I would like to join the debate, on affordable  housing and drainage, and include Camden.

Why must we always build new, and cover more  permeable and potentially photosynthetic ground with more building and pavement? We should consider alternatives first.

Here in Camden we are surrounded by empty or almost empty houses, kept for occasional vacation occupancy, possible retirement home and worse, on spec. Couldn't some of those homes be encouraged to become two family, with clever cautious zoning change, where, say, a certain percentage of housing in each neighborhood could become duplexes, a pattern that used to be natural in most Camden neighborhoods? A  mildly mixed zoning would make our neighborhoods more diverse, more inhabitable and perhaps less lonely.

In conjunction with such a change, I would like to see limits to paving and increased roofing, impervious surfaces that increase runoff, flooding, erosion and capacity problems for our municipal storm sewers. This can be done partly by within the same footprint when rehabing homes, by requiring permeable surfaces for paving (and I am aware that snow plowing is a problem but we can work on it) and  by instituting a tax on impervious surfaces as is increasingly done in runoff challenged municipalities ( Portland, Maine, for instance)

How about it?

Beedy Parker lives in Camden