BY GREG HEETER

There’s an old adage that goes “When a hammer is the only tool in your toolbox, every problem looks like a nail.”

That saying was put to practice Wednesday evening in the meeting of the DeLand Planning Board. Presentations were made, discussions were held, and votes were taken to bulldoze another in-town forest and pack it with cookie-cutter residences. The unfortunate acreage is the tree-covered area at the northwest corner of South Blue Lake Avenue and East Taylor Road.

Not long ago, specifically to supplement their toolbox, the Planning Board added a new, less-dense zoning option: the “Transitional Residential District” (TRD).

The TRD zoning enables a number of other housing possibilities: upscale town houses a la Winter Park or Celebration, clusters of duplexes or quadplexes interspersed with green spaces, and multifamily options, as well as single-family homes.

The TRD offers a modern smorgasbord of choices that preserve more trees and open areas — unique, novel, meeting people’s needs, and not cookie-cutter.

But after listening to speakers from the general public, the City pulled its hammer from an otherwise empty toolbox, and banged out its only routine solution for every residential requirement: single-family houses — cookie-cutter-style! And each house must have expensive, finicky, resource-eating St. Augustine lawns in the package.

With only a hammer, every undeveloped space in metro-DeLand continues to look like a nail to City leadership. No creative housing is taken seriously. Burn, build, repeat.

In rezoning requests of the Planning Board or the City Commission, the reflexive answer is:

•Starter homes for young couples: single-family houses!

•Smaller homes for retirees and seniors: single-family houses!

•Homes for big families: single-family houses!

•Homes for singles: single-family houses!

•Homes for the wealthy: single-family houses!

•Homes for the financially pinched: single-family houses!

(The only point of debate is the width of lots: 40 feet, 60 feet, or 80 feet, depending on whom you wish to irritate.)

Recent years have brought six identical cookie-cutter single-family-house developments along Beresford Avenue alone, with others sprawling from Lincoln Oaks to Lake Winnemissett.

Despite the label and options of “Transitional” zoning, the board’s decision came with five votes in favor of single-family houses — and nothing else. One board member broke through the fog and recommended the possibility of using other tools for deciding — “creativity, vision, thinking outside the box, new ideas…” But DeLand’s tried-and-true 1950s tool, single-family houses, won the day.

Dear citizens with vision, please encourage our city commissioners to reconsider the board’s advice to cover that area with more cookie-cutter development, and ask them to apply a few new residential tools that their TRD zoning allows.