"What Helps Me Helps You, but Really Helps Me"
I haven't written anything in a while, but as I grow older and have increasingly stupid thoughts on how to change the world using a keyboard attached to a glowing box, I feel the need to write them down more and more, so here goes.
I recently had a conversation with a family friend about priorities in new subsidised developments, specifically Dallas' Trinity River Project, whose master plan includes constructing a gigantic toll road through a park. It's no secret how I feel about the Trinity River Tollroad (quick hint: I hate it) and about inner city highways in general. My stance is basically that its stupid for Dallas to subsidize/use taxpayer money to build these highways that do little to encourage anything except make it easier for commuters to drive right past our city. Ruteger, as I will call him, was arguing that creating developments that help one part of the region help the entire region. I don't think I was making my point very well that night, so I felt I needed to take to the bloggoworld to further express my opinions.
Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a staunch supporter of urban development, oftentimes at the expense of the surrounding suburbs. I don't approve of a lot of the projects that are going on around the city, including the construction of the Trinity Tollroad and the Margaret Hunt Hill bridge (I'm aware that this is a privately funded project, but I'm still against it's construction), and I'm pretty critical of even "urban" feeling problems such as the Woodall Rogers Deck Park (great idea, meh execution). Essentially, I feel as though the concrete moat of highways that surrounds Dallas' urban core has done a lot to segment our population and essentially move people out of the boundaries of Dallas. All the highways that cut through our urban core essentially make transportation easier for people trying to reach downtown for work from Plano or Arlington or Forney, but make things very difficult for people that live very close to downtown, as destroy walkable environments.
To summarize, Ruteger's argument claims that helping Allen ultimately helps Dallas, and by that he means that making it easier for people far from Dallas to work in our CBD (Central Business District) helps our city's economy. However, this is clearly wrong, as Dallas is facing a horrible budget crisis and features some of the worst infrastructure of a major US City. These inner city highway construction projects to a whole lot to inconvenience the residents of Dallas proper and very little to improve our business. If everyone working in our city commutes from suburbs, and pays taxes in those suburbs, our inner city schools and neighborhoods will continue to atrophy at a quicker and quicker rate.
Moreover, I think part of the central argument here is an issue with conservative thinking. If you look at the way right-wing philosophy has gone since the "great" Ronald Regan, basically all of their economic thought is some kind of variation of the trickle-down economics. Take this example. As communities further subsidize our poorly designed transportation network, stretching out our auto-centric society ever further, we're supposed to support these developments as "generating growth." Glossing over momentarily the reality that "growth" for a suburb is almost always coupled with incurrence of massive debt by the local government and the new citizens with their hard to pay mortgages, the idea that helping the few to help the many is just flat wrong. It's the same argument that conservatives have used to get lower tax cuts for the upper class and greater power and wealth into the upholders of the status quo that have led us into our current economic crisis. "But building these highways creates jobs, even temporary ones," says Ruteger. But why not tear highways down and try to re-assemble our fractured network of inner city transportation?
It's amazing that our city, "Big D" after all, its so gun-shy when it comes to supporting an idea that could actually do big things. What about the deck park, you ask? The damage to the Uptown-Downtown connection is already done. The DMA and Nasher and Winspear sit with their backs turned to our new urban park, and on the Uptown side the federal reserve and some sparse office buildings sit across the access road with little to offer. Meanwhile, people going from Garland to Grand Prairie remain unfettered, more than happy to drive right past our decaying urban center, satisfied that the parasites have become the host.
Congratulations if you've made it this far. I hope I'll actually get good at this writing thing at some point.
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