Secret Hope for Old Richardson

Are big things in store for old downtown Richardson?

In November, the council approved zoning changes to facilitate a large expansion of the Afrah restaurant, including a market center and plaza.

In January, the council approved doing a Main Street/Central Expressway study to create a redevelopment and reinvestment strategy for the area.

In April, secret doings in city council. More after the jump.

Market Failure

Mention "Great Depression" to most Americans and what do they think of? High unemployment and poverty, certainly. ("I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." -- FDR.) What they might not think of is failure of the free market. But at the time, it was a different story. There was serious doubt about the viability of America's free market economic system, whose failure was on such dramatic display. There was an alternative system that was increasingly attractive to many Americans, the revolutionary communist system in the Soviet Union ("I have seen the future and it works." -- Lincoln Steffens.)

But in the end, Americans of the day rejected revolution and communism. Americans of our time forget, or never learned, that that wasn't inevitable. We can thank the success of FDR's New Deal in creating a safety net for those suffering the most from the failure of the free market. And on the other side of the coin, the totalitarian nature of communism in the Soviet Union gradually became clear to Americans. With the atomic bomb and ICBMs, the USSR posed an existential threat to the US. Partly in reaction to the threat of Soviet communism, memory of the failure of the free market during the Great Depression faded and was replaced by its opposite, a glorification of the free market. It became a matter of self-evident truth: the free market could do no wrong.

The pendulum had swung too far. After the jump, restoring some balance.

Return of the Dead: Trinity Tollway Edition

Dead development projects have a way of coming back to life and haunting their cities forevermore. Last week, it was a plan for a self-service warehouse on Arapaho Rd in Richardson that the city council dragged out of its grave and plopped down in the middle of a commercial and residential neighborhood just down the street from city hall, where it will haunt Richardson for twenty years.

But the mother of all living dead projects has to be Dallas's plan to lay a freeway down inside the levees of the Trinity River. No matter how many studies reveal that to be a disaster waiting to happen, the powers that be in Dallas keep finding a way to keep breathing life into that zombie development project.

After the jump, a dream that won't die, a dream to counter these nightmares.

Spring in the Steger Garden (2012)

From Flowers

Clicking for Charity

Maybe I just missed the start of this trend, but it seems like a lot of charitable funding decisions are being turned over to online voting. That leads to get-out-the-vote campaigns by champions of those charities.

What better way to drum up online support than through Twitter? After the jump, three tweets with a Richardson connection that caught my attention recently.