To follow up on an earlier post, another quote. This one from the Detroit News:
...There’s a lesson here, as much for local and state politicians as for business leaders facing difficult circumstances and a problematic future: Success depends on the courage of leaders to acknowledge failure, sometimes decades of it, and then chart a credible path away from it — wherever it leads.
This is also somewhat relevant to the current Housing Visions debate. Where is the plan as we continue to drift forward? Where would Housing Visions fit in? Our last "Master Plan" was done in 1998 and never ennacted officially. It appears to have partially shaped the Main St rebuild and parts of UCC (or was it just luck?) but beyond that?
We tread with no vision to inspire and follow. No official path of what we want to become to inspire others to join in. It's budget season. Let's hope when its over we can start moving forward on laying out our future.
2 comments:
I'd love to see us doing what Detroit did, where they are razing entire neighborhoods, even starting urban farms on some of them!
Goodbye Genessee St!!!
Now that would be a good use of $9,000,000!
Funny thing is though, you could probably buy the whole street for less than a million!!!
You don't have to go to Detroit to see that. Just spend 25 mins heading over to the east side of Buffalo and visit its urban prairies. It does not work.
The more of the East side of Buffalo that is vacanted and demolished the more the problem moves outward and now its finally into Cheektowaga. You can even look here in Lockport. We demolished Market St in Lower town and the "problem" moved to Genessee. Demolish Genesee and people near it will move away faster leaving a void to be filled by the same "problem".
And even worse it just replays the mistakes of the blanket urban renewal DT. All those old victorians next to DT are gold in the ground waiting to be mined. We just need a long term methodology to accomplish it. We need to make it a much easier decision for people to take the chance to invest in them. People are much more likely to invest where things are growing than where they are being demolished.
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