SHOOT: One might rewrite the above title more briefly, and more accurately as: America begins dismantling suburbia and the American dream.
In a historic reversal, the cities are embracing plans that emphasize growing smaller. In Buffalo, where more than a third of the students drop out of high school, Michael Gainer, executive director of Buffalo ReUse, is putting young people to work dismantling some of the thousands of abandoned homes and selling the scrap materials.
Representatives of Dayton, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo; Canton and Youngstown, Ohio; Flint, Mich.; and Charleston, W.Va., took turns talking about their plans. There was little discussion of how cities might pay for the initiatives.
About 500 abandoned structures will be razed this year with $3.5 million in federal stimulus money. Neighbors can annex the empty lots or the city will plant prairie grass and call them parks, said John Gower, Dayton's director of planning and community development. |
2 comments:
There's nothing accurate about your rewrite - the suburbs have almost nothing to do with what we do at Buffalo ReUse.
The majority of our demolition and salvage is done within the city limits of Buffalo, current population 250,000 (once 600,000). Mostly because of this population loss, Buffalo has somewhere around 15,000 vacant houses, virtually all of them with little or negative value, and most of them will at some point be demolished.
We've created a business (within our non-profit) to do something constructive with those structures. Rather than throwing away the houses and the materials they contain, the usual and predominant method, we take houses apart and salvage around 50% of what is usually discarded.
Our retail store is a major source of revenue for our organization. These houses are mostly 100 or more years old and contain a large quantity of house parts and in the case of our demolitions, framing lumber.
Our city, like quite a few in the Great Lakes region, is shrinking. Rather than fruitlessly try to buck that trend, many people are making do with what they have. For example, we have plenty of land - there's been a striking growth in urban farming in Buffalo just in this past year.
As for the American Dream, well, it may or may not include the suburban lifestyle. Plenty of room for everyone's dreams . . .
"the suburbs have almost nothing to do with what we do at Buffalo ReUse."
Really? I guess if there weren't foreclosures [er...that happens where?] you wouldn't have a business to start off with.
"As for the American Dream, well, it may or may not include the suburban lifestyle. Plenty of room for everyone's dreams . . ."
So you reckon the American dream is about something else besides having a home and a car? I'd like to know what that is.
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