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With$�A. - Page 226 r�e over-the-rnoon to find 29 Finger Avenue as a place to put down roots. Despite the state of our tumble-down cottage, we felt we'd landed in clover. Finger A�-enue has warmth and eclectrc charm in abundance, with a sidewal�C oz�both sides of the street where we can walk with our children and greet our neighbors. It's an uncommonly apen. friendly and supportive neighborhood. We celebrate birthdays and Oktober Fest together. And as if that weren't luck enough, it is - abo�•e all - a street whose homes are sheltered and made discreet by a generous and unusual abundance of trees and vegetation. It's an ideal spot to bring in new homes and new famil�es. Having said that, I trust that no one would believe in an overarching need to degrade the neighborhood in the process. We specifically moved to Redwood City to avoid locations on the Peninsula where homes,built in wise propox-tion to their lots, were being razed and repZaced with goliaths,bordered by rninimal strips of land which would never see the sun. This process was turning neighborhoods into parking to#s. If you have ever been at a social event, and had two or three people standing too close to you for comfort, you'll understand perfectly the neighborhood equivalent: excessive mass and scale wedged on hummingbird-sized iots —like too many people in an elevator. It means we all end up with comically ugly scenarios, and we all lose. It's the same as finagling a few of those big red hotels on Vermont Avenue—if you recall the modest blue Monopoly board property. The McGowan nine-lot developmen�is a particularly egregious examp�e. It's bearing down�ike a Mack truck on our neighbarhood—a discreet riparian haven. The project promises to cram nine disproportionateIy huge homes with high roof lines on lats barely wide enough to accommodate them, bulge intrusively wherever it needs into the community's protected creek setback, and to convert land that should be a walking path into roadway rnarginally wide enough for a fire truck to pass—as long as the developer and city ignore fire codes that the rest of us have to abide by. Writing in layers of exemptions doesn't make it right or sane. McGowan's vision is also about slapping a locked and gated comrnunity within our close and friendly neighborhood, where we are accustomed to eye contact and greeting each other. Placing a locked and fenced community in the middle of our stree�reminds us of defensive gated compounds in ravaged places like Afghanistan. It's tantamount to saying "We are fearful of our safety here". Is tlus the message the city wishes to model?A gated communiry on Finger Avenue is a chilling comrnent on where the city feels it has to go. This is even worse than the sort of development aur family escaped in 2009. Although it may be Iega1, is it visionary? Is it aesthetic or compatible with our neighi�orhood?We say it is not. In conclusion, the McGowan Nine Lot Finger Avenue development has no justification in its current farm, and it is painfully evident that the developer has no intention of inediating with the community mast aff'ected by his intentians. Eight years of effort to arrive at some sort of mutually beneficial modification have been to no avail. z