The community in Old Town is organized enough, at least enough to get this topic in the news 2 straight days. But for some reason this part of the community suffering the responsibilities of the entire city, to avoid lawsuit, is acceptable to those in other communities.
I understand the need to be close to jobs/transit, but there are buses throughout town and other areas along RT that are just as accessable.
Look at Bidwell St today: Decrepit homes, a tire store, senior assisted living, low income apartments, an empty rail yard-ish thing storing cars, a barely painted school district bunker, and now psychatric living and homeless shelter? Come on! Enough is enough! The HD is trying to work it's way back up, and this is another burden it just doesn't need to bear. The rest of the city needs to step up!
I absolutely agree, Mylo. It really does seem that this general part of town gets the short end of the stick a disproportionately high amount of the time. From torn up streets that take forever to get repaired to a seeming hodgepodge of zoning and development. A trip down Sibley or Bidwell underscores this pretty well. It's a very convenient place to live in this town and has some great attributes, but this often seems to be in spite of the city's efforts rather than because of them. I like many of my neighbors, I like being able to walk to old town, I like being less than 5 minutes from the grocery store. I don't like the way so many of this town's residents treat our neighborhood streets like expressways, the way that code enforcement seems to be non-existent, the way low income and now "psychiatric" housing is clustered here and the way the city seems to be unwilling to do anything about any of it because it might not be popular with people who live in other parts of the town.
I WANT to continue to live in this part of town, but it would sure be nice if the city would take steps to protect the area from the erosion of neglect, traffic and hodge-podge zoning.