{news} (Hartford Courant)"Reckless With Wrecking Ball" (New London Greens quoted)

[Green Party-CT]

"The idea that you would tear more stuff down when you haven't yet filled in from your last round of taking, to me doesn't make sense," said Chris Nelson, a local boat builder who ran some Green Party municipal campaigns. It is, he said, "bipartisanship at its worst



---------------------------------
http://www.courant.com/business/hc-haar0707.artjul07,0,5788980.column?coll=hc-headlines-custom-specials 

Reckless With Wrecking Ball 



Dan Haar
ADVERTISERS
---------------------------------
Advertise on ctnow
-->
July 7 2005

There is blight at Fort Trumbull in New London, where the U.S. Supreme Court said it's OK for the city's redevelopment agency to take 15 old, small properties to make way for a private developer's scheme.

The blight isn't at Susette Kelo's pink, mid-18th-century wood-frame house, which offers a breathtaking view of the lower Thames River with its mélange of Naval history, scenic beauty, commerce and industry.

The blight isn't at the Dery complex just up East Street from Kelo, in the family for 100 years, where a couple of houses and a storefront huddle together like circled stagecoaches under siege.

The blight isn't around the corner, where a shirtless James Guretsky skipped a protest at city hall Tuesday evening so he could act as a neighborhood sentry from the long front porch of his side-by-side-by-side three-family house on Smith Street.

No, the blight is up the block, across an open field, in the form of a modern, four-story brick office building - vacant except for the weeds that surround it. The 90,000-square-foot building arose in the late 1980s for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, which abandoned ship by the mid-90s and cruised up the coast to Newport, R.I.

It is blight, not only because it's slowly sinking from a decade of disuse, though that's certainly true. More to the point, the building stands for the failure of a big idea in urban development.

The big idea is that in places such as New London, the city - or, worse, an appointed agency removed from accountability - can tear out the countless beating hearts, the countless household dreams that form a neighborhood, and replace all that with a grand collection of oversized concrete constructs.

It didn't work two generations ago at Hartford's disastrous Constitution Plaza. It has failed virtually everywhere it has been tried across America where mid-size cities have sacrificed thriving neighborhoods. And it won't work in New London.

Since the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling on June 23, we've seen lots of hand-wringing about why a city should be allowed to take private property to advance private development. A blend of property-rights conservatives, anti-government libertarians and anti-corporate progressives have held their noses to join in protest, as we saw colorfully Tuesday on the steps of New London City Hall. I toured Fort Trumbull with a Republican and a trio of Green Party activists, all speaking in one voice.

It's a noble fight, and the idea that a city can uproot whole neighborhoods to make way for private gain is distasteful, at best. But it's maddening that we should even get to that debate. Most of the time - and New London is shaping up as no exception - the vision of progress is shortsighted, based on a dangerous mix: the addictive high of construction dollars, with money thrown blindly from some seat of government far away.

The old undersea warfare building is part of the proof. The Navy built it, then left. If there were demand for commercial and office space, we'd see it here. If there isn't demand, then why build more? Remember, this isn't just near the development site - it's the heart of it.

Arguments about the need for critical mass don't wash. Grand scale development might work in some places, but it can't rise up where demand is weak to begin with.

For more proof about Fort Trumbull, walk a few hundred yards to the corner of Bank and Howard streets. There, at the gateway to Fort Trumbull, prime real estate in this old whaling city - a three-acre field stands vacant save for a sign advertising that it's available. Whither that field? It, too, was a collection of old buildings back in the Nixon era, until someone back then got the bright idea to clear the area and fill it with large-scale, modern commerce, known as Shaw's Cove.

Some office buildings were built along Howard Street, but they are ugly, underused and detract from the life of the city more than they add in property taxes. The rest were never built. Across Howard Street, in a commercial building called Columbus Corner, the first-floor retail space is vacant.

And this, Connecticut state taxpayers, is the neighborhood where 72 million of your dollars have poured in - to advance a year-2000 version of the failed vision.

"The idea that you would tear more stuff down when you haven't yet filled in from your last round of taking, to me doesn't make sense," said Chris Nelson, a local boat builder who ran some Green Party municipal campaigns. It is, he said, "bipartisanship at its worst."

On Wednesday, David Goebel, chief operating officer of the New London Development Corporation said the agency will not amend the plan even though Shaw's Cove remains under-built. The Fort Trumbull plan - which has a developer on board - comprises 300,000 square feet of office space, including the old Navy building; a 134-room hotel with conference facilities, expandable to 250 rooms; 80 units of housing, preferably upscale condos; and a Coast Guard museum.

"If there were people interested in building Shaw's Cove," Goebel said, "we would welcome that. ... You don't tell somebody where to build. This is a market-driven economy."

Market-driven, that is, except where the "market" requires tens of millions of public dollars and the awesome power of eminent domain.

Tom Picinich, a self-described Republican, pro-development son of a homebuilder, wore a bumper sticker on his back Tuesday night, which said, "New London seized my home and all I got was this lousy sticker." His house was on Howard Street - taken five years ago to widen the road leading to the new Pfizer complex - was also in the redevelopment zone.

Picinich's hands follow the sweep of destruction. "There were houses going around the block," he said, standing on his former property.

The property rights side of the argument - that government should deploy eminent domain only for truly public amenities such as schools and highways - has hope in Fort Trumbull. State Rep. Robert M. Ward, R-North Branford, the House Republican leader, has introduced a law that would strip municipalities' of the right to take property for private development.

But, again, it shouldn't come to that. Saving the remaining homes in Fort Trumbull is not a lost cause even though the redevelopment agency has already razed most of the houses and small buildings on the 90-acre site, about 75 in all. Contrary to the image most people might have, the 15 that remain are not a hopeless gathering of isolated, dilapidated outposts.

Each of these 15 structures has character of the sort that's hard to rebuild, and most, to this untrained eye at least, appear to be in decent shape, even the few that are vacant. As a group, they form the potential core of a human-scale redevelopment that now must happen if the project is to succeed in the long run.

The issue is not an abstract battle over legal concepts and it's certainly not just a matter of principle for the teary-eyed lead plaintiff, Susette Kelo, a nurse, and her husband, Tim LeBlanc, a relaxed former merchant mariner.

"I come out here and have coffee in the morning and it is fantastic," LeBlanc said, both sides of the river in full view at sunset Tuesday.

And so this small remaining band of neighbors stand, a slice in time between destruction and memory. What would we give to still have some of this in our grasp in Hartford, where the same moment passed barely noticed decades ago, as Front Street gave way to Constitution Plaza?

Dan Haar can be reached at dhaar at courant.com. 
Copyright 2005, Hartford Courant 




===========================================================
      THE GREEN PARTY OF CONNECTICUT is the third largest political party in CT. The Greens are also the third largest political party in the US, with 220 Greens officeholders in 27 states. Over 80 countries in world have Green Parties. Wangari Maathai, the 2004 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, is Kenya's assistant minister for environment and an elected Green Party member.
===========================================================
National Committee member from Connecticut: Tim McKee (860) 324-1684

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/private/ctgp-news/attachments/20050707/970e3a6a/attachment.html>