Urban Renewal -- WTF??

Cafe Society
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Thank you and the others who have complimented me. This is a subject I’m passionate about.

I lived for several years as a child in a formerly vibrant ethnic neighborhood that was rapidly turning into a black ghetto. A few years after we moved came the first in the series of 60s summer riots. one that occurred right in front of our former home. A few years after that the entire area was urban renewed out of existence. Completely. Not a single building, store, school, or landmark remained. Even the projects themselves were eventually torn down, although ironically they were the last to survive.

Many years later I started working for city government, where I picked up a deep interest in urbanism. I’ve read many if not most of the basic texts in the field and have visited projects in several parts of the country. If I had to recommend just one book, I’d say read City: Rediscovering the Center, by William H. Whyte even over Jane Jacobs mostly because Death and Life is a bit dry and out of date, though it has to read to understand what happened in the cities. (If you can find Whyte’s film The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, see it, see it, see it.)

I even started a graduate degree in Urban Studies before that program was urban renewed, er, budget-cutted out of existence.

During my years at the city I watched and even participated in their totally wrong-headed and always failed notions of projects that would bring people back. Tens of millions went into these sinkholes and today the vibrant areas of downtown are places that grew up organically and without government money.

Since then I’ve also started seriously researching the notion of futurism in popular culture, aka where did the Jetsons come from? The answer is that the future that the Jetsons represented was a blend of high and low culture from every aspect of media, combined with the technological advances of the early 20th century becoming the dominant forces in society. Way, way too much to summarize, but it’ll all be a book someday, after I figure out how one can read about everything that happened in a century in less than a dozen centuries. :smack:

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Except that DC is one of the cases of a city where the middle class is moving into the city and the city is slowly being revitalized. Places like Logan Circle and Adams Morgan that used to be slums are now very expensive to live in. The same can be said for neighborhoods like Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant. The definition of Capitol Hill is expanding as places that used to be kind of rough are getting much better and the new inhabitants and realtors are calling it Capitol Hill, or Capitol Hill North where I live. However, for the most part this isn’t because of a city plan for Urban renewal bur rather people moving in and renovating old row houses. You can’t really build another Georgetown as what makes it special is the mix. You have some modern buildings and you have some other buildings that date back from the 1800s, often right next to each other. Neighborhoods grow organically. It is not so easy to just plan one and build one in the city. Also, people own a lot of the housing stock and it is not politically feasible to just seize it.

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Nice or not, a lot of the stuff that happened under his administration doesn’t seem to have turned out too well. In retrospect, what does he think of the UR that went on back then, and about the shape of American cities today?

Exapno – I knew I was on shaky ground with the Chicago World Fair; I spent a bit of time in Chicago a while back and took a tour around the area where the fair took place, and thought those buildings dated back to that time; are some of the buildings still there not a direct result of the fair?

Regardless, why does the deck seem to be so stacked against American cities? Part of my frustration with the topic is because I’ve spent almost half my life in Europe, and I’ve experienced the kind of lively, clean, vibrant cities that barely exist anymore in the US. And while larger European cities do tend to attract disproportionate numbers of young, single people and the richer and poorer ends of society, many cities (especially medium sized ones) still have a decent middle class, and families with children. What is it about American culture that has made us abandon our cities so quickly? And it’s not even just the cities – the cores of many towns in the US are small-scale versions of urban blight. Most of the people in a small town I used to live in lived in large developments far away from the center of town – I used to think of the developments as suburbs without the “urb”…which just leaves them “sub” – subpar, if you will. These people would do most of their shopping at strip malls, and work, I suppose, in various office parks off the interstate. There was no discernible center to where they lived – no town square where they could bump into neighbors, no sidewalks in their neighborhoods, nothing. This didn’t have anything to do with escaping the pressures of urban life – the town that had been abandoned was pretty homogeneous, and the crime rate was low. The schools were fine and, actually, most people still used the high school in town – they’d just ship the kids in from ever farther suburbs. It seems that people just wanted to withdraw from others – to get a bigger house farther from people who might bother them. Like I said in the thread title – WTF?

To get back to the comparison with European cities and towns, the reason I hear most often about why the same things haven’t happened in Europe is because Europeans just don’t have as much room to spread out as Americans do. I don’t buy it, at least not fully – they could certainly spread out much more than they do, but, as far as I can tell, they don’t want to. It’s just that the culture values different things, I suppose.

I still have a nagging suspicion that modernist architecture plays some part in this mess (can you tell I have a grudge against the stuff? :slight_smile: ). If I’m correct in thinking that the style never had a popular appeal, than there were probably never very many people who would choose to live in that type of building if they could afford to live elsewhere. People want to be proud of their homes, and live in a place they think looks nice. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a modernist building that looks like it was being nicely kept up by people who were proud to be living there. A few days ago I was in London, and I came across a big modernist commercial/residential complex near Russell Square. As far as modernist buildings go it wasn’t actually that bad, because it at least had a somewhat interesting shape to it, but at the end of the day it was a big concrete eyesore. And just looking at it and walking around, you could see that it was a pretty depressing place – shabby and unkempt, dirty in places. An old and very worn woman was hanging her wash out to dry on a balcony; the shops were pretty quiet; there were few signs that anyone cared much about the place. The contrast with the (non-modernist) buildings surrounding it was immense – most of them were very clean, well-looked after, thriving, sought-after buildings. I don’t think it’s just my bias that led me to this impression; if there are any Londoners reading this perhaps they can confirm or deny? (The complex in question is on the right hand side of the road that is straight ahead of you when you come out of the Russell Square Tube station)

brujo – I had not heard that about DC, but if it is happening, then it is a very hopeful sign. It has been a while since I was in DC, and it can only change for the better.

To everyone – is there a compelling, practical argument for the government to try to keep our cities alive, or at the end of the day is it just as well to them if everyone moves to suburban developments? Are suburbs demonstrably more expensive to maintain (what with roads, the expansion of utilities, etc.), and do they have a demonstrably worse impact on the environment, the economy, or anything else? On a purely practical level (aside from any sociological concerns), does it matter if our cities live or die?

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Great stuff, Exapno. Your posts almost sound like “ivory tower” stuff at first glance, but I’ll tell ya, I’ve lived in the middle of Baltimore for almost 10 years now, and I can cite practical examples of everything you’ve talked about here.

Good thread, too. Thanks for starting it Rodgers. I’m kind of living in an area being gentrified, if you will. It’s a historically white working class/poor white neighborhood.

It’s a part of town that is currently (probably) 99% locally owned small businesses, but with the young ‘hip’ crowd moving in, there’s been a lot of tension lately over the possibility of seeing the Starbucks and the Barnes & Noble show up. Maybe not surprisingly, it’s the old school folks who wouldn’t care about seeing half a block ripped out to have a Wal*Mart go in.

Now, even though the SBux and B&N’s typically seem to put up nice brick structures with comforting green awnings, one still wonders if they’ll be seen as the ugly, soulless, (possibly empty) shells 50 years from now, taking what they could get from the neighborhood when it was hot, and then stranding it when the money-spenders went elsewhere for whatever reason, lacking the flexibility of the current small storefront model to adapt to demographic and economic changes.

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Rodgers01, the difference between the U.S. and Europe is that race plays an enormous factor in the makeup of U.S. cities that Europe has yet to experience. The U.S. was also decades ahead in embracing a car culture.

It is not true that the white ethnic middle class abandoned the cities for the suburbs starting in the 1950s simply because of racism. As I’ve argued, moving to the suburbs was a rational decision to improve one’s family life. The vast majority of Americans prefer living in a single-family house on its own plot of land. They prefer the freedom that having a car gives them over the constraints of public transportation. They prefer the newness of housing stock. They prefer the ability to combine large numbers of errands into single trips via car over scurrying around with kids and packages. They don’t like the long commutes but recognize that public transportation can require journeys of equal time across large cities, with none of the flexibility that using a car gives them.

But race has played a role that cannot be underestimated. Blockbusting - the use of fear of falling home prices once a black family moved in to encourage white families to move out - certainly existed. Most suburban developments barred black families throughout the 50s. The Levitt of Levittown once said that he could solve the housing problem or the race problem but not both so his homes were restricted to whites. The federal government allowed, encouraged, banks to redline certain areas of cities so that blacks could not get mortgage money.

Blacks often complain that they do not get the same services or attention that whites do. My personal anecdote on this is that I was by far the best student in my ghetto, and nearly all-black, school. They kept wanting me to skip grades, though I didn’t. We moved over Christmas vacation in my second grade year a mile down the street, but to an almost all-white if still poor ethnic neighborhood. In that school I was two months behind in the work. Though we all went to the same high school, nobody from my old school ever caught up.

For all these reasons and many more, cities are overrepresented by minorities who live in poverty. Money does matter, in schools and in everything else. Once the middle class moves out, a city cannot thrive. There is no tax base, but the need for services goes up disproportionally causing the need for higher taxes, which drives out taxpayers in a vicious cycle.

Does the central city need to thrive or indeed to exist at all? I think the answer is yes, although we don’t have yet any good examples of a completely failed center city. Buffalo, NY, is probably closest to meltdown and needs to be watched to see what happens. Buffalo is a perfect model of the industrial-based rust belt city that lost all of its industry and has no other good reasons to draw people there. Although its downtown is as ugly as any, the rest of the city is filled with beautiful buildings and great houses and neighborhoods. But it has no money at all.

The trend over the last several decades is for people to move to the Sunbelt, and inhabit new housing stock. Las Vegas, a city with no downtown at all in the usual sense, has gained over a million people in 15 or so years. It is all suburban sprawl. But it has a growing economy, which means jobs. That is the most important factor in the growth and recovery of a city. Nothing else, and I mean that literally, matters. Buffalo’s horrible climate didn’t matter when it was a center for chemicals and shipping; Las Vegas’ horrible climate doesn’t matter now. The almost unbelievable ugliness of the area’s buildings, few of which are concrete modernist in style, don’t matter either.

U.S. cities have come back to a remarkable degree after their low point in the 1970s. But they have long been overtaken by their suburbs, and thrive in correlation to whether their suburbs thrive. Metropolitan areas are today’s units, not central cities. I believe that you can’t have any part of a unit fail and have the unit as a whole succeed, so I think central cities are important and I’m glad that they are learning to reinvent themselves. But they are no longer central except in geography, with a few exceptions.

As for Europe, the increasing immigration of minorities to cities will create some of the same tensions as U.S. cities saw in the 50s and 60s. Already parts of London and Paris are so heavily immigrant Muslim that they are becoming ghettoish. Germany is seeing huge tensions in Turkish immigrants seeking jobs. Falling birthrates and the need for low-cost workers will just draw millions more immigrants to Europe rather than to America. I predict very similar shifts to a white suburban ring surrounding minority/rich cores that we see here. And that future will be just as ugly. It doesn’t matter what the buildings look like.

I happen to hate those concrete monsters myself. They don’t look good when new, and they age terribly. Prince Charles once wrote a book decrying this new architecture, BTW, A Vision of England. He got tremendous flack for it, but I think you’ll agree with what he says. Architecture is a factor, and it’s important that it should be good, but I place far less import on it than you do.

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Forgive me for doing it, but I just wanted to temporarily bump this thread to the top before it disappears into the archives. Still want to respond to a thing or two and maybe keep the conversation going, but I have limited time at the moment as I’m traveling and frequenting expensive internet cafes.

Bump! :wink:

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Buffalo, and to a lesser extent Rochester, both are cities that have reinvented themselves once already. Buffalo came into existance as a transshipment point from the Ohio valley to the rest of the States, and Rochester was really made by two things: The Erie Canal and the Genesee river’s waterfalls, which could be used to power large numbers of processing mills for grain coming along the Erie Canal. Rochester, for example, still calls itself “The Flower City,” which is a reinvention of the original - “The Flour City.”

When the railroads put waterborne transport, either along the Great Lakes, or man-made Canals, into eclipse both Rochester and Buffalo felt some serious population problems. What saved them both, then, was the advent of the iron-based economies that grew as both cities began to transfer their natural avantages to processing industrial goods, instead of agricultural goods.

A lot of the problem that I believe both Rochester and Buffalo face today is that governments are incapable of true innovation. The solution that Buffalo, in particular, has ridden down to near complete ruin has been desperate attempts for Federal and State governments to keep rust-belt industries alive by pouring monies into dying industries.

If one wants a particularly sickening example of the way this thinking has blighted the area, look at the two cities of Niagara Falls.

The US Niagara Falls is a city firmly in the rust-belt. Moribund, if not dead, and the last time I went through there it was about as pleasant to view as some of the blighted areas I’d seen in my time in the Navy in the backsides of Caribbean states. The roads, aside from the few major thoroughfares, are potholed, it seemed that every other building was boarded up. In short, in spite of having one of the greatest natural wonders of the world (or at least North America) next door, it was a place to go through, not a destination that one would reccomend to anyone.

Crossing the border to Canada was the difference between night and day. The Canadian Niagara Falls is a clean, vibrant, and welcoming city. The roads were so much better one could feel the change.

In a large part the difference between the two cities can be traced to the difference in the reactions of the respective governments to the movement of heavy industry out of the rust belt and to other nations. In Canada, there was far less emphasis on using public funds to keep the existing industries alive - rather the emphasis was to maintain the city’s attractiveness as a tourist destination. In the short term this did depress the local economy compared to the situation across the river. However, the soundness of the plan seems apparant, now going on 20 to 30 years later. On the US side as money became more scarce the attitude seemed to have been that tourism would have to look after itself, we must save the heavy industries.

The end result, however, seems to be that they saved neither. In fact the lack of monies going to general infrastructure, such as roads, has contributed to the degradation of the US Niagara Falls as a tourist destination. Only in the past several years have the various governments awakened to the fact they had lost the lion’s share of the tourist monies to the Canadian city, and their solution has been to focus on the most trivial reason for that: The presence of a casino on the Canadian side.
Rochester is in better shape, in part because the industry here had already begun going high tech back in the 50’s. Haloid, anyone? Or as you’re more likely to know it: Xerox. Even so, Eastman Kodak has made some particularly stunning strategic blunders that are causing problems, now: The company that developed filmless photography should have been in a position to own that segment of the market - but because the company leadership refused to accept that industries and markets continually evolve and change, they felt that anything that might weaken the film imaging market was a bad idea. And so while they developed the digital camera, much of the market is controlled by other companies. And film imaging is becoming more and more of a niche anyways.

As Exapno Mapcase has emphasized time and again - cities and industries are organic things, they grow and ebb with changing environments. Anyone who fails to consider that reality in their attempts to “save” or preserve an urban area is doomed to failure from the start.

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Calm down.

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This has been true a long time, even as far back as colonial times, when a pattern developed of American farmers living on their land in isolated homesteads, as opposed to the European model of farmers living together in villages. I believe this was touched upon in The Geography of Nowhere, one of the more recent criticisms of American building.

I for one would love to read that book, not least because futurism has especially been an influence in architecture; perhaps even part of the background thinking behind Urban Renewal. Think of the “gee whiz” World of Tomorrow type stuff seen at so many World’s Fairs.

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Forgive me if this post is redundant - because Exapno Mapcase has done a wonderful job discussing the subject. I’m now all jealous that I didn’t see this thread earlier, as this is a subject I feel passionate about as well - in fact, I wrote a paper for one of my classes a year or two ago on the very subject of urban renewal and how it ruined so many neighborhoods. The Death and Life of Great American Cities is in large part a condemnation of urban renewal, written at the height of the movement, and it’s incredibly instructive on the subject. The choice to mow down old neighborhoods and replace them with ugly urban renewal projects was motivated - as Mapcase mentioned - by utopian ideas of cities and particularly by the ideas of Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier’s radiant city consisted of giant towers of housing connected by wide avenues and set amidst large open park-like areas, and even if his science fictiony extreme never took route, his ideas were very present in planning until fairly recently. You should understand that Le Corbusier - and those who inherited his ideas - had no particular affection at all for the city or for its history. He promoted his Plan Voisin which involved first and foremost demolishing the center of Paris and building wide avenues and towering skyscrapers to turn it into a truly modern city. This is the kind of thinking underlying urban renewal - destroy whatever’s there and now, unencumbered by the old, we can build a perfect community.

And so of course urban renewal was destructive. Compounding that idea was something that Jane Jacobs illustrated really well in The Death and Life - planners simply didn’t understand what made for an effective community at all. They didn’t even know how to recognize one. She tells about places in which the city officials simply can’t understand why a neighborhood hasn’t fallen into crime and decay, when its residents are poor and mostly immigrants and live in old buildings. The fact is many of the neighborhoods that urban renewal destroyed were perfectly functional, livable areas. Their inhabitants were working class, but the neighborhoods were not the decaying, unlivable slums that city planners saw. Many neighborhoods ended up getting bulldozed strictly because of demographic characteristics, in complete ignorance of the neighborhood’s character.

The Death and Life goes into excellent detail as well as to why housing projects failed. Part of it is that when neighborhoods were ripped up, social structures ended up being destroyed and folks got jammed into high-rises without any of the institutions - churches and such - or the informal networks that had made the old neighborhoods work. And part of it was the result of bad design. Trying to build parks in the middle of the city in that way tends to fail - when you have an open area in the middle of a bunch of high-rise residential buildings, very few people will end up using it. No one from outside the housing project ventures in simply because they have no reason to: there’s no business inside, so the city’s life ends up bypassing the new artificial areas. Since most people within the housing projects didn’t spend enough time sitting around in parks to fill them, they ended up deserted, or filled with drug dealers.

So the long and short of it is that urban renewal simply was a really, really fucking bad idea. This is not blind nostalgia for the old ethnic neighborhoods that were destroyed. It’s simply the case that urban renewal destroyed functioning neighborhoods and built either expensive, luxury housing for others, or housing projects that were doomed to failure.

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I’d like to say that this is one of the most brilliant and useful therads I’ve ever seen.

I’ve often thought that what the US neds is a Bureau of Re-Invention. Literaly, it would advise companies on what technologies and industries they can use to recreate themselves, as best we can. More to the point, it would pressure other parts of the government not to interfere unduly with economic change.

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OtakuLoki, While the Niagara Falls city government has historically been notoriously incompetent and corrupt, the success of the Canadian side of Niagara Falls can be summed up in three words: location, location, location. The reality is that the Falls angles toward the Canadian side. This gives them all the access and all the good views. The Maid of the Mist loads from the Canadian side, the spray in the face tours start from the Canadian side, and all the hotel towers that have views of the Falls are on the Canadian side. You can’t do this from the American side. If you go up high on the American side all you get a view of mist and foam and the river above the Falls.

Sure, the government blew it by sinking their money into a mall and convention center that nobody wanted. I don’t think that mattered. If there was real money to be made on the American side, private investors would be snuck in and done so, the same way that the lively downtown areas in Rochester and Buffalo were developed by private interests.

The American Niagara Falls is on the wrong side of the river for today’s tourism. Better roads will not solve that.

Rochester and Buffalo are somewhat different cases. There is a possibility that high-tech industries like bioengineering and optics will create high-paying jobs. New York State is actually being helpful here in providing money for high-tech centers like Canandaigua’s Infotonics Technology Center.

The issue here is that these jobs will help the metro areas but are highly unlikely to be placed in or to benefit the center cities. We still don’t know the answer of whether a healthier suburban ring can overcome the drag of a failing city, part of the more general question of how important a center city is to a metropolitan area in the 21st century.

I don’t think anyone can read my comments and conclude that I’m a cheerleader for governments. But I think you’re placing way too much emphasis on their importance. Governments can help and can hurt their communities depending on their actions. But they can’t save or bring back those communities. The forces that affect communities are too large and outside governmental control.

There’s nothing that Rochester’s city government could do to keep Kodak shrinking from 60,000 employees to 15,000. Kodak now has the leading market share for digital cameras in the U.S. but will never be the dominant company it once was. How does city government compensate for that? Rochester and Buffalo can’t compete with the weather of the Sunbelt. How does city government compensate for that? Even regional competition matters. The Rochester metro areas now has more jobs with a smaller population than Buffalo’s. That’s a result stemming from Buffalo’s historic dependence on heavy industry and Rochester’s dependence on light industry. Government can’t compensate for that.

I can analyze the problems to my satisfaction, but I have no answers. I’m pretty sure that private investment paired with governmental support is key but that’s just a pretty sentiment rather than a plan. You have to give people a rational reason to go somewhere, whether it’s to live, visit, or shop. What are those rational reasons in upstate New York? Nobody really knows. Until some creative mind has an answer the area will continue to stagnate.

Excalibre, I mostly agree with everything in your post. The only caveat I might have is that we forget today how bad cities had become in Europe after World War I. Half the continent was starving and jobless, political ferment made cities truly dangerous, and ancient overcrowded neighborhoods were ripe for destruction, just as they had been dozens of times in European cities’ past. Whether he did or not, the perception of Mussolini that he made the trains run on time should be a clue. The cities in Europe had stopped working for much of their population. Radical notions of overturning a past that had proved to not work were in fact what were needed.

Le Corbusier’s specific plans were not it, true. Then as now, no planning group or individual had solutions for the underlying societal forces that shape cities. At least he had the excuse that nobody at all then understood what these might be.

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Lively? Rochester? If you say so…

But seriously, it’s amazing that this discussion has shifted to my home town as the example. It has made an already interesting thread a must read every time I sit down at the computer.

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Exapno Mapcase, I don’t disagree, on the large scale, with anything you’ve pointed out. I mentioned the two examples I did because: A) The two cities of Niagara Falls are about as close as can be possibly achieved for two cities that are nearly identical but going in very different directions; B) Rochester and Buffalo shared (past tense) a lot of the same factors that caused the two cities to grow originally. As such I still feel both are valid examples of the ability of government alone to save, protect, or develop cities, or metropolitan areas against the economic and social factors that make cities.

I certainly don’t disagree with your statement that to see the Falls one must go to the Canadian side. But, while a large number of people will prefer to stay and spend on the Canadian side for the factors of convenience and economics (as long as the US dollar converts to a larger number of Canadian dollars there will always be a certain portion of the population that believes, prima facie, that their money buys more for them in Canada. Regardless of actual purchasing power.) there is little objective reason to stay and shop only on the Canadian side. If the two cities were equally pleasant appearing, that is. For myself, while eating in a restaurant at the top of one of the tower hotels on the Canadian side may be attractive, I can’t really see the point to staying in said hotel, if comparable quality accomodations are available elsewhere, with less risk of obnoxious neighbors. After all, the view you’d be paying for isn’t exactly something you’re getting to enjoy while sleeping - which is what I consider the main purpose of travel accomodations. (And yes, I may be inaccurately extrapolating from my views to a segement of the population. I’ve done it before, and will again. I try not to, but…) Since travel across the border there had been trivial the last time I’d done it, and is still only a minor hassle for daytripping, I’d always considered where one stayed in the Niagara Falls area to be potentially independent of where one went to see the Falls.

Granted a lot of this I’m basing on anecdotal evidence from parents, grandparents, and people I’ve met personally about how seeing the Falls was done from the Canadian side, staying in either city had been a toss-up. (Usually decided on the basis of relative purchasing power at the time of the trip in question.)

I also didn’t mean to imply that I believed you were an advocate of the ability of goverment to presevrve or even on a large scale to affect urban health, I guess is the term I mean. I’d meant my examples about the last man defense of heavy industry to amplify, not contradict, the excellent arguments you’d made earlier. I apologize for not making that clear in my earlier post.

I hope this clear is a bit more clear-headed a post, this time. :wink:

I like snow? :smiley:

Hell, yours is a better answer than the one my crack-smoking junior Senator ran on to gain upstate support: casinos!. Wanna run for US Senate from NY? Please?

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I was thinking of the East End and St. Paul St. in Rochester (and the Chip Strip and Allentown in Buffalo). Both areas in Rochester are attracting lots of nightclubs and restaurants and, amazingly, downtown housing. And not affecting the rest of downtown one iota.

What interests me from the theoretical side is that they were totally developed with private money (except for some city money for the strip along the Genesee River along Water St. a block behind St. Paul and some help for the housing on East Ave.) Not just that, but developed in opposition to the places the city wanted the money spent: Main St. and High Falls. The private developers looked at where the city was putting its money and went elsewhere. Except for the suckers who’ve tried to get a foothold in the High Falls and who have gone out of business over the past two decades like a row of imploding firecrackers. (I was part of the city team that first got the High Falls started. I told 'em and told 'em that people wouldn’t go there from downtown. But did they listen? Nooooo. Who listens to Exapno “Cassandra” Mapcase?)

OtakuLoki, maybe it’s just different experiences, but the Canadian dollar has been a draw for Americans since I started going to Toronto and that’s three decades ago. Possibly the American side had an equal chance before that but add the cheaper dollar to its other advantages and the Canadian side is golden.

As for casinos, every public official in New York State seems to be jumping on the casino bandwagon so I think singling out Hillary Rodham Clinton is more than a trifle disingenuous. Last I looked George Pataki was trying to make casino deals everywhere that Indians weren’t.

And the thought of a casino in downtown Rochester had many, many tongues hanging out. Hell, if the choice is between a casino and the empty hole that is currently Main St. in Rochester, then I’m for a casino myself. Casinos appear to be the only, literally only, private money willing to go there. The Renaissance Square project - which for you outsiders is remaking a major central block of Main St. into a combination bus terminal, college campus, and performing arts center, no, really, I’m not making this up - is simply not going to change anything about downtown. Or help any of the surrounding neighborhoods. Give me a good alternative to a casino and I’d drop it like a hot potato. But it’s been more than a decade now, waiting, waiting, waiting.

To get out of New York State for a moment, let’s look at a city that everyone has hailed as coming back from the dead. Cleveland. But the entertainment area known as the Flats is a symptom of the rebirth rather than a cause of it, just as the East End would be if Rochester comes back. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and new stadium are nice, but tucked away from the rest of the city. And if you go to that city, go just south of downtown, in fact, you can drive for miles along major streets that have next to no visible signs of life. They weren’t even urban renewed, but torn down piecemeal like much of Harlem or Bed-Sty in New York City. Buffalo has similar, if less extensive, areas east of its downtown. Rochester, fortunately, has nothing at all like that.

Almost eerily similar is Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. It’s great for touristing, but you can walk to a part of downtown that is nothing but empty boarded-up buildings in five minutes.

Or Philadelphia, whose waterfront north of I676 is a frightening empty eyesore even though the areas south of I676 are booming entertainment districts with lots of high-rises growing like tomato vines.

Reanimating downtowns is important, but does little to help the surrounding areas of the city if all it does is draw suburbanites who go right back again afterward. The extra tax money is a good thing - always better than none - but it’s only meaningful if the jobs and housing created starts creeping back into the blighted area. Maybe it’s just too soon to see these effects; maybe a whole generation needs to grow up with this reality.

I keep coming back to neighborhoods and jobs. Tourist jobs are mostly shit - look at what we now know of New Orleans. You need a sounder, better paying job base to create a middle class. Figure out how to do that in rust belt cities and you win all the Nobel Prizes.

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You may well be right. Though I still contend that the cheaper Canadian dollar doesn’t always mean that the US tourist gets more buying power for his more Canadian bucks. But, today, I wouldn’t spend the time in the US Niagara Falls to check relative buying power. As for Toronto - that’s a horse of a whole 'nother color. While I think Rochester has an incredibly vibrant art community for a metropolitan area of half a million, Toronto has an incredibly vibrant art community for a metropolitan area of several million. Add in even the appearance of increased buying power, whatever the reality may be, and it’s well-nigh irresistable.

I agree 100%. I just got really pissed off a few years ago when Sen. Clinton began her campaign for 5000 workers for a Northern Border Division (Do I have that break down right? I’m not sure I think you know what I mean, though.) for the Homeland Security Department, ostensibly to seal the US-Canada border. That and, during her campaign for the support of the Rochester-Toronto Fast Ferry, claiming that it would meet airport level security are why I have taken to calling her “my crack-smoking junior senator.” There are advantages on the US-Mexico border that just don’t exist for the US Canadian border and that can’t be sealed. Trying, at this late date, to seal the US-Canada border strikes me as an idea of the same feasability as sweeping the tide out of a harbor. With even less utility.

Don’t get me wrong - I believe that the idea that casinos, in this day and age, are a draw for tourism from outside the region is based on the reality of two (or more) decades ago, when legal gambling was far rarer than it is, now. But she’s far from being the only politician who sees casinos (and to a similar degree, State and multi-state lotteries) as a means for governments to raise monies without actually imposing taxes. I remain of the opinion that it was her making the support for what became the Seneca Niagara Casino an issue during her Senate race has a lot to do with making it an issue on the state level. And a reality since then. But she’s far from being the sole person at fault. Or to be credited.

Had? What’s this past tense you’re using? :wink:

I don’t even want to get into the whole Renaissance Square Project. It seemed like the original good idea about an indoors bus terminal just never quite got enough support to go on its own, so those supporting the project just kept adding more and more features, until they had several different niche groups providing enough support to get the backing for the combined boondoggle.

An indoor bus terminal, in the Rochester environment, made sense to me, as a bus commuter. Having to wait, for what always seemed to be up to an hour downtown to make transfers in winter is a real pain in the arse. But I’d never been sold on the idea of it making sense for the price tag quoted. And as more and more features got added, the whole thing has grown less and less like what I’d consider a smart idea.

I don’t know what would be a viable alternative to a casino. I simply believe that, with Turning Stone and the two casinos in Niagara Falls, a downtown Rochester casino will do nothing to bring in tourism from outside the region - and will mostly survive and succeed by parasitizing the local poor. I understand your point about getting anything other than abandoned buildings in that area. I can’t say you’re wrong, either. But enthusiasm isn’t something I can generate for the idea.

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I think you’re discounting just how popular those three destinations to plenty of Rochester residents. I’ve loved the idea of a downtown casino in Rochester ever since they started talking about it precisely because I wouldn’t have to go to Niagara Falls or Turning Stone whenever I wanted to do a little gambling.

With the right surrounding businesses it could be a big hit and add a little variety to downtown. Which leads me to…

Yes East End is nice with plenty of bars and clubs and Spot Coffee. But I pretty much hate bars and clubs and they take up all the parking near Spot Coffee.

It just seems like if you have no interest in alcohol there’s nothing for you to do downtown. That is what I think is Rochester’s biggest failing.

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Would the docklands project in London count as an example of successful, planned urban renewal? It seems to me that all the goals of the government were wildly exceeded.

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I won’t go on and on about a subject with which I am not familiar. However, I would like to note an interesting article I read once about the city as Sacred Space. That is, that what defined a city was not that it was a center of commerce (as these tended to spring up as the city developed, but were not neccessarily the cause of its formation) but that it was sacred.

In short, the idea was that modern cities needed to create a safe space first. It goes a lot further than that, but sacredness begins with the idea of the city. This idea must then take physical form by making a safe, wholesome space. Only then does the city itself come into being physically. Perhaps the problem is that too many modern cities are losing that sacredness. They are viewed merely as engines of commerce. But money can build only the physical foundations of a city; it cannot get the residents to care about it, to work on making it better, etc.

So the practical upshot fo this was that by choosing policies which promoted crime and disaffection (i.e., urban renewal) polities destroyed their sacredness. The city killed its social value. This spirals, as other posters have explained far more competently than I, into a destruction of social services and commerce. But important in this is that the commerce itself did not makje the city run; its return must be accompanied by a rebirth of the city.

This may be why New York did very well during the Guilliani years. Although many did not like his policy of low tolerance to crime, or his empahsis on cleaning up the city, it allowed people to take a second look at the city.

So in the end perhaps the real question to ask about cities is not really about business or government, but simply this: “Would you feel safe and happy raising your children there?” If the anwer is no, then none of the other things matter.

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You know, reading all this, I’m beginning to think that the basic problem is that when you get right down to it, we really don’t need cities to exist in the first place. Maybe Americans have always had the desire to get as far away from each other as possible, and only the technological advances of the past couple of decades have enabled us for the first time to fulfill that dream – must have something to do with the pioneer spirit. Because if you look at the period when our cities began to decline and fall (roughly the 1950s-60s?), that same period witnessed the emergence of the American superpower as we know it today. Mind you, I’m not arguing that we became a superpower because our cities fell apart, just pointing out that we certainly haven’t been too hurt by the fact that they’ve done so. Sure, there were growing pains as we moved from an industrial to an information economy, but the change is mostly made now, most people have moved to the suburbs, cities either adapted or were left in ruins, and time went on. The economy is strong, life expectancy is high, crime is falling – who needs the cities?

What, economically, can you do in a city that can’t be done in an office park off the interstate? What can you buy in a city that you can’t buy online and have shipped to you almost anywhere in the world? Most of the business that is done in cities can just as well be done anywhere else, and given the ease of telecommunications these days, more companies are going to continue to move “anywhere else.” I suppose we’ll always need a few big cities – New York, LA, Chicago – for practicality, but there are very few compelling reasons for most medium-sized cities to exist anymore. Even the few lively cities we still have sometimes feel like they’re there just for the fun of it (for the tourists and those who, for whatever reason, want to live in cities) than for any real practical reason.

The only reasons I can think of for having cities are those nebulous, hard to quantify ones – sociological and cultural reasons, chiefly. But the government is never going to decisively act for that type of thing – the government is in the business of keeping the peace and helping the economy to move along. And by that definition, cities are probably more of a hindrance that the government would rather just be rid of – who wants a big hole of crime and joblessness?

If the government did for some reason want to keep our cities going, they’d have to make it financially preferable to work and live in town. I guess that means major tax cuts for setting up business on main street, and mega-taxing outlying areas to slow urban sprawl. And how about this for a radical idea – why not move public housing for the poor out of the cities and into the suburbs? We could have blockbusting in reverse – people fleeing the suburbs and pack into town! :smiley: