Big Foot housing

I am interested to read that the City of Birmingham is going to set up a Sustainability Board (November/Downtown).

Is it possible to do something about the proliferation of Big Foot housing along our neighborhood streets?  One block from me, Pleasant Street used to be full of various sized homes, many small ranches, the larger ones (two stories)  nestled in nicely cultivated gardens amid a lovely canopy of trees. 

After more than ten years of nightmare construction while houses were built to the edges of the lots and lawns and gardens asphalted over for driveways, patios and swimming pools, Pleasant Street is far less pleasant.  There are only a few modest houses left that young families in the sub-millionaire set can afford.  Structurally, neighborhood drainage is threatened by all that concrete and asphalt, which cannot absorb our heavy recent rains as well as the vanished lawns and gardens could.

Environmental sustainability seeks an ecological balance in a community for the sake of those of us who live here now and those will come after us.  With that in mind, could Birmingham’s new Sustainability Board consider devising zoning regulations to balance out the number of larger and smaller houses per street, according to anticipated drainage patterns?

Dr. Annis Pratt

Birmingham