Bulldozing cities to help them survive

[csberry]

I love the plan discussed in THIS ARTICLE from the Telegraph. While the likelihood of the plan discussed in the article becoming a reality outside of Flint, Michigan is still quite speculative, I'm really hopeful that this proves successful. Both the fiscal responsibility of contracting the size of the city service's reaches and the shift from abandoned, but developed to completely undeveloped are great reasons to give this a go. It is amazing the types of redevelopment that has followed greening projects (cleaning up brown zones or turning abandoned/unused property into greenway or park land). There are portions of North and South St. Louis that would tremendously benefit from this (East St. Louis is a lost cause for numerous reasons.).

Comments

[csberry.livejournal.com]

While many large cities have a fluctuation between blocks, the differences between how nice a street can be one block from Forest Park and how crummy they can be 5 blocks away is striking.

I only lived in St. Louis for a year. I was in Richmond Heights (technically, it is a city on St. Louis(city)'s border). I lived about 1/2 a mile from Forest Park and loved to walk/bike around the park and the surrounding neighborhoods. After being laid off (and during the following 7 months of unemployment), I really started reading up on the history of the city and just wandering around exploring. Nothing bad ever happened to me, so I never feared wandering the entire city during the day. Some of the folks my wife worked with were a bit shocked by the areas were I was wandering - especially my journeys into North St. Louis.