Jeff Branch...AAGH

OK, disclaimer: I write this less as the editor of SFR and more as a southside resident whose house is under constant encroachment by Jeff Branch who, not satisifed with approval for San Isidro Village, now wants another 74 acre development. Guess where friends? Oh, my backyard, where I walk my nice dogs everyday, which has been undeveloped open space for, for, forever, and one of the few tracts left in Santa Fe County not crammed with cheap stores and cheap houses, but actual genuine open space. How can the city keep annexing these huge tracts of land? I thought we had a water problem. And why does the county keep letting them do it? If all these undeveloped acres become shopping centers, what is left of rural Santa Fe? The roads on our end of town can barely accommodate current traffic, and most of them have just been redone in the last few years anway. There's schoolkids everywhere walking home all the time and they want to put in a massive shopping center? Why? The Alberson's on Zafarano looks like it's on the verge of bankruptcy as it is. No one has any money to spend. There's video stores within 2 miles of that very area. Not to mention, wasn't Santa Fe just ranked the third most sprawling city of its size in the US. Does anyone in the city planning regions and policy making ranks even give a shit about this stuff anymore? And this isn't a case of NIMBY. Any person who lives on the southside already spends half their time in traffic, stuck behind big trucks, adjacent to some kind of construction or commercial venture. We're hardly spoiled with the largess of unimpeded views and sprawling valleys. This is about larger questions like, I thought these kinds of projects were generally agreed to suck. It's more big box construction, more chain stores, more bad housing (has anyone looked at just how many houses there are on the southside being built and not yet sold. Slow down already. At least let people move into them). And yes, Virginia, where will the water be coming from? Jesus, did Jeff Branch make a deal with the Devil or something? So much for our anti-growth city council. Apparently the only place they care enough about to stop growth is downtown (where re-development makes sense) but on the southside where, oh, those poor people in the county live, why bother.