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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (133683)	2/27/2001 4:20:14 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1580000

I don't see where the lack of zoning has hurt Houston at all. But what could Houston have been had zoning been used effectively? Both Houston and Dallas [more so Dallas] are working hard to revive their downtown areas but not with alot of great success. Why? Because both cities allowed/encouraged a lot of commercial development outside the downtown areas which siphoned off much of the downtown's vitality. This probably plays into your corruption theories....some good ole boy has some land he wants to makes some bucks off of so they rezoned the land and made it into Post Office Plaza [?], a huge office complex in the middle of what esssentially was residential development on Houston's west side, I believe. Most cities were ready to take the same road as Houston and Dallas but some resisted. The result is cities like Galveston where the downtowns are active and you can walk from place to place. These did not happen by chance....it was due primarily to benevolent leaders and an informed public that used planning tools like zoning to make it happen.....although in some cases, natural disasters and lack of economic growth prevented change for a long time, precluding Post Office like developments from happening. Most of the time it is an issue, it is because someone wants to punish some form of behavior that they don't like, usually the placement of a liquor store or a porn palace. It may look that way but it is far more complicated a process than that. Americans have had a tradition of hating cities, starting with Jefferson. Consequently, we have not been as effective as Europeans in making our cities attractive....partly because development of many of ours coincided with the beginning of the industrial age. But in the past 50 years there has been a lot of Americans traveling to Europe and getting off on cities like Prague, Stockholm, Paris etc. And now they want it here. However that kind of city does not come easy...nothing good ever does...so it requires a lot of changes...to zoning, to people's attitudes, to how the city views itself etc. Its nice [at least for me] because many American cities are starting to become real cities. ted