Regarding your July 14 article titled “The price of housing”: We hope that the developers of the so-called Dana “Reserve” (the question remains as to what they are in fact “reserving” or “preserving”) will return to their prior top development priorities of “open space uses within the oak woodlands.”
“Do a smaller project and leave the oak trees alone,” said Neil Havlik, a retired natural resources manager for the city of SLO. Replacing 4,000 200-year-old oaks with 4,000 tree saplings does not mitigate the loss of 2.25 million pounds of carbon dioxide sequestered by these trees every year.
Granted, Nipomo may need more affordable housing, but this project far exceeds the number of housing units specifically projected or planned for in local and regional county planning documents. In fact, the Nipomo unincorporated area is experiencing a jobs/housing imbalance characterized by a shortage of jobs compared to the number of housing units. This jobs/housing imbalance will get significantly worse with the creation of 1,441 new dwelling units.
And the environmental impact report (EIR) found that this project is potentially inconsistent with more than 30 existing land use plans, policies, and regulations adopted for the purpose of avoiding environmental effects. What makes this proposal even more egregious is that this project’s EIR highlights greenhouse gas emissions, biological resources, and air quality as “unavoidable” impact areas at a time when we are in the midst of battling climate change. The developers might as well be saying that climate change is also unavoidable!
Allan Cooper
San Luis Obispo
This article appears in Jul 28 – Aug 4, 2022.