Toulon Place
Siding going up here as well
General observations
tl;dr There is a lot of housing going up in this neighborhood and I hope that the city is thinking about how to improve walkability and bikeability
Details
Hopefully this photo helps show how quickly housing is being built in this neighborhood.
Standing where I took the photo, there are developments going up in every direction.
- Left: South Heights (Garner + Sawyer on the map)
- Right: Toulon Place
- Directly behind: Summit at Sawyer
Here’s the map that’s been shared before:
I walk around this neighborhood a lot, and as of right now the pedestrian experience is mostly an afterthought. I’ve posted before about the lack of sidewalks. Another example from today, walking east along Bragg from Person: first there are no sidewalks, then when you get to Garner Rd, the button to request a walk signal is on a corner of the street which has no sidewalks and not even a crosswalk to get over to it. I am not sure how this happened…
There are about to be hundreds (maybe 1,000+?) more residents on just these few blocks within the next few years, with more on the way. I hope some real effort is put into giving the people who will live here the option not to get in their car to make short trips. As of right now, I wouldn’t blame someone for avoiding it assuming it would be unsafe. The built environment is currently telling people passing through here “if you aren’t in a car, there is nothing for you here”.
The good news is that there is low-hanging fruit to be picked. These developments are all 1-3 blocks from the Little Rock Tr greenway. I would think that putting in few blocks of sidewalk to connect over to the greenway would be a no-brainer.
Another point, I agree with @trueurbanist here that this is important: the weather today was much more bearable once I got on the greenway, mostly just because the trees provide a fair amount of shade.