I have had lots of problems with overdevelopment in the town
of Maize where I live. The area is being overdeveloped, gentrified and any kind of
nature, plant or animal, is being wiped of the map. The quality of life in this
town has gone down since I moved here almost 20 years ago. Here is a story that agrees that suburbs need
to go. Most leaders in Kansas are slow to learn from these kind of mistakes,
but I will post this anyway.
- សតិវ អតុ
From Time:
From Time:
If you looked up “Minnesota nice” in the dictionary you
might see a picture of Charles Marohn. Affable and mild-mannered, Marohn, who
goes by Chuck, grew up the eldest of three sons of two elementary school
teachers on a small farm near Brainerd, the central Minnesota city best known
as the backdrop for the movie Fargo. Marohn (pronounced “mer-OWN”) graduated
from Brainerd High School, entered the National Guard on his seventeenth
birthday, and went on to study civil engineering at the University of
Minnesota. He now lives with his wife, two daughters, and two Samoyeds in East
Gull Lake, a small city north of Brainerd. Marohn, forty, likes the Minnesota
Twins, reads voraciously, and is a proud Republican. He’s the friendliest guy
you’re likely to meet. He’s also a revolutionary who’s trying to upend the
suburbs as we know them.
After graduating from college, Marohn went to work as a
municipal engineer in his hometown and spent several years working with the
small towns around the greater Brainerd area, putting projects together that
would build roads, pipes, storm drains, and all kinds of infrastructure. It was
the mid-1990s, the area was booming, and Marohn was laying down the systems
that helped the area grow. “I built sprawl,” he now says.
Often his work required him to knock on the doors of
residents, many of whom he knew from growing up, and tell them about changes
that might impact their property. In order to make the town’s roads safer, he
would explain, engineers were going to have to widen the road in front of their
house or cut down a tree in their yard. When his neighbors would get upset and
ask why or try to protest—the roads were hardly trafficked at all, and sparse
enough to almost be rural, they would point out—he’d explain that the town was
required to make these changes in order to comply with the book of engineering
standards to which it had to adhere. The code, put in place by the town but
derived from state and national standards, dictated that roads must have an
ample “recovery zone,” or a wide berth to accommodate cars that veer off the
road, and that drivers have improved “sight distance,” the distance a driver
needs to be able to see in order to have enough room to be able to react before
colliding with some- thing in the roadway. When residents pointed out that the
recovery zone was also their yard, and that their kids played kick ball and
hopscotch there, Marohn recommended they put up a fence, so long as it was
outside the right-of-way. He was sorry, he told them, but the standards
required it. The trees were removed, the roads widened, the asphalt paved and
repaved. “I never stepped back from my own assumptions to consider that I
wasn’t making anything safer,” Marohn says. “In reality, I was making their
street more dangerous, and in the process, I was not only taking out their
trees, I was pretending I knew more than them.”
For the rest click here.
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