Pro-suburb propaganda garbage.
^^^^^
No seriously, I agree. This is bullsh**t. Demolishing the central city to cater to the needs of suburbanites really worked wonders the first time.
This isn't about destroying the city center of Flint. Flint hardly even has a city center. This is about managed decline, removing previously developed areas that are simply abandoned today. That's not an issue in most cities, but cities which have contracted dramatically and no longer serve an economic purpose (and so will not grow again) should be encouraged to do things like this.
Cities die. Most cities don't, but some cities do. Their reasons for existing disappear, and they have to be allowed to contract or disappear along with those reasons. Some major, major cities of the past are entirely gone now. The US is young and has for a long time had a growing economy everywhere in the country. But that's not true any more; the glory days of some US cities are now passed. And we have to help them decline with grace rather than become abandoned cesspools.
Yes, but Flint has considerable suburbs... ask Michael Moore about that. What they ought to be doing is coming up with ways to attract people back into the central city. And yes, I am aware of how bad things are in Flint, and the some structures are going to have to go regardless.
However, this is the same mentality that led to mass suburbanization to begin with. "Tear them down. They're just slums. We need space to build another massive single floor office complex, urban mall, and a super highway."No; if the city disappears, the suburbs disappear, too. There is no place for the suburbs without a central city. You're deliberating misreading this as an anti-urban policy; it's not. It's about reinventing what were once relatively large cities as medium-sized towns. You can't do that with the ruins of a big city sitting around you. Like I said,
there is nothing that will attract people back to Flint. Flint no longer has an economic purpose as a city of substantial size, and you can't just create a purpose out of thin air, not when there are hundreds of similarly sized cities that actually have purposes out there attracting the same people Flint would be competing for. Flint has to downsize, and the only way to do that is by bulldozing.
Look, I
hate suburban sprawl. But that's not what this about. At all.
Also, I strongly disagree with you about the government destroying cities. It was certainly the case that the Interstate System laid the foundation for suburban sprawl, but that wasn't the intent, and the Interstates have good things going for them, too.
