Great article in today’s Detroit News about yet another failed neighborhood in Detroit City. The only difference is, this one was quite successful up to just five years ago. It had everything you’d want in a neighborhood: Integrated population, well-maintained homes, mix of ages, the whole bit. But they let it go down the tubes….One lady figures she has lost the entire value of her $60,000 house. Meanwhile, she is getting taxed to provide for big highways for the burbs….
How so?
Well, Michigan, like most of the country would rather keep paving into the countryside for future burbs instead of taking care of its existing neighborhoods.
The irony is, the economic destruction visited upon existing neighborhoods is all occurring within a block of the first paved highway in the country. Yup, the city built by the automobile, destroyed by the automobile.
In case you are wondering why all the Detroit News, my wife is from SE Michigan, born in Detroit, moved to Ann Arbor when she was six (yeah, right after the riots, like everyone else). So we end up visiting the area routinely. Even back in the (relative) heyday of the auto industry of the 80s & 90s, the place was just butt-ugly. Tangles of highways, and either cul-de-sacs or ghettos in between. Truly a place characterized by gigantic voids of imagination.
One of the things that attracted us to Wisconsin, and Madison in particular, was the relatively good upkeep of older neighborhoods and the relative cohesiveness of the cities. After we moved here in the early 90s, I discovered why: Wisconsin was (thankfully) near the bottom in per capita lane miles of Interstate in the country. Madison was the largest city in the nation *without* an Interstate blasting through the middle of it. Madison had had several major–and successful–battles against mega-highways through its heart. Even Milwaukee had just won a major victory in stopping a massive Interstate Ring through its healthiest neighborhoods. It really made a difference in the look and feel of these cities. They felt a little more hospitable toward humanity.
Unfortunately, Wisconsin has been making up for lost time in the last decade with its highway building spree. And it has been a bi-partisan effort all the way down to the local level. Madison’s “Green” Mayor has been getting in on the action as well. In the most recent budget every department suffered major cuts except for the highway dept. I wrote about it in my first post on this blog which was also published in our alt-weekly, Isthmus. He’s become the Greenwasher-in-Chief.
We worked our asses off to get this guy in office to prevent exactly this sort of wasteful & destructive spending. Looks like we’ll have to vote him out of office. We got rid of zombie politicians before, we’ll do it again. More on greenwashers & greenwashing in Madison & Wisconsin politics to come…..