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My two cents concerning East Liberty is the govt screwed it up years ago with the Liberty Circle, why should we get them involved again? Let the private sector handle it.
h_curtis: "The people that have been living there for as long as I've been alive had their chance to clean it up. Heck the government built homes for those people. It never went anywhere."
BrianTH: "They are still there, and it is going somewhere."
h_curtis: "Guess you didn't notice the high rises that were given to the people that trashed them are all gone. Where did they go? They are gone."
I'll leave it to others to judge what you were originally claiming.
You are wrong, and you will continue to be wrong, but if you are not willing to accept that your worldview is contradicted by reality, that is fine with me. It makes you largely harmless.
I have noticed that you read my posts in black and white. I look at the overall trends. Where my points may be written to indicate a trend, you don't read it that way and look at it as "everyone", or "all", when the meaning is more about trends. There is no such thing as "everyone" and "all" when you are talking about migrations. I assume that would be obvious to all. The trend in East Liberty is more in line with my hopes. That is more than obvious. My perspective of East Liberty would be no doubt very different to someone that hasn't lived there or wasn't always there since it was about 20 feet from my front door for a 6 year span that was only 3 years aog. Your view of what the area was like would be very different than mine. You are on the outside looking in, when I was in the trenches.
The area is moving UP. People ARE going to have to relocate due to rising costs to stay. A migration is taking effect.
I suppose you can go against forum rules and get away with it with your constant personal attacks, but I am talking about East Liberty and my perspective of the trends that are occurring. Seems you are more interested in bashing my good name because my view is quite different than yours. I personally feel that my view must be correct, if you are resorting to personal attacks. That is how arguments generally go.
Interestingly, this is exactly what happened in the post-WWII era as well.
From what I've learned the Renaissance era did indeed see government and capital (or business, if you prefer) allied. Seems to me there's an important difference, though - the experience for both sides of centralized planning in WWI & WWII (especially the latter in the US) made a post-1945 "technocratic" solution to urban problems seem feasible and efficient, and contributed to the social-democratic consensus which produced Section 8 among other programs (or the Welfare State in the British-Empire countries, including large-scale "housing estate" solutions in British cities). The era of Carnegie didn't have that experience or faith.
There was a paternalist element to that technocratic approach, certainly. But the results were often unfortunate, and in the specific example of E. Liberty it's just recently that some of those technocratic mistakes are being rectified.
The question to my mind is whether the technocratic failures of the late 20th c. disqualify any paternalist use of government authority, and I'd say they do not. It may be that a paternalist use of gov't authority divorced from the central-planning technocratic approach can work better - which is what I was trying to suggest by reference to late-19th c. government policies in France or Canada.
In any case, the alternative to paternalist government is to abandon any concern for social harmony, which in effect means abandoning the lower classes. The point of the Disraelite paternalist idea of government wasn't do-goodism for its own sake, it was to avert social conflict and therefore ultimately the destruction of the social order. It seems to me this goal is not less relevant to us now - and especially in matters of urban planning, because it's in cities where the disenfranchisement of the lower orders ends up having the most direct impact on the propertied classes in the form of crime and social disintegration. So a measure of government authority in urban planning seems to me a necessity to avoid the dangers Disraeli described in "Sybil": a nation of haves and a nation of have-nots.
I don't hate poor people but I would hate to see cities stop evolving from a truer Capitalistic system as described by the late, great Mr. Kostof. . . . I think if government was simpler and wasn't concerned with having a hand in SO many issues, we could get a LOT more done in American cities. In my opinion, related to the subject matter here, our government/planners shouldn’t concern themselves with mixed income housing.
So a lot depends on the process you are suggesting here. Basically, you are arguing that if governments don't address the undersupply of lower-income housing in cities, it will lead to governments adopting better policies with respect to a whole range of different issues.
Honestly, I don't see how that is supposed to work. And to my knowledge it never has worked anywhere it has de facto been tried: it is perfectly possible to have lots of bad policies while ignoring the fact that your policies are pushing poor people into suburban shantytowns.
I really don't think we can do this in a piecemeal fashion and just hope it works out. Our current set of policies is creating specific problems, and if we adopt a laissez-faire approach to those specific problems and ignore all the other policies that created them, I don't think that is likely to lead to those problems fixing themselves.
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Housing should be provided for the very needy but people, including families, need to rough-it more times than not.
To be blunt, "rough-it" is a term people use when they have come from a better place and expect to return to a better place soon.
Asking a child in particular to "rough-it" for their whole childhood and into their adulthood, while systematically eliminating the best opportunities they would have to do better, is really just cruel, and again it is a bad policy for the rest of us because it perpetuates problems and wastes a precious resource.
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Though stories about subsidized, mixed-income developments provide feel-good moment for some, it is really just a minuscule drop in the barrel of an issue that the government cannot possible address unless it went into complete Socialism.
Again, we know this isn't true. There are countries in the world which combine a very robust social safety net with an otherwise very robust capitalist economy. Doing both is therefore possible, and we don't do better in our country because we are choosing not to.
My two cents concerning East Liberty is the govt screwed it up years ago with the Liberty Circle, why should we get them involved again? Let the private sector handle it.
Um, how is that supposed to work? You need the government to redo the roads (which in fact they are doing).
Seriously, this government-yes versus government-no debate seems largely beside the point to me. Government is, and always will be, involved in the development of cities. The issue is whether the things they are doing are helpful or harmful, and you don't really need to take a stand on the total quantity of government involvement--if that concept even makes sense--to assess that issue.
Obviously, I realize the government builds roads, but if private industry wants to build condos or apt buildings, or whatever let them call the shots. I'm not sure how many were around when this happened, but a sure sign of government not knowing what to do:
Two decisions in the 1960s changed East Liberty. The first was an attempt to halt a slow trickle of businesses from the City to the suburbs. In the early 1960s, a few of East Liberty's larger merchants saw that some residents of Pittsburgh's East End were moving to the suburbs, and that suburban shopping malls were consequently growing and expanding. These merchants feared that suburban development would harm East Liberty's status as a market center, and asked the City of Pittsburgh's Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) to take action.[2] The URA proposed creating an outdoor pedestrian mall on Penn Avenue, to be surrounded by car-friendly roads on which large stores, surrounded by parking lots, could serve shoppers just as the new suburban stores were doing. This plan required the demolition of roughly half of the 254 ac (103 ha) that comprised East Liberty. After some contentious debate, the plan was approved, and the URA stopped traffic on the busiest part of Penn Avenue (the old Greensburg-Pittsburgh turnpike of Jacob Negley's day) and routed it onto a series of new, one-way thoroughfares (called Penn Circle) that formed a ring around the central business district. Many small shops were destroyed—a million square feet of retail space in all. While the URA was remaking the street plan of East Liberty, the City of Pittsburgh's housing authority made a second set of changes to the neighborhood. Housing authority planners noted that the nearby African-American neighborhood of Homewood was overcrowded, largely as a result of the URA's earlier demolition of the lower Hill District to create the Civic Arena, which had forced many of the Hill's African-Americans out and into the North Side and Homewood. The housing authority's solution was to build three large housing complexes, each close to 20 stories tall, in East Liberty along the new Penn Circle roads. These two measures ultimately failed to preserve East Liberty as a market center, and arguably hastened the old neighborhood's demise. By routing cars away from Penn Avenue, the URA's new street plan seemed to send a message that the neighborhood's commercial center was not worth visiting. The housing authority's massive housing complexes quickly developed a reputation as centers for crime, and this reputation, perhaps reinforced by racial prejudice against the complexes' African-American residents, likely did as much as the confusing street plan to drive commerce away from East Liberty.[3] In the span of just a few years during the mid-1960s, East Liberty became a blighted neighborhood. There were some 575 businesses in East Liberty in 1959 but only 292 in 1970 and just 98 in 1979. The businesses that remained tended not to serve the majority of nearby Pittsburghers, but only the captive audience that remained in what was now an urban ghetto.
I have noticed that you read my posts in black and white. I look at the overall trends. Where my points may be written to indicate a trend, you don't read it that way and look at it as "everyone", or "all", when the meaning is more about trends.
I responded to what you actually wrote at the time. I am glad, though, that you are now in the mood to moderate your prior statements.
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The trend in East Liberty is more in line with my hopes. That is more than obvious.
No, exactly what I said should happen is happening. Existing residents are being given an opportunity to participate in the redevelopment of the neighborhood, including through subsidized housing, and a good number of them are. You wanted to deny them that opportunity. Maybe you are backing off that claim now--although you still haven't answered my question about what your actual plan would be--but this isn't what you originally claimed you wanted to see happen.
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I suppose you can go against forum rules and get away with it with your constant personal attacks, but I am talking about East Liberty and my perspective of the trends that are occurring.
I am trying to be polite, but you keep claiming that your personal experience means we should all listen to you, when in fact I know for a fact that many of the things you have claimed are false, and demonstrably so.
So pointing out you are wrong necessarily takes the form of implying your claims about your superior knowledge and insight are false. Again, I'll try to be polite about that, but you made this into an issue about yourself by claiming we should listen to you because of who you are, and it isn't my fault you are making yourself look bad in the process.
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Seems you are more interested in bashing my good name because my view is quite different than yours.
I'm primarily interested in making sure people understand that many of the things you are claiming to know through personal experience and expertise are in fact false. I actually don't care what anyone thinks of you, I just don't want anyone to be fooled into thinking your claim to superior knowledge and insight means you actually are saying things which are true.
I'm also interested in making sure people understand the actual consequences of what you are proposing, which would be to turn Pittsburgh into something like the Third World cities which are ringed by shantytowns. And again, I will credit your claims to the contrary as soon as you explain how you plan to avoid that--a question I have asked of you multiple times now, with no actual answer yet to appear.
Again, I'm not doing that because I care what people think about you. I want to make sure people understand what you are actually proposing so they can judge it for themselves.
I'm not sure how many were around when this happened, but a sure sign of government not knowing what to do
Again, we can all agree bad government policies are bad. The problem is that what is going to happen in East Liberty is going to be, in part, the result of many government policies, whether or not there is a specific policy with respect to subsidized housing. Just eliminating that one policy isn't going to somehow change the fact that all these other policies are in place.
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