I am angry and heartbroken tonight.
By a 4-4 vote, the Borough Assembly just failed to pass Ordinance 2010-09, which would have created two new zoning types: a “retail hot spot” and a “supporting commercial district”. These new zones — which would have been merely codified, not even applied — were one of the key governmental tools for encouraging businesses to invest in quality retail building downtown. And now it’s fucked, thanks to Michael Dukes, Matt Want, Natalie Howard, and Joe Blanchard — none of whom owns a god-damned square foot in downtown Fairbanks. (According to the FNSB Assessing property database.)
I can’t get into the particular arguments the detractors used — I’m too heartbroken right now — but I do want to thank Assembly members Nadine Winters, Diane Hutchison, Karl Kassel, and Mike Musick, for their “yes” votes, as well as Mayor Luke Hopkins for putting the ordinance forward, David van den Berg of the Downtown Association for his ongoing work with downtown business owners and the revitalization effort, and everyone who testified in favor of the proposed ordinance, including the near-unanimity of downtown business owners who supported it.
No doubt the detractors are comforted by their free market and anti-government ideology. My curse on them is that all their cars break down, and then they can see how much they like their WalMart shopping and their living out on Chena Fucking Hot Springs Road.
It’s enough to make me want to ditch this Borough, this un-community, for a place civic-minded enough to say, “We will take these restrictions on ourselves and impose them on others who may sometimes be unwilling, because public will is sometimes more important than some individual jackass who might want to stand in the way of 100% consensus” — and then to torch this fucking place on my way out. (Please understand, I do not mean the “torch this place” thing literally. It is an expression of my disappointment and my feeling of hopelessness for Fairbanks’s future.)
Vivat communitas! Stadtluft macht frei!
I just noticed today that it had been a long time since you’d last posted. I’m sorry this was what got you to post now. I can hear your bitter disappointment and there isn’t much I can say.
I’m hoping tomorrow you might be a bit more philosophical about it all. We missed you here and your thoughtful posts about community.
I agree with Steve.
Keep the faith.
Good to see your return here. Don’t fret, Karma is a bitch and you have to stay around to see her act. The names you mentioned with disdain (above) are most likely associated in some way with Francis Schaeffer Cox.
I’m getting the popcorn ready. :)
Cheers!
Dan
Grad student from hell
It’s an interesting thing that the idea of common space and common good is so reviled by the Right Wing. I am surprised at the vote by Joe Blanchard; I would have thought he’d have a better sense of the value of this kind of zoning and its effects. Your blog is valuable, Paul, and I would hope you keep it going in the positive tone you had before. Some people you can never educate or persuade, but most people can be. Your blog is a very good exploration of community living and the values of neighborliness. Keep it up. Don’t give up. We’re here, too.
keep it up. there are lots of folks like us out there. politics sway, and we’ll be there when it does.
Let me add my voice to the chorus who’d like to hear more from you. Politics at so many levels seems so dispiriting these days. But I hope you’ll do your best anyway.
Look to see if there’s anything worth celebrating anywhere in the borough. This would be the phenomenon of “bright spots” documented in the book Switch by Dan and Chip Heath. See http://www.heathbrothers.com/switch/ for some samples.
Good luck and hope you stay.
But we do need people like you to stand up for these local shops and citizens. Fairbanks is still a wonderful place to live and no matter where you go there are always going to be issues within the city government that people don’t like. It’s up to us to raise our voices and our pens to really do something meaningful about it. Keep your head up and thanks for the blog post.
It’s been a long time since you posted this, but I think it’s important to add the “other side” of the story.
First, I’m a long-time Alaskan, who lived in the downtown area for more than 30 years and loves to walk and ride my bike. This is not a car-lover’s view. It’s a Fairbanksan’s view.
The downtown revitalization would have severely constrained economic growth in the downtown area at a huge cost to the taxpayers. Original ideas included tearing down the newly built transit center to replace it with a park when there is already a park diagonal to it and a proposal to slow traffic down to make it more difficult to drive through the area. The idea was that this would somehow encourage people to stop and shop. What? Why the heck would anyone go downtown if traffic is going to be even worse than it is now? Moreover, it was going to raise the taxburden of the downtown property owners in order to create a vision that would lead to less economic activity rather than more.
A precursor of the sort of development that was planned by Vision Fairbanks can be seen on 3rd Avenue between Lacey and Cushman. Narrow streets with limited parking make people want to avoid the area, not come to it. These sorts of projects work best in cities where there are a lot of apartments nearby and the weather is mild enough year-round to enjoy walking. That’s not Fairbanks, which is really more of a regional gathering point for a suburban/rural community.
More than that, though, was the bossy, meddlesome ordinances that were going to come along with the redesign. For those of us who value the truly Alaskan lifestyle built on liberty, THAT would have spelled the deathknell for the town. It’s already difficult enough to live here with bureaucrats in your private business everytime you turn around, telling you what you may do with the property you paid for. When businesses would be required to go through a difficult permitting process for any business changes, it would just speed the emptying for downtown.
Yes, we should try to cooperate with our neighbors to make our community a better one, but we shouldn’t force one another to walk in lockstep toward some collectivist goal that ties us all up in red tape. That’s tyranny and it’s anything but civilized.
Just the thoughts of one of your neighbors. Wish I could have logged in to this when the topic was hot.