Parks and Housing Are Hottest Topics at EnvisionCR Workshops
The EnvisionCR workshops at CSPS wrapped up this Thursday and RDG partner Cory Scott says that parks and recreation and housing are what the planning firm was asked about most.
“The city has so many different assets,” said Cory Scott an RDG spokeperson. He said that the EnvisionCR process is about connecting planning the city has already done, mostly in core neighborhoods and for the Cedar Rapids trail system and helping to connect it into a unified vision. The comprehensive plan will also look outside the cities core at neighborhoods and corridors that are underutilized.
Cedar Rapids has a lot of park land per person compared to most other cities in Iowa. What people wanted to see was the parkland we do have better connected with trails and bike paths and for smaller parks to have more recreation options.
RDG Planner Martin Shukert showed me a preliminary drawing of a bike path that would connect downtown, Kingston Stadium and Westdale. The bath goes from 3rd, along existing paths and streets past Kingston Stadium, then through undeveloped land along a creek between Wilson and 33rd Avenue before connecting to Westdale.
Finding underused corridors like this is one of the benefits of embarking on a new comprehensive plan.
Citizens also said they wanted more diversity in the types of housing being built and more housing downtown. Something I’ve also been looking into. RDG also said it had heard a lot of feedback saying there was a need for more affordable housing. Kiran Sood has been doing tremendous work on affordable housing in the corridor.
Oakland Road and Center Point Road are being looked into as a way to better connect the cities core to outlying communities and create more retail space within Cedar Rapids.
Center Point and Oakdale are overlooked as ways to get through the city currently. Using better signage and zoning for high density development along those roads could pull traffic away from First Avenue and encourage retail investment along the Center Point corridor.
Improved transit is also an area of interest. The First Avenue corridor between Downtown Marion and Westdale was talked about as a great route for an enhanced bus line. An enhanced bus line would be a bus line with larger busses, covered stops, and wait times less than twenty minutes. It’s a bus line that would function more like a metro line.
Remember that you can tell the city and RDG what you want to see in the next version of Cedar Rapids at CRTalks.com.
