Critics of SanTana's never-ending, never-successful efforts to “revitalize” the city's downtown claim such plans will wipe the place clean of Mexis or, at the very least, gentrify the area. So it's quite refreshing to know that city planners have dropped the charade and agree: we want to turn back the clock and return downtown SanTana to the past, before the illegal invasion and even before there was a small black community, too!
Oh, the city's planning department and Mayor Don Papi Pulido will never explicitly say so. But just turn the thousand-pages-plus environmental impact report for its Re-Renaissance Plan to the front–so to the front, in fact, that it's a separate document called the Transit Zoning Code, which spells out the different regulations that will get implemented in the area to be “revitalized.”
Specifically? Turn to Section 4.3, where SanTana gets into the ol' DeLorean and dreams!
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The section lists six “allowable” architectural styles that any new buildings built in the Re-Renaissance Plan's boundaries must adhere to if they want a smooth planning process. The genres represented are an American TP Party member's wet dream:
*Main Street Commercial
*Mission Revival
*Art Deco
*Folk Victorian
*Craftsman
*California Contemporary
Notice a pattern? With the exception of the last one (which is the preferred style for overpriced lofts nationwide), each had its heyday before World War II–which, in SanTana history, was a time when everything was wonderful and the darkies and brownies couldn't enter certain restaurants, had to live in certain neighborhoods, and got to go to the balcony to see movies.
I like those purty old buildings as much as the next Southern Californian native son, but please: to make new buildings adhere to those standards is such a blatant attempt at trying to recapture a long-gone past, such a laughable put-your-head-in-the-sand-about-the-present civic plan of action that it just further proves my theory that Don Papi Pulido really does imagine himself to be a grand señor of yore, trying to civilize his wilderness. And it's not just me saying this–it's also academia. Details to come…
