Destroying a small city with big developments

The city of Glendale, CA is, by all standards, a small city: 200,000 population!
Its streets were designed to accommodate this kind of population, so they are mainly one-lane and full of grown up trees. Many people would like to live here, so the city council decided to approve the construction of more than 4,000 living units and 2 hotels. Squeezed by big pension obligations, and very high salaries, the city council is desperate for more revenue!
Therefore, the “development on steroids” started several years ago, and now the people of this great city wake up daily in the middle of a nightmare. The main street taking the full brunt of this nightmare is Central Avenue, and it looks more and more like a street from Moscow, in the 1950’s! There is no comprehensive vision of this plan:

• old buildings(with a lot of character) have been demolished
• doctors’ offices on Central Avenue were relocated
• countless adult trees have been cut out
• green space is non-existent
• the traffic is already a big problem, and the people of Glendale brace themselves for the impact of 8,000-10,000 more cars. It will be impossible to move around the city, or to get on the freeway!
• the stress put on the water and power structure will be devastating, leaving people without electricity, and burst water pipes.
• finally, the main reason for this letter, there’s now the “Citibank Project”: a developer will build 24 live/work units, 464 multi-family residences and 9640 square feet of commercial space within four buildings, on the only green space left in Downtown/Central Avenue

Around the North-East corner of Lexington Avenue and Central Avenue, tens of adult trees will be cut, the grass will be gone, and another impersonal gray structure will be built.
The project has been approved once, but it changed developers, so it needs to be approved again. In order to make as much money as possible, there is a race at both ends (developer and City Council) to overlook the implications and go for high-density, not-enough-parking-space structures.
The only street with 2 lanes is Central Avenue: all the others (Milford Avenue, Orange Avenue, Lexington Avenue) are one-lane streets. This issue alone should have stopped the project, but it didn’t. They should have considered leaving the green space in place, and integrated it within the project. That would have been a wonderful decision for the people who live in this neighborhood.
Our last chance to keep this last patch of grass, and the 5-6 trees on it, comes on November 4th, at 6 PM, when the City Council takes another look at this project, among others in the construction pipeline.

Please, join the people of Glendale at this meeting and help us save out town!
Please help us stop the council in transforming Central Avenue into a hideous line-up of one gray building after another!
Please ask the City Council the tough questions the people of Glendale have been asking for years now, without receiving any answer!

The bottom line is that the city does not need so much development, and it is beyond belief that just 5 people can have the power to change this quaint town into another victim of over-development.

Note: The City Council of Glendale:
1. Zareh Sinanyan (The Mayor)
2. Paula Devine
3. Laura Friedman
4. Ara Najarian
5. Dan Weaver

Signed, a concerned citizen