quote:
That’s always a risk if you build along a rural highway without many restrictions in a suburban area. . Developers can come in later and surround you. That happens all the time.

Ask people on Jefferson Highway in BR between Drusilla and Airline about that.

40 years ago that was a sleepy little area with a 2 lane highway running through it.

These days, it is about a 5-6 lane highway which goes flush against people’s front doors after their yards had been EDed for the widening.

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Posted by frequent flyer

USA

Member since Jul 2021

3009 posts

Posted on 12/5/23 at 9:53 am to teke184

quote:
These days, it is about a 5-6 lane highway which goes flush against people’s front doors after their yards had been EDed for the widening.

That happens when there is poor planning and no funding to expand road networks until after the development happens. Jefferson was always an artery. The parish didn’t care what was built on that stretch until it was way too late.

Ascension Parish and Livingston Parish are going to go through this hell over the next 30 years. They didn’t plan ahead. They didn’t make obvious restrictions and logical setback requirements for their arterial roads. In some cases they still have narrow roads with open ditches and no turn lanes serving as a major artery. There is no way to widen those streets without taking out the homes on one or both sides. So it costs a fortune to do the work because it requires a lot of painful expropriation and moving utilities around.

By La standards - Zachary and Central are probably above average when it comes to planning. And it is still a disaster. Ascension is even worse than EBR when it comes to land use. Livingston is even worse still. And they are militant against taxing themselves to fix those issues….not to mention that they don’t seem to care what developments throw together. It’s a recipe for disaster.

West Baton Rouge is trying but they are still about 30 years too late. They are lucky that they still have a lot of open space and their residential development has been mostly throttled by highway infrastructure issues in Baton Rouge (the bridges in particular).

West Feliciana and Pointe Coupee’s answer to their numerous past mistakes is to simply regulate and restrict development so much that it almost doesn’t happen at all. So they pretty much never have to widen roads. Almost nothing new is built in the southern part of those parishes anymore that’s less than $500k because it costs so much to actually develop anything there the past 5-6 years. It’s rare to see new subdivisions at all anymore in that area.