Fireign Blog

With the nation’s governors and mayors imploring the incoming Obama administration to launch our nation’s largest domestic federal spending program since Eisenhower’s national highway program, I wonder whether this time we’ll get it right. For the sake of America’s cities, I pray that we do because our most recent massive federal spending programs tore America’s cities asunder, destroying homes, neighborhoods and entire communities. Make no mistake, I’m a big advocate of federal investment in America’s cities, but bad projects, like bad plans, are worse than no projects at all. 

Eisenhower’s highway program cut my city, Toledo, Ohio, into four parts, separating neighbors and neighborhoods from one another. While motorists could now speed through Toledo in record time, we who lived here were left with disconnected, desolate, dead-end spaces hostile to homes, businesses and human activity of any kind. Were that not bad enough, the same program that ravaged the city subsidized the suburbs, actively promoting the economic and racial segregation that accompanies suburban sprawl.

A highway cuts this Toledo neighborhood entirely in half

Toledo didn’t fare much better under federal programs sponsored by Democratic administrations, for the failure to nurture America’s cities has been distinctly bi-partisan. Under the guise of “urban renewal” and “model cities”, Toledo lost scores of small businesses and solid, traditional neighborhoods. In their place were either vast, vacant spaces or federal pseudo-developments, often in the guise of large, uninspired block buildings termed “community centers.” Far from being centers of a vibrant community, these dreary edifices accurately bespoke the anti-family and anti-community federal programs found inside.

The abandoment of public transportation makes a large parking lot necessary for this boarded up building - the streets and sidewalks have been abandoned by both the city and pedestrians

But good news is also to be found in Toledo, where areas like Lagrange Street, the Warehouse District, Uptown, and Viva South are making comebacks. They are doing it with human scale development and attention to seemingly small things like wide, pedestrian-friendly sidewalks and attractive streetscapes; refurbished retail storefronts and microloans to local business owners. And neighborhood community development corporations, not administrators of big Washington programs, are leading the way.

Hope for Toledo development. Wide stidewalks and restored buildings in the St. Clair Village (left) and the local Lagrange St Development Corp revitalizing an area of Toledo hit especially hard by suburban-friendly and anti-city policies (right)

Our challenge with the upcoming recovery program will be to design projects calling for big investments in cities but on a scale sensitive to human needs. Public transit, both inter- and intra-city, must be a priority, but America’s cities can hardly survive another rescue plan that gives us the most efficient transportation facilities imaginable while destroying cities as places where anyone wants to spend time living or working.

If economic history is any guide, then it is likely that our current economic difficulties will pass in a matter of years. The physical results of our efforts for America’s cities, however, will be with us for generations. Encouraged by the positive results I’ve witnessed here in Toledo, and knowing that a community organizer is about to occupy the White House, I’m hopeful that this time we can get it right. For the future of Toledo and other great American cities, we have to.