PCPC approves Lower NE Plan, supports 50-foot stream buffer | Lou Kahn’s new park | Philly seeking state help for AVI | PPA tickets Scalia

Tuesday’s Philadelphia City Planning Commission meeting had a full agenda, ranging from district plan approval, neighborhood plan acceptance, and evaluations of zoning questions. Some highlights from PlanPhilly:

• The Lower Northeast District Plan was adopted by the Planning Commission, reports Kellie Patrick Gates. The plan identifies three major “opportunity areas” for more concentrated development: Frankford Transportation Center, the Frankford Gateway and Castor Avenue. The plan’s other ideas include: a greenway along Frankford Creek, extending the El to Roosevelt Boulevard, adding health care facilities, and changing the zoning along Frankford and Castor avenues.
• Commissioners supported a bill in City Council that would establish a 50-foot buffer zone along the city’s waterways, Jared Brey reports. As PlanPhilly previously reported, rumor has it that a certain Council Member would prefer to decrease the buffers to 25-feet wide. Council’s Committee on Rules will consider the bill on October 31.

Some 40 years after his death, Louis Kahn’s designs for a memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt on New York City’s Roosevelt Island have been realized and will be dedicated today. Inga Saffron visited the new Four Freedoms Park and found its design to be quiet, timeless, contemplative, and optimistic.

Philadelphia is asking the state legislature to pass a raft of bills to enable and soften the impact of the Actual Value Initiative, the city’s planned property-tax reform, reports the Inquirer. The necessary enabling legislation would allow the city to lower its tax rate, to tax commercial and residential properties at different rates, to put liens on all properties owned by tax delinquent landlords, and to create means testing for aging, low-income homeowners. The legislature will recess for the year on Wednesday.

Proving that no one is beyond the reach of the PPA, US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s vehicles were ticketed outside the Union League yesterday, reports the Inquirer.