Skip to main content

Michael Fleming and Leland Ware are right: We all need to be concerned with fixing Wilmington

Too bad the problem is actually the government . . .

First, I have to say I agree with this:
The sad, steady decline of our state’s largest and most important city should deeply concern every Delawarean. Just as we are all invested in the health of the First State’s natural and economic resources – our beautiful coastline, our world-renowned courts, the University of Delaware, etc. – for reasons both moral and practical, we all have a serious stake in Wilmington’s fate.
The future of Delaware, if it involves having a failed city along the lines of Camden, is bleak.

And, have no doubt, as Professor Leland Ware observed in a recent op-ed that everyone couldn't wait to ignore, government played a major role in destroying the city:

A few of the online responses to The News Journal article, “Wilmington mired in violence,” attributed some of the city’s crime problems to the decision to ram I-95 through the heart of the city, destroying neighborhoods and dividing what was once was lovely, walkable city. 
This is an accurate observation. For most of the 20th century, policymakers at the federal, state and local levels pursued development strategies that had a detrimental effect on central city communities.
Fleming's article is an emotional call to action; Ware's piece is a dissection of government interventions gone wrong.  As such, I think Ware's column is more critical to addressing the problem.  Read the whole thing if you missed it, and pay attention to his conclusion:

The demographics of cities like Wilmington are not, as many assume, the result of the private choices of individual families. They are the direct result of decades of urban planning policies developed and implemented by federal, state and local governments. 
Public agencies and private organizations such as the Wilmington Renaissance Corp., Riverfront Wilmington, the Delaware Historical Society and other groups are working to reverse this trend by revitalizing downtown Wilmington. They deserve our support.
They deserve our involvement as well.  This one's too important to the quality of life in all of Delaware to leave to politicians and government bureaucrats.

Or else we can just start erecting the wall around the city limits and send for Kurt Russell when a helicopter crashes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...
44 comments
Read more

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...
22 comments
Read more

Soda tax debate reveals fundamental progressive assertions about your lack of individual rights and the "responsiblities" of the State

I thought it would be at least amusing to use the Delawareliberal comments as sub-headings regarding each category of what is wrong with the proposed tax on sodas and juice drinks. But there are so many different little strands of each comment that it would be impossible to pull them all out. So, instead, I'm going to let you read them in more or less the order they appeared, and note the assumptions. pandora: I’m perfectly okay with taxing sodas and juice drinks. Mainly because they’re total crap, and one of the main reasons our country’s children are overweight. They are also dirt cheap. Assumptions here: (1) Because "I" am perfectly okay with a new tax it should be imposed on everybody; (2) it is the government's responsibility to keep children from being obese; (3) the cheapness of the product to be taxed justifies charging people more for it. John Manifold: Soda fattens your kids [and you and your husband], shortens their lives, costs more than water [a...
31 comments
Read more