Laguna Beach is not a village. Laguna has always been a sophisticated urban center in a sea of suburbia. It has a true downtown, a high street and a variety of communal places, parks and urban streets. Proper cities sustain us. A sense of community is fostered by architecture; buildings create outdoor rooms that encourage and enable us to come together, allow us to eat together, talk, to discover. This is what humanity seeks and this is what we need, companionship, a collective society. These are the kinds of places you visit on your holidays and travels.
Such civic places are not created by one story, unconnected small structures, something that measure Q and its proponents desire; everything proposed by Measure Q destroys civic potential.
The authors of measure Q clearly don’t understand the proposed zoning and controls and most certainly not the physical results of what they propose. I don’t say this in a derogatory fashion. Most people don’t understand this. However, most people don’t propose to control how we build our city, our civic heart. As a practicing architect and student of cities and civic life, I implore you to vote no.
L Paul Zajfen, Laguna Beach
