Downtown stuck in the dark

11/18/07
Nothing drives someone out of a neighborhood faster than a boarded-up building.
Bridgeport’s South End has some outstanding housing developments, in the works and already open. The trend of turning abandoned factories and schools into fashionable lofts has taken off.
But amid those new oases, in an otherwise nondescript residential neighborhood, there they are — burned-out, falling down, abandoned buildings, with who-knows-what inside and an air of menace on the street.
Maybe Magic Johnson’s pleasure palace up the street will change things, or the luxury towers planned on the former Remington site. Either way, it’s going to be hard to excite potential homeowners with lingering urban decay on many blocks.
Then there’s the garbage.
Walk down any street outside the downtown core (ably kept up by the Downtown Special Services District) and you’ll be dodging trash the whole way. Post employees park on State Street and then walk a few blocks up to the main office, and it’s an obstacle course of wrappers, plastic bags and discarded paper (if you’re lucky) the whole way.
Also, streetlights. That walk on State Street includes a stretch under the Route 8/25 connector. It’s a short distance, but it gets plenty dark under there, especially this time of year. There are four different streetlights in the underpass; they’re all burned out.
Most cities have faced similar problems. Before he became a national figure on Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani’s biggest claim to fame was “cleaning up” New York City. Never mind that every major city in the country made similar gains in crime-fighting and quality-of-life issues; it was Rudy who received, and still claims, the credit.
But even taking the national trend into account, there’s no denying New York got a lot safer. And one of the main drivers behind that was what became known as the broken-windows theory of crime-fighting. The thinking is, when presented with a dangerous, drug-infested neighborhood, start with the little things — cracked pavement, fallen-down fences, garbage on the streets, broken windows.
As the theory goes, as those quality-of-life issues get better, so does the general tone of the neighborhood, to the point that people feel safer, crime starts to drop and more people move in.
There’s more to it than that, and a stepped-up police presence is necessary, which means more money. But the basic idea is sound. Fix the little things, start at the bottom and watch those changes make a difference at the top.
If any city could use that kind of approach, it would have to be Bridgeport.
We have no shortage of the alternative, the top-down approach. The promised gains from the recently approved Steel Point plan are 100 percent based on the trickle-down theory. No, the people who live here won’t be able to afford a home there or maybe even to shop there, but the money that comes in through increased tax revenue will benefit everyone.
Even at the most optimistic, though, we’re talking 20 to 30 years down the road when that tax revenue starts to make a difference. But the city is counting on success there — and in other large projects — to change the culture of Bridgeport, make it a place where people feel comfortable investing and building. That, theoretically, is how the people who live here will see immediate gain, in the city’s improved reputation and its accompanying benefits.
Talk about a dicey proposition.
Even in the best-case scenario, all this taxpayer money is going toward something ephemeral, something that may or may not happen down the road. The gains are real for the out-of-towners who buy a luxury condo on the water, but not so much for a working family here.
In the meantime, spending money on cleaning up garbage, knocking down abandoned buildings and fixing broken windows could have immediate benefits.
Imagine walking down well-lit streets around downtown. At the moment, there aren’t many places to go in the area to eat, have a drink, see a movie, etc. But there are some. And the best way to guarantee no one will take a stroll through the area is to keep those streetlights dark.
Broken-windows fixes aren’t cheap, but it’s about priorities. Taking that approach doesn’t benefit developers or banks, at least not immediately, but it can make a difference in ordinary people’s lives.
And there’s no reason that approach precludes development, even on a large scale. But what it could mean is that for every dollar set aside for a private development, a certain amount must be set aside for infrastructure improvements and the like.
It should be clear to everyone that it will take much more than luxury development to get the city going again.

Hugh S. Bailey is assistant editorial page editor at the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6233 or via e-mail at hbailey@ctpost.com.