VDare: Earlier today, I posted an op-ed written by a Boston city planner and climate change activist who advocates for bicycles to reduce climate emissions. She takes a trip to her bicycle mecca, Amsterdam, and meets with city planners to find out how they’ve made their city so bike-friendly. But slowly, the horrifying truth dawns on her: the Dutch bureaucrats build fast, big, cheaply, and beautifully by focusing on the greatest good for the greatest number (i.e., Dutchmen) rather than on Centering the Marginalized like American city planners have been trained to do, which is a big reason few things get built in America.
Readers have pointed out yesterday’s New York Times article about how Who? Whom? thinking has halted any progress on turning an abandoned bridge across the Anacostia River near the US Capitol into a park, but that’s a good thing because urban planners have been busy for 11 years trying to figure out how to prevent their planned park from causing gentrification.
Can Anacostia Build a Bridge Without Displacing Its People?
A decade in the works, the 11th Street Bridge Park in Washington, D.C., has yet to be built. But it could be a model for how to create public space while lessening the effects of gentrification.
By Megan Kimble
A new bridge for cars was built, but there are some disused piers from the old bridge still in the river. What if they they built a new bridge over them and made it a park? It would be kind of like the wildly popular High Line footpath along a disused elevated rail line on the west side of Manhattan. People would love it! more
Good lord, the idiocy that has bubbled to the surface the last couple decades is amazing. Everything the left touches turns to shit.
The piece ends with, this is why we can’t have nice things. True dat.
It’s called the “Shake Down.”
Funny, that’s what the Mob does … coincidence?
mortem tyrannis
izlamo delenda est …
This is why they despise Trump – a builder who managed to build things on time and frequently under budget
@ MMinWA AUGUST 11, 2022 AT 11:54 AM
By design. The progressive movement exists and is motivated by a compelling urge to increase innocent human suffering, misery and death.
You show me where they have their fingers in anything and I will show you something that will never healed it’s stated rationale, and will result in increased innocent human suffering, misery and/or death every time. It matters not the scale of the project or program, they all end the same.
@ Genipero AUGUST 11, 2022 AT 11:55 AM
That people actually want and don’t have to be forced to use.
The city of Spokane built a pedestrian’s and bike only bridge over the BNSF railroad tracks that connects the Eastern side of downtown Spokane to the University district up around Gonzaga University at a cost of approximately 16 million dollars a few years ago. One of our local radio talk show hosts pissed off the powers that be in our local govt. by calling it the bridge to Hookerville because all the hookers used to hang out around that area. The talk show host is no longer there because of this and a lot of us locals do call it the bridge to Hookerville. I have yet to cross that bridge on foot or by bike and probably never will.
Cruise by a REgressive site sometime JD. The lies and hatred are incredible. I swing by CommonDreams for my daily 2 Minutes.
There’s no doubt that if they had the power, they would be boxcaring us off to camps.
“Why do we have to move out for everything to succeed and be beautiful?” That quote from the article is as inadvertently racist as anything a white supremist can come up with. It’s a statement that minorities are incapable of living in anything but squalor, crime and failed institutions.
In my observation, progressive policies are designed to mandate the substandard status quo for ghettos while promoting the disintegration of surrounding neighborhoods. Think “the wild animal park must be maintained while we tear down the fences to the suburbs next door.” The progressive solution to crime is to not enforce the criminal code and hamstring the police. The progressive solution for poverty is to make the disadvantaged utterly dependent on government handouts. The progressive solution for the disintegration of the family is to push Margaret Sanger’s abortion policies. The progressive solution for a failed education system is to teach young people that boys can be girls, girls can be boys, and both can be whatever gender or mammal they want. Unless the desired solution is to turn everything to crap, progressives have no solutions to anything.
A successful community activist would be someone who encourages people to be better. Raise expectations, and encourage people to get an education, get a job, and drive out criminals. Being poor is a condition that can be remedied; poverty is a state of mind that will last forever. Progressives, and in particular white liberal progressives, have no interest in bettering the lives of minorities because their job and career would be on the line. Progressive policy failure is a feature – not a bug.
I can’t figure out how ‘gentification’(a misnomer for a confused concept) harms anyone. Suppose I live in a poor neighborhood where the city has built a nice park. I can enjoy that park right along with the young affluent lefties moving in and paying premium prices for their digs next to my paid-off hovel. One day, a realtor shows up and tells me he can sell my house for many times more than I paid for it. I take the money and run…to a new neighborhood but not quite as affluent as my old one was becoming. Have I been displaced or priced out?
Black neighborhood guy: “Why do we have to move out for everything to succeed and be beautiful?”
Don’t you just love it when a question answers itself?
For 6 decades, white people have had to accept black people moving to their neighborhoods, and dare not complain for fear of being branded a racist.
But when white people’s tax money improves the black neighborhood, and the white people even think they might want to move there, it is systematically discouraged and decried as “gentrification” (which is a newspeak way of covering for racism.
Per the NT Times: “ By 2015, half of Washington’s Black population lived east of the river, where decades of disinvestment and racially restrictive redlining had depressed property values, concentrated poverty and left residents struggling to access basic services. …”
Disinvestment was the direct result of repeated riots, burning and looting; NOT systemic racism.