Letters to the Editor

NewCanaanite.com recently received the following letter(s) to the editor. Please send letters to editor@newcanaanite.com for publication here.

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There is a guy from history who would be pretty proud of what is happening at Weed and Elm street now.

His name was William Cobbett. He had a bright idea on how to get some local dogs to stop chasing his rabbits. He’d cook up some fish and the smell of that would make the dogs crazy and take up all their attention.

And thus the term “red herring” was born.

I can’t help but think if William had started talking to the dogs about if they were for or against affordable housing, he might have achieved the same effect.

Because judging by all the yard signs, it seems to be working here in town.

And it’s making us residents lose the plot a little.

This proposed development is not about whether or not New Canaan is filled with good people who support lower rents, or bad, greedy, nasty meanies who only want country club types living amongst us.

This is literally about trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Only the square peg is also several thousand square feet bigger than the hole.

Maybe a better analogy would be an Amazon delivery truck trying to park in a compact car space? Or, considering the traffic experts at last weeks P&Z meeting, several Amazon trucks. And moving vans. And SUVs, Ubers, etc…

Or maybe I forgo the clever analogy route and just call it what it is : An enormous, hulking apartment building designed to fit 100 families going in the place of a house (and big, green, lush lawn) designed to fit one.

That’s it. That’s what the issue is. Nothing more, no matter what the battle of the lawn signs seems to indicate.

The idea of putting a giant apartment building at Weed & Elm is as ridiculous as replacing the playground at Kiwanis Park with a Six Flags.

And it’s not just everyone with common sense who thinks this. Other P&Z meeting experts flooded the meeting with thoughts on how we’d actually get flooded. A lot. And have crazy traffic problems times a million, a heavily increased risk of auto and pedestrian accidents, and a big punch in the nether regions for local mother nature.

To be fair, this proposed development does raise some interesting questions.

Do we as a town need to deal with 8-30g? Do we need a plan for where apartment buildings make sense? Do we need to maybe first try and get some kind of town-wide official conversation going about where these inevitable apartments make sense? Do we need to finally figure out this whole moratorium paperwork business and be honest about what is happening and going to happen with all that?

Well, yeah. Of course we do.

But to try to shape the conversation about this proposed building into something about how empathetic or selfish New Canaanites are is as tasteless as, well, have you seen the artist renderings?

Maybe let’s not try to outdo William Cobbett with the diversion tactics and non-arguments. Let’s get the Weed and Elm plan off the table and find a solution that doesn’t fill Town Hall meetings with people who hate it.

Andrew Ault