The draft town plan for 2015 shares the same misguidance that the 2010 plan offered, upzoning dressed up without even rationalization to justify it. The bottom line is that upzoning kills villages and hamlets.
One sad example is Butlers Corner in Essex, where used to stand a collection of houses that marked a stop on the stage route, with a tavern and farmhouses, and in later years a corner market. Along came water, and sewer (to resolve failed septic system problems). Boom. There's a freeway and a shopping mall. Then a planning reaction to make a town center with mixed uses and compact arrangement. The results are clear: failure. Failure to create new humane spaces. Failure to preserve old buildings. Fiske house? Abandoned. Cedar Spring Farm? Abandoned and demolished. Store? Gone. Tavern? Demolished. Derocher house? Relocated and radically transformed. Only one old building remains in use and only because of a very expensive restaurant remodeling.
Compare with Williston's stable, not-neotraditional zoning, as described in this article:
http://www.willistonobserver.com/a-tale-of-two-developments/
Upzoning leads to maxed out subdivision and development using short-term profit maximizing style, which is uniform, production housing, built in short period. Whether single-family, duplex or multifamily, or even residential tower, it is not going achieve the difficult to duplicate, subtle qualities of compact settlement in a "traditional" village.
