Where We Live: Sustaining our Cities
Connecticut has 3 of the nation's 20 poorest cities.
Connecticut’s cities, once the economic and cultural engines of the state, are increasingly home to some of our toughest public policy problems. Poverty, crime, and disinvestment have plagued Connecicut’s urban centers for decades and though there is no single, clear-cut solution, a new strategy is emerging for revitalizing city neighborhoods.
That’s the topic of a policy forum happening at the Lyceum in Hartford tomorrow. Community and non-profit leaders will gather to talk about so-called “place-based” strategies for development. It’s a new buzz word, favored by federal housing authorities---but what does it mean? Coming up, Where We Live, we’ll ask how this new approach might increase affordable housing, promote economic development, and provide new revenues for a broken state budget.
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We've been looking at cities for the past sixty years as places people leave. For 5,000 years before that, cities were centers of economic activity, cultural activity. The opportunity is there.
Comments
Listener email from Jim
I used to work in a north end of Hartford school and drove through the area daily. Generally, I found it to be a calm and “neighborhoodish” place. Yes there was trash on the streets but a neighborhood just the same.
Similarly there are empty buildings and one or two burned out. There is a huge and old cemetery next to a big multi-block area. I suggest that a refurbishment of a few buildings and help the families relocate. Then we can knock down several in a large common area to build a community center. It should have ball courts, a health facility, food market, educational centers and the like. Then design a shuttle around the city to help get local people there so that a parking facility is not really needed. What we need is to give people something to do and feel good about. It will create local jobs,
We can pay for this through donations and grants as an experimental project
Listener email from Ed
What are places like Middletown (and Willimantic) to do in the short run about the strain on neighborhoods with large concentrations of subsidized housing?
Legislation "encouraging" smaller and suburban towns to develop affordable housing sounds weak-kneed. Why not put moritoriums on towns which are over-burdened, and require smaller towns and suburban towns to share the burden.
There's a house on my street that was blighted. It was snatched up by a social services agency who bought it at a very high price and then spent more thatn $700,000 to create two living units. Unfortunately they don't have the money to manage the tenants, and there have been big problems with drug dealing, violence and noise. How does that help?
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