Please pardon my passion. I care. I cannot help myself. I invest. I rebuild. I take places broken by desire for exclusion, and set them right. I take ignored pieces of my beloved adopted city's broken heart. Ruins. Weed lots. Problems. Into chunks of dying urban core, steeped in crack, feces, the despair of apartheid, I breathe new life.
I take homes destroyed by highways and the rush to sprawl, and gently transform them. I take streetscapes scarred by hollowing out, and work with neighbors to replant, one tree at a time. I live on Little Rock's inner urban frontier, and defend it.
It is risky, hopeful work, and I am grateful to do it.
Thirteen years of effort and $2 million invested bears fruit. My redone homes stay rented. People love modest, charming apartments and small houses, an easy and pleasant bike ride from our reviving downtown. I may not be crazy after all. The houses yield solid returns. It's working.
With better city governance, it could work much better.
Over 30 people now live well in once-empty places Urban Frontier reclaimed from the trash heap in the vortex. You know the vortex, created decades ago when the power structure divided us with white-flight freeways. Caucasians north, west and in suburbs safely out of reach, African Americans south and east, locked behind interstate walls, left to fend for themselves, defenseless.
The central business district was ravaged, while elites speculated in big-box stores and hermetically sealed, soulless new "communities." The old district is now mostly parking, surrounded by poverty, pockmarked by bombs of urban removal, neglect and powerful backs turned. Tragically, myopically turned. We all know the story, especially those who orchestrated it and pretended they didn't. They still orchestrate it, still pretend they don't.
The myopia and collusion continue. The highway plans continue, worse than ever. We kill ourselves with cars. We atrophy, destroying our world with unwillingness to walk or share. We grow unhappy, walling ourselves from neighbors. The grotesque plans now proposed for I-30 Crossing may make sense for people who think they must park a short waddle to the store. In a healthier world of livable cities, they make no sense at all.
I ride my bike by mothers waiting in lines of expensive SUVs to drop children at downtown schools, refusing to walk a block or two, even on beautiful days. What messages of fear and waste are conveyed to children trapped within? What messages of isolation? How did this become normal?
Thankfully, many of these hostages do not crave the bland, cancerous overgrowth of suburbs. Once grown, they rebel against childhood dependence on chauffeurs, stripped of human mobility. They seek community, walkable places, diversity, freedom unknown in an over-sanitized world. They no longer view I-630 as the impenetrable barrier the social engineers of segregation intended. They long for connection, history, organic growth of real neighborhoods, not contrived perfection of gated enclaves, not endless strip malls. They go places where creativity can flourish, mixing happens and the yeast of city life brings growth.
How can we possibly explain this different vision to those pushing the blockhead plans now proposed for I-30? How can we convince our city board to defend what is precious against those so greedily eager to pour concrete and leave more wastelands behind? How can we change the worldview of the powerful, from one that sees the I-30 plans as reasonable, into one that sees them for the clunky, outmoded abomination that they are?
Can they be convinced? Can money-shut eyes open to the future that young people crave, one rooted in a fundamentally different dynamic? Can Little Rock envision itself as a great small city rather than a gutted hub of a network of oversized freeways taking impatient commuters to nowhere special, from a place that could have been amazing, but was thrown away, yet again, for some insiders' quick gain?
There must be a way. Later generations will curse us for not finding it, and thank us if we can.
There is a more positive, human-scaled future, ours for the building. Our urban core has enough underused space for decades of crafting environments where tomorrow's creative people of all colors and classes will want to live, work and play. Let's go there together, not separated by concrete barriers, but joined by the parks and common spaces so enticingly presented by StudioMain for the highway department--for which not a penny is allocated. Let's change the vision, change the dynamic and build a gem, not a boondoggle.
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Paul Dodds is managing director of Urban Frontier LLC (www.urbanfrontier.org) and recipient of the 2015 Preserve Arkansas Award for Neighborhood Preservation.
Editorial on 06/06/2016