Whitewater’s Common Council meets twice monthly, and was in session Tuesday evening. I follow the proceedings. Fortunately, politics doesn’t begin or end in a day, and few sessions are decisive. (If they were, our condition would be worse than it is.)
Part of Tuesday’s session concerned blight, and blighted properties. The two are not the same, and the difference is more than mere wordplay. The former describes a condition, the latter an afflicted property. (Note, though, that there was no apparent eagerness to use the obvious terms for Whitewater’s affliction.)
That blight is a topic in 2010 for Whitewater, reveals the truth of our small town’s economic condition: after six straight years of administrative projects, task forces, grants, declarations of vision, pronouncements on community betterment, and myriad dodgy claims about our supposed progress, we still have a problem with blight. (I sometimes think that our municipal manager must assume that Whitewater’s residents have a problem with memory, and that they are unable to recall the contradictions among his administration’s claims, many of which belie previous ones, made only months earlier.)
It’s very true that Whitewater has a problem with blight, and it’s a good idea to address it. A street will look better after the restoration (or even the demolition) of a blighted property.
This is a Community Development Authority project, and addressing blight’s an obvious choice for community development. In the end, though, community development in Whitewater is too dependent on initiatives and projects of our municipal administration, and Whitewater has walked far along a big-project, big-headline path (with little benefit).
Trying to solve a problem like this is harder for these other large, draining, ineffectual efforts. It’s harder because these other grand projects have wasted money and time, generating mostly headlines. It’s also harder because those believing such headlines come to believe in grand-yet-piecemeal solutions, typically of doubtful value.
Yet, we have blighted properties because conditions produce blight, and not the other way around. Poor people do not create poverty — conditions of poverty leave people poor. If Whitewater has a problem of blight, it’s because she is unable to create valuable alternative uses for properties, and so they are left to decay and fall into disrepair. (This is true even if every property targeted is truly blighted in fact and at law.)
The long-term answer to combating decaying properties is a prosperous local economy, and that requires a smaller, less burdensome, more limited, local government.
Removing blighted properties will improve neighborhoods, but removing them won’t stop (for long) blight. The underlying problem is systemic. Considerably lower fees and taxes, with necessarily commensurate reductions in the size of city government, would be a good option for Whitewater. There are other options — such as doing what we’ve been doing — but they’re options undesirable by comparison.