Your tax dollars at work: the Feds signed on to paying half the cost of the Central Corridor at a lavishly-covered pep rally yesterday, featuring…
…bureaucrats. Like FTA administrator Peter Rogoff, who spoke at the rally yesterday:
“This project truly embodies the president’s vision for winning the future through infrastructure investment…”
“Gotta destroy the city to save it”, I guess.
It will create thousands of construction jobs now while paving the way for many thousands of jobs that will come to the Twin Cities through the economic development successes surrounding the new rail line,” [Rogoff] told an enthusiastic gathering of…
…of who?
…more than 100 local, state and federal officials…
I’m sure that some University Avenue businesspeople will show up in the story eventually. Just positive.
By 2030, weekday ridership – projected to exceed 40,000 – will top Hiawatha LRT ridership as people gain new access to nearly 300,000 jobs in the two downtowns, at the University of Minnesota and in the neighborhoods in between.
“Central Corridor represents an historic economic opportunity to connect St. Paul residents to jobs, businesses, services and educational opportunities throughout the region,” said Mayor Chris Coleman. “At the same time, it’ll transform one of St. Paul’s most iconic streets and strengthen the communities that surround it.”…
…provided that those “jobs” decide to align themselves along a corridor where already-lavish mass-transit and freeway development hasn’t drawn them after fifty years of trying. It’s a simple fact – cities aren’t developing the way they did fifty years ago. The urban rim – the third-tier suburbs and exurbs, the Maple Groves and Woodburies and Elkos – are where the people, and the jobs, are going. If you don’t believe me, believe Joel Kotkin.
Or believe neither of us; just try to find an example of a light rail development in the Twin Cities area that promised vast economic benefits, and delivered only slightly-altered patterns of decay. That’s right – the Hiawatha Light Rail line. Been on that route lately? The brief spurt of condo development along the route deflated quickly when the housing bubble burst; the only real “development” anywhere along the route has been among bars (catering to the hordes of people who ride the train from the Mall to Twins and Vikes games, as well as the Hiawatha’s bar-hopping crowd) and some developments along East Lake that are more driven by changing demographics and lavish city investment than the light rail line, unless you want to claim there’s a surge of people riding the train to and from the East Lake Target Store or Pineda Burritos.
Anyway – let’s scan the list of other notables and see if there are any University Avenue business people (emphasis added by me):
“On this day that is 30 years in the making, we must recommit to making Central Corridor all that it can be: to heal the wound that a freeway opened in the West Bank decades ago, to fully integrate light rail with every mode of transit, and to connect transit-dependent communities to every opportunity,” said Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak…
…”We are turning into reality our vision of a network of interconnected transitways,” said Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin.
Hm. Just more bureaucrats, so far.
We’ll keep looking:
The Central Corridor light-rail line will revitalize University Avenue as a lifeline between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Streetcars operated on University Avenue continuously from December 1890 to Oct. 31, 1953. With a streetcar operating as often as every three minutes, there was an energy and vibrancy to the street life along the avenue.
Supporters expect Central Corridor line will rekindle that same kind of energy and enthusiasm as neighbors meet neighbors, students meet professors and business people meet customers aboard busy trains and at busy rail stops.
A reference to the glory days of the streetcar. Let’s come back to that.
Let’s keep looking for businesspeople:
“When completed, this project will bring the community together in a way not seen since the age of the street car, but also in a manner modern and contemporary,” said Ramsey County Commissioner Jim McDonough.
McDonought is – I’ll be kind – trafficking in fantasy. For starters, streetcars were simple little rattletraps, mechanically even simpler than buses, that stopped every block or two, more or less like buses. Light Rail is big, heavy, “fast”, like little trains rather than buses on tracks. Light Rail doesn’t bind communities. It gets people through them in a hurry .
And that’s even if “communities” were the same as they were during the glory years of the streetcar, which they’re not. Urban development has changed in the past fifty years. The big cities – all of them, not just Minneapolis and Saint Paul – developed at a time when the Big City was where the factories, bureaucracies and banks were; where the capital got invested. Transit – the fabled streetcars – brought them from the “suburbs” (which, back then, were places like “50th and Bryant” and “Battle Creek”, not Wayzata) to jobs at Ford, Honeywell, the mills along the riverfront, the big banks downtown…
…all of which are now gone, or have radically realigned, taking the need for a big, centralized city with them.
“The federal grant commitment of $478 million is the largest federal grant ever received in Minnesota for a transportation project,” said Metropolitan Council Chair Sue Haigh.
…Rep. Betty McCollum, whose district includes the rail line, collaborated with state and local officials to secure federal funding for Central Corridor as a member of the House Appropriations Committee.”Today’s federal commitment to the Central Corridor represents a great achievement for Minnesota,” McCollum said. “The Central Corridor is an investment in infrastructure that will help meet the demands of our growing community and create new economic opportunities for generations to come.”
“With this commitment, the federal government has recognized that the Central Corridor is not only an important part of an efficient transportation system in Minnesota, but also a vital piece of our efforts to ensure economic vitality in the Twin Cities and beyond,” Sen. Al Franken said. “This new rail line will offer a critical transportation alternative for commuters and create badly needed jobs in our region.”
Not a single University Avenue businessperson. I wonder why?
It’s simple – the Central Corridor is going to be a disaster for businesses in the Midway. That’s s given; even CCLRT supporters are saying so, now, after years of denying it, accompanied with that “you gotta break eggs to make an omelet” sneer and the same patronizing “change is scary to some people” you get from junior managers trying to make a budget cut turd seem like paté. The death toll is rising every week; rumors have it the newly-remodeled Rainbow on Uni at Snelling will close, at least for the duration of the project; others are dropping, week by week.
Beyond that? Even when (and if – remember the Hiawatha Corridor? We’ve been waiting seven years for that dog to hunt; it’s still lying on the porch) the economic development takes off, it’ll be in the form of gentrification around the small number of stops on the line. There, property values and rents will drive out the few businesses that survive the construction. Chains, with their national and international capital depth, will move in; local businesses will get squeezed out.
Eggs will be broken.
Government is picking winners and losers – and trying to tell you it’s for everyone’s good, because soon we’ll go back to the fifties, the golden age of the lunchpail job and the bedroom community and the trade union, and everything will be all right.
And you know how fairy tales turn out, right?
Let’s be honest. Rybak & Coleman don’t want, never did want those little walk in businesses. They want Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, a co-op, Restoration Hardware, etc. It’s eminent domain disguised as transportation. Yes, you’ve helped revive the Midway, but we think we can now do better. See ya.
Plainly, Mitch, you have not been drinking your Kool Aid like you’ve been instructed.
Reading Rybak’s comments made me speculate he’s been ingesting his through a different orifice.
If you don’t believe me, believe Joel Kotkin.
And there’s the problem — Kotkin spends his days trying to understand how things are and explaining the larger meaning, while RT, Betty, Chris and the rest are trying to impose a larger meaning by driving rail spikes.
Won’t stop people from living in Woodbury or Elko, though. Or, more to the point, in Plano.
RT, C Coleman, Betty “the ditz” McCallum, Crazy Al Franken.
All they are missing is Krusty the Clown.
So, they say this will bring development, but they are banning any new buildlings taller then 3 stories from being built along the line. It is because the St Paul NAACP says tall buildings are racist.
One correction, Mitch; light rail doesn’t get you anywhere “quickly”. They’re predicting 40 minutes from one end to the other, which is about what any good bicyclist could do for the same distance without breaking much of a sweat.
And a monstrous 1.7% ROI-well, to be fair, that’s BEFORE you account for the operating costs of this boondoggle, so reality is that ROI is probably pretty far in the red, and that’s AFTER the capital costs are paid for.
‘”With this commitment, the federal government has recognized …(blah blah more BS)… a vital piece of our efforts to ensure economic vitality in the Twin Cities and beyond,” Sen. Al Franken said.’
Not satisfied with FUBAR-ing things on national scale, the Feds come in to help micro-manage smaller failures. Hooray for consistency, I guess.
When archeologists dig up University Avenue 10,000 years from now they’ll conclude that we had a rich, vibrant society up to the point the locals decided to build some sort of primitive people-mover. At that point the physical record will show the empire imploded from its own excesses.
I remember when they broke ground for the Hiawatha Line. The semi-literate mayor of Minneapolis Sharon Sayles-Belton proudly declared that the city would see enormous economic development all along the line.
Hows that working out?
How much did it cost taxpayers for them to have their little party and pat themselves on the back? Was it included in the funding?
My Minneapolis Longfellow neighborhood was built up right after the First World War complete with alleys. It had one new streetcar line winding through the new 1919-1921 development. It received relatively little use except during the Second World War when tires and gasoline were tightly rationed.
My basic theory was that the Twin Cities streetcar system, started in 1875 was viable on it’s own before WWI. After that it probably lost money but the money was made though land speculation and development (secretly buy up the land then run the streetcar out to it) and through commercial sale of streetcar electricity. (factories tended to fire up electrical equipment between rush hours).
The Great Depression put a halt to land development. In the early to mid 1930 President Franklin Roosevelt signed an order making streetcar operations divest their electrical sales operations.
Basically after WWI the automobile and competing “jitney” buses were taking business away from the local streetcar system.
Make that “In the early to mid 1930’s”
Everytime I read about one of these transportation schemes, it reminds me of the line attributed to Gen. George Patton – “Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man”. The scheme will only benefit the rare few whose schedule never varies and who go to the same place (in town) everyday.
The reality is that with cloud computing, cheap video conferencing and the ability to coordinate major projects via internet in real time, the “office” will become a relic like the steno pool, the typewriter, the dictaphone and (in a blow to our Gov) the three martini lunch.
Can we also bring back the tax rates from the streetcar era?
Speed, you’re exactly correct about the development they hope will come. It’s the stuff of dreams. At the planning meetings, the artists’ watercolor renderings were always a balmy June day with a happy couple and their one perfect child, holding hands strolling the cobblestone walkway beneath lolipop trees while chirping larks fly over a rainbow.
Never a picture of a single mother lugging three sacks of groceries and two toddlers through a dark February evening wading through snow up to her *** waiting for the train to haul them back to her “affordable housing.”
There is not one single Starbucks, Caribou, Wicks-n-Stiks or Bed-Bath-And-Beyond the entire length of University Avenue, but there’s an Aldi’s right next to the White Castle. The reality is the people who live there can’t afford chi-chi coffee or imported potporri now, and they won’t be able to afford it when the train replaces the bus.
The only businesses that have managed to eke out a living on University are the family operated restaurants and low-end retailers who cater to the less affluent residents. We’re intentionally killing that for pie in the sky.
Shameful.
Nate: You nailed it!
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