I attended the Glen Lennox Visioning Workshop this past weekend. We had a lively, creative evening imagining a future Glen Lennox apartment property redevelopment. It was a great opportunity for the public to participate in the redesign process and we came up with a variety of good ideas to accommodate progress. I’m still puzzling about a few things though.
For example, in all of our redesign scenarios, we basically pushed the development beast to the edges of our neighborhood by degrees. Overall, I think we just held our noses while eating our peas and some of us put a better face on it. And we did little to discuss changes and development controls on the wider area of our neighborhood. I also can’t seem to shake the idea that the workshop was a kind of puppet theatre and that our participation implies a tacit approval for the next proposed development plan, assuming it incorporates some of the ideas. I also wonder if the visioning workshop co-opted the original effort of crafting our NCD.Â
But maybe the Glen Lennox redevelopment can be a catalyst for both change and stability in our neighborhood. Maybe we can all get what we want by staying in the discussion and cooperating. Mostly, I am hopeful that our NCD steering committee will keep their eyes on the prize … the place all of us like to call home.
Tom Carson
Chapel Hill