Maggie says:
In today's Times, John Tierney writes about the "Circus Maximus syndrome," in which "a leader's prime civic responsibility is to build entertainment palaces for the masses." This is an affliction Albuquerque residents should easily recognize - a look downtown is all the proof we need that Mayor Marty is a big time victim of Circus Maximus syndrome.
Tierney: They've endowed downtowns with stadiums, arenas, theaters, concert halls, museums and aquariums. They imagine drawing hordes of out-of-towners to the new convention center, and when the visitors don't materialize, the mayors' solution is to build an even bigger convention center with a subsidized hotel next door. The mayors hire consultants to project grand economic benefits from their projects, but these dreams virtually never come true.
So how does this relate to Albuquerque? Let's see: We have a mayor who is against the Planned Growth Strategy, totally beholden to developers, and all about increasing his voter base with massive sprawl on the Westside. Incidentally, he's also trying to get a new arena built downtown.
Meanwhile, we have pockets of neighborhoods downtown crying out for investment - real planning and development in their interests, not more circus tents. In these neighborhoods you can almost always see one of two extremes: either massive gentrification or major disrepair. Nothing Marty's administration is doing addresses these two problems. We see nothing to protect long-time residents from losing their homes due to price increases and we see nothing to keep other residents from moving to, say, the Westside because they can't get the amenities they expect and deserve as residents of downtown Albuquerque.
What are Marty's answers? In line with Circus Maximus, it's high-dollar development. The new arena. New lofts. A new sports bar. What doesn't investment include? A local grocery store. A local bookstore. Protection against gentrification. Attention - at least recognition - that downtown is more than just a nightspot for college students and young professionals - it's home to about a dozen neighborhoods that have been here for forever. It's home to families, to voters. It's home to me, to Marjorie, and to Mikaela.
I'll let Tierney finish up here. Think of our fair city and who's lining Marty's pockets as you read this:
Those neighborhoods are hurt by grand public buildings that take up valuable real estate and must be paid for with higher taxes, which drive businesses and the middle class to the suburbs. Older cities have made comebacks the past decade by getting back to that core function of protecting people's lives, but most still haven't figured out how to restore their commercial marketplaces.
Instead, their leaders build projects whose economic benefits go to the Circus Maximus industrial complex: real estate developers, construction workers, bond traders, owners of hotels and sports teams. Aside from the thanks of these groups, politicians also get a pleasant distraction from their mundane duties.
It's more fun to pose next to a model of a new stadium than a new water main. Announcing plans for the Olympics gets better coverage than announcing plans for bridge repairs. If you want immediate gratification, there is nothing like a circus, as a moralist named Salvian observed in the fifth century.
By then Rome bore certain resemblances to a lot of American cities. While emperors were investing in monuments, commerce and manufacturing suffered. The population declined along with the port, the roads, the bridges and the water system, but the circuses went on. "The Roman people," Salvian wrote, "are dying and laughing."
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