A friend of the blog emails:
I’m not going to weigh in on whether the Interstate system was bad for some neighborhoods when it happened.
But, every urban renewal project since then (like St Paul’s Green Line) seems to have been worse in terms of the impact on these neighborhoods. The goal in these current projects seems to be to keep poor neighborhoods poor and segregated.
So, I read this and anticipate that current St Paul activists/councilmembers are looking at Syracuse and drooling at what they can do to I94 and the businesses owned by Immigrants and POC that survived the Green Line and the 2020 riots. And how many accolades they’ll get from Macalester Groveland for “saving those people” from pollution of cars by destroying their businesses and displacing them out to suburbs.
It’s funny- they supposedly hate cars so much, but they never ask to close the section of Snelling Ave down between Selby and Grand, for instance. It’s always about shutting down streets in neighborhoods where they want to make sure to keep control of the residents.
I’ve wanted to tell these people – you want to make a statement? Muster all that political clout you have and shut down Lincoln and Portland Avenues from Hamline to Western. Or Dayton from Snelling to the River . Or just block all the streets south of West Seventh from Eagle down to Grand. Or Como from 280 east to Raymond. And make Crocus Hill, Merriam Park, Irvine Park and Saint Anthony Park, respectively, the urban meadows you envision.
Lead by example!
Here is a little story to help better understand the elite mindset.
A guy I know sent his kids to Bienvenue à L’Étoile du Nord. For those of you who do not know what that is. It is a real place, a publicly funded French Immersion Elementary School on the East Side of Saint Paul.
So every morning, tiny yellow buses swarm around Highland, Merriam Park, Irvine Park and Saint Anthony Park picking up elite kiddies and dropping them off on the East Side and every afternoon the process is reversed.
One day, a city school employee, who probably does not work there anymore, got a brilliant idea. Why not move the school to the kids instead of the kids to the school?
It would save a bundle.
When the notion was proposed, the moms threw a fit and lowered the politically thunderous hammer of Thor down on the offending official’s head.
Didn’t the district functionary understand the value of busing elite children to an elite school in an under-privileged neighborhood?
Ann Althouse admits today something every normal person knows, but the elites do not know: “This is a lesson on reparations: It will never be enough.”
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-flagship-commemoration-event-to.html#more
I think that I know why the elites do not know this. To admit that they cannot fix something would be to admit powerlessness, and the elites hate that feeling.
Logic cannot penetrate their ignorance. Any two groups that are siginificantly distinct will have different values. These values will change life outcomes because, well, that is what values do when they are working properly. Group A will produce more or fewer astronauts than group B, but never the same amount.
But the elites continue to demand “equity” for all of the groups they recognize.