Dave, what bridge are you talking about? I seriously hope you are not criticizing the East End Bridge.

When faced with a difficult task where we had to put a lot of material in a small space, we looked at what our competitors did to overcome this challenge. What they had was so blatant, that we couldnt figure out why NOT to try it. They had a video on their website demonstrating how they overcame it.

We tried many times to get our manufacturing engineer to try this method. After many failures of his old, “tried and true” methods, he did give the new method a try, only “half assing” it. In the end, we are still strugling to get over said challenge with a lower than desireable success rate.

Our company, is in the Indianapolis area. Not that this single person tells the complete story, but anyone who has worked with people who have been doing something for a long time know how difficult it is to break that mold and change the idealogy behind what they are trying to overcome.

Just a small example demonstrating your article Aaron

Whether this happens to the US remains to be seen. The US has high background population growth due to its high immigration rate and piss-poor birth control, which helps more cities grow. But if you look at cities that have decent income growth and aren’t another city’s satellite, and that aren’t fueled by natural resources that are about to run out, it’s basically just the coastal cities plus Chicago. Even Atlanta doesn’t make the cut – its income growth is disappointing.

Louisville is in the middle of constructing a heavily-subsidized basketball arena smack dab in the center of the city. For the same cost we could have built something that actually increased productivity, like schools or transportation infrastructure, which I’m guessing is going to go very much farther in ROI.

Instead, the city seems to limp from bad idea to bad idea – loaning developers a million dollars for nothing in return, building a bike trail beltway as sprawl inducement far, far from the urban core, razing the urban core to build yet more interetate expressway lane miles.

In 2009, we have ~6 candidates for Mayor, and only one of them is willing to admit that this expressway is a bad idea. He’s strongly opposed by the local paper, and probably will get laughed out of the race as a result.

And all the Mayoral candidates are falling over themselves to endorse a plan to build a bridge along the outer beltway, which is itself just a big sprawl-inducement project.

Its like we’re in a monocuture of morons.

anon 11:33, that’s an interesting question without a simple answer. Why stay anywhere I guess.

Cities do have natural life cycles. Most places rise and fall over the ages. But I am troubled by this idea that we simply discard the old and move to the new. Is America destined to be a place with 7 or so sustainable major urban cores and a remainder populated with the remains of cities that flowered for a season, then died? Perhaps if we simply keep chasing the lure of greenfield economics that will happen. But I think it is important that we don’t.

From an individual perspective, I think there an be reason to want to live lot of places. And it is up to us to supply that narrative. I suggest picking up a copy of Monocle magazine for this month. They do a great job generally of finding all these quirky out of the way borderland places and actually making them sound almost cool enough to want to move to – or at least visit. Read up on far eastern Russia and Gothenberg, Sweden, for example.

People aren’t afraid to struggling to build a future they may never live to see and which might never be – if you give them a vision and a reason to believe you are heading in the right direction.

?

Why should we even try to work with the old, worn down, blighted, legacy cost burdened urban areas? Why don’t we just rally everyone with education, money and ambition to the nearest white city? Everyone “progressive” left near Detroit, move to Ann Arbor. Everyone educated in Milwaukee, move to Madison. Everyone employable in Cleveland and Cincinnati, move to Columbus.

For that matter, why are we even staying in the Midwest?