I wrote about the Vistas once before, when the public hearing was first announced. That public hearing is scheduled for tomorrow evening (Monday, September 25, 2006), and I’ve just noticed that the background materials for that hearing have been posted. I’m guessing that they went up late Thursday or early Friday, as the internal time stamp on the third of the three PDFs is around close of business on Thursday. The three PDFs can be found here, here and here.
As is usual with the PDFs from the City planning department, they contain only images of the pages submitted, rather than machine-readable text of the content of those pages. Thus it can be a bit of a challenge to read it through looking for specific content. The non-free professional version of Acrobat does, however, have an OCR (optical character recognition) feature that can be used to quickly scan the documents for images of text. I’ve done this with these three documents and I’ve found that, within the ability of the software to recognize text, it was not able to find the strings “MPDU” or “moderately priced dwelling unit”. I did find a single instance of the word “affordable” in the first of the three documents, on page 24 in a discussion of densities:
We understand that there are economic and other pressures (such as keeping housing more affordable) that may militate toward a somewhat more dense mix in the Vistas. Indeed, the Board and the Committee are generally comfortable with the portion of this design that uses high-density condominiums along Orchard Ridge Road, with the possible exception of the Condominium structure planned for the comer of Winter walk Drive and Orchard Ridge.
However, there is a strong community feeling that more downward movement in the density numbers is needed.
If there is significant interest in the OCR’d versions of these PDFs please mention it in the comments or by email and I’ll consider posting them. I’ve pasted in a few images from the background PDFs:
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