The other day Channel 2 in Atlanta had a news report about a vacant car dealership in Alpharetta and mentioned that the city was asking the Atlanta Regional Commission for help in finding a use for the property. You can read the report by clicking the picture below:
Then today I saw this article about kids that had found a use for vacant car dealerships in Alpharetta:
According to Alpharetta police, the five, whose names have not been released, broke into a vacant building in the 1400 block of Alpharetta Highway that was formerly an automobile dealership and set up a skate park.
So a few of Alpharetta’s enterprising youths have already solved the city’s dilemma: The city needs an indoor skateboard facility on the site! The market has spoken.
GA Jim 
From a CA blog I follow, here is an excerpt from the latest post that sums up my feelings on ARC and regional planning/interference in general.
MaryAnn MacGillivray spoke about the seizure of control over local planning by Sacramento, and how cities such as ours no longer have any real sway over how our town is to be developed. Apparently Soviet-style central planning is all the rage in the capitol city these days. Should we be ordered to do so, the state planners now calling the shots can tell us what to build and where, no matter what Measure V or our Hillside and Canyon ordinances happen to say. Both SCAG and SB 375 play important roles in this travesty, done in the belief that if you build miles and miles of identical cookie cutter condos the world will somehow be saved from global warming. Which, if true, must mean that Rancho Cucamonga is the greenest city on the planet.
The Gang of Four did not seem troubled by what MaryAnn was warning them about, however. Perhaps realizing that what Sacramento is really doing here is rewarding its development and realty lobbies for their years of great generosity. Something they have long hoped to do themselves I suspect. At least on the local level.