Opinion: City of Boise
Doting Over Downtown Boise Should Stop
By Martin Johncox, Guest Writer, 12-30-09
The irony is almost too much: Me, a conservative, urging a Democratic Mayor and Council to pay attention to poor and disenfranchised areas of the city.
These days, the Boise mayor and council seem deeply uninterested in addressing urban decay problems south of the Boise River. Hundreds of Boiseans are at risk of being evicted from rickety trailer parks and hundreds of school children walk to school in dangerous conditions without sidewalks, yet the city is spending huge amounts of energy (and, possibly, money) on a downtown streetcar.
Boise City should be spending stimulus money helping long-neglected Bench neighborhoods with better housing, reinvestment and life-safety features such as sidewalks. Unlike the downtown streetcar, these are all urgent needs.
Since 2001 an estimated 1,300 mobile home owners in Boise have been forced to relocate. In contrast to the streetcar committee of movers and shakers, trailer park residents are the moved and the shaken. According to a Boise State University study, about 5,400 Boiseans live in manufactured housing. Half are seniors and a quarter, astoundingly, live on $900 a month or less. Most are women and nearly half have a chronic medical condition. One in four live in a park listed for sale or redevelopment.
This issue has receded with the economy, but it will return and what is the city doing now to prepare? The report listed some strategies for addressing the problem; I wonder what progress the City of Boise has made on any of them. Helping these people is an ambitious, complex job that will require imagination and commitment, but it could be done in partnership with local housing agencies, the Capital City Development Corporation and federal stimulus funds.
If that’s not enough of a priority, the city could focus on building sidewalks, the lack of which is a serious safety issue on the Bench. One of the reasons our family and three children moved from the Bench was the absence of sidewalks; we just didn’t feel safe letting our kids walk to school. Nowadays sidewalks are required - much like electricity, indoor plumbing and fire code compliance - but the city decades ago allowed Bench neighborhoods to be built to primitive standards. Now is a good time to go back and fix this and connect these sidewalks with the new schools the Boise School District recently built.
If the city really wants a streetcar for the economic benefits that come with it, I suggest a streetcar line between the crumbling strip mall at Orchard/Emerald and the mostly vacant strip mall at Orchard/Overland. Don’t laugh - a streetcar in fact used to run on Orchard Street and in 2000, the Treasure Valley Futures group and UI architecture students worked with neighbors to create just such a proposal with a rail-oriented development. The precedent and imperative exist for a rail line on Orchard and it would spark private-sector urban renewal the city wants and show Bench neighborhoods that they, too, are worth the good stuff. A city council member told me the city could eventually extend a streetcar system onto the Bench, after downtown, but I think that order is backwards. After 40 years, the city has done a great job with downtown. It is a decade overdue for the city to turn its urban renewal efforts to the Bench.
The city will say the stimulus funds are only for transit projects, not for sidewalks or developing decent housing, but I think that’s just hiding behind process. If there’s a sincere political will to build sidewalks, build a streetcar or help people who are about to lose their homes, the city will find a way to do it; the money is out there. In fact, on Dec. 2, The Statesman reported new federal grants for “projects that connect destinations and foster the redevelopment of communities into walkable, mixed use, high-density environments.”
This sounds just like what some neighbors south of the Boise River have asked for. Yet, instead of new investment, the Bench is losing its few historic structures (mostly schools) while the city remains completely silent. Bench strip malls continue to decay and empty, denying the city needed tax revenue and dragging down surrounding neighborhoods. When the 126-year-old Trolley Bar suffered fire damage, the city didn’t marshal its historic preservation forces to restore this treasured piece of local history. Officials just told the owner to move his junk.
I implore the city to stop doting over downtown and get to the long-delayed work of improving the lives, safety and heritage in neglected Bench neighborhoods. They are also part of Boise. If history isn’t enough to convince them, they should follow their consciences.
Martin Johncox lived in The Bench between 1991 and 2007 and is former vice-president of the Borah Neighborhood Association. He discusses this and related urban issues on his blog and you can follow him on Twitter @mjohncox.
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The School District has now plowed tons of money into the new South Junior High School. They also cleared the land at Franklin and Orchard to make way for development, and have rebuilt Whitney School and improved the surrounding area. And where is the city in this whole process? Nowhere to be seen. The Council long ago pawned off responsibility for development to the CCDC, which just plain doesn't understand development outside of a central business district, if even that. CCDC are just caretakers now of a downtown that has been rebuilt since 1992.
Without leadership from the city, the school districts investments are wasted. No families are going to return to the Bench because the housing stock and urban amenities such as sidewalks and shopping just aren't there. CCDC and city folks will tell you that it's a "market" problem in order to escape blame, even though even the dimmest bulb understands that urban redevelopment has always been driven by government planners and government money.
The other culprit in this is ACHD, which doesn't give a hoot about sidewalks, neighborhoods or anything that isn't laying pavement and moving traffic; they should not emerge from this discussion without having a certain finger pointed at them.
Finally, even understanding that politicians favor big-bang projects like streetcars because they can claim credit for such things easily, it still doesn't jive that the Mayor doesn't do more for the neighborhoods. The ONLY reason there are libraries at the Hillcrest and Ustick locations is because the Mayor/Council got their butts handed to them on the library bond. So the political costs of ignoring the Bench and others is rising. We'll see if it ultimately makes a difference at City Hall.
Kids walking to school?!!? What planet do YOU live on, Martin? Kids don't walk to school any more, do they?
As a lifelong (since '53) Boise resident, I walked to school.
I can also remember when Hillcrest Plaza was shiny new, with Welles (think Fred Meyer) at one end, and Buttrey's at the other. I was a young kid, but the parking lot seemed vast! (They put zoo animals on all the light posts, so you could find your way back to your car by locating the nearest-by critter.) The Plaza Twin Theater was cutting-edge!
Down the road at Emerald Street, the fancy new bowling alley was just down the sidewalk from the Rathaus pizza joint, and "J's Steak Village," with a giant fiberglass cowboy in the parking lot.
Perhaps the Hillcrest Library branch was a bone thrown to the neighborhood. But with few exceptions, it seems to be going to seed. And yes, it seems CRAZY for the Ribbon-Cutter-in-Chief to obsess about his little downtown streetcar.
I've lived on "the bench" for close to 35 years, and 2 blocks off Orchard for 20+ years. I've seen precious little evidence that Mayor Bieter recognizes my part of town as Boise.