the north side of the parcel need a way to get their sewage over the ridge before gravity can take over.
The developers offered the township two options - a second pump station that would serve those 50 homes or individual grinder pumps hooked to the lateral lines on each of the affected houses.
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BULLDOZERS: CHEAPER THAN A BAILOUT, FASTER, AND MORE FAIR
No joke: Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins suggests that bulldozing vacant homes would be a better government policy than the currently brewing stew of bailouts and tax breaks.
"Knocking down surplus homes would be the most efficient and equitable way to spend taxpayer dollars," he writes. "It can proceed experimentally. It can be turned off quickly when the need evaporates. It would not be a lesson to Americans that housing debt is not real debt and need not be repaid. It wouldn't benefit the most irresponsible lenders and borrowers at the expense of responsible ones. The housing market would still have to hit bottom, but the bottom would be higher (and sooner)."
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