David, speaking of good small media efforts, congrats on the recent article about the Guardian in High Country News.

Growthophobe, you still haven’t offered a plan for helping decaying strip malls. The city estimates there are hundreds of acres of run-down strip malls that attract neighborhood nuisances, depress the surrounding homes and are getting worse. I submit to you that renovating strip malls will increase the value of the surrounding neighborhoods (excluded from the urban renewal district) and more than offset the taxes that go to pay off the improvements. Also, better-off neighborhoods will demand fewer services such as code enforcement, police and fire. You know these arguments as well as I do but you don’t discuss them.

Again I ask, aside from telling people to leave town, what’s your proposal for making this city a better place by dealing with run-down strip malls? Give what you want and suggest some better ways of doing it.

Carping and tearing down proposals is certainly an important and necessary job – and one with a surplus of takers – but good public policy demands solutions in addition to opposition.

You seem to know the value of a dollar but not of a neighborhood.

Actually, Mr. Logic, I’m speaking as someone who’s active in my neighborhood association. It seems illogical to presume I’m a developer. Or is it just an ad hominem effort to delegitimize my position to speak on this topic? Since you want to personalize this, I ask if you are active in a neighborhood association. Logical question.

To me, you sound like one of those people who earns his living outside this community and just lives here, although maybe I’m as wrong about that as you are about presuming I’m a developer. It’s a free country and all, but I notice people like that are not too terribly vested in the economy of where they live.

Instead of a strip mall full of strip clubs, how about buildings that come to the street, parking lots clustered in garages or behind buildings, a neighborhood stage and gathering area, mom and pop offices, low-income apartments above the street-level shops – you know, the kinds of places we used to build in Boise, the kinds of places that we have a precious few samples of, the kinds of places developers are building anew on bare land on the outskirts. We can do it if we really try. There are no big secrets to building places worth caring about.

BTW, I rent my brain on the open market. Some of my clients are developers, some are neighborhood associations, some are government agencies, some are non-profits and some are small businesses. Each of them, in their own way, wants to make this a better place to live by actively addressing what’s wrong.

And you? What are YOUR proposals for Boise’s decaying strip malls? Or do you even care?

Wow, this is a scary scenario: “buildings that come to the street, parking lots clustered in garages or behind buildings, a neighborhood stage and gathering area, mom and pop offices, low-income apartments above the street-level shops.” Sounds like a real military-industrial type place fer sure.

I presume you live in a neighborhood, designed by a developer, approved by a city, built by construction workers, sold by Realtors and inhabited by people earning an honest living. This is what you call the “government developer cartel” and you live in it.

It’s also called “society.” You don’t have to be “well-connected” to care about it and want to improve it.

Sounds like someone is a little bitter he isn’t part of the money trail.

I just can’t resist this one. If quasi-governmental agencies like CCDC are to be completely ruled out as viable means for urban renewal then WHAT? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, criminal prosecution for code violations. Failure to clean up junk = jail time and/or big fines. This system could even be a money maker just like DUI’s.

Wonk, I think you may be missing something, though. Many people in this town are right at home with junk cars and weeds and peeling paint etc. etc. There’s no accounting for taste and it’s a tall order to legislate “class.”

We have hispanic pride marches and gay pride marches and women’s pride marches, when did anyone ever here of a civic pride march? Perhaps it’s time for one, if we’re lucky, 5 or 6 people might show up.

So, if we cherish in-fill housing why not just doze the decayed strip malls and build housing in their place? Low income apartments would be useful in several of the neighborhoods where these eyesores are located, and they would be more likely to be on the (way too pathetic) bus routes. At many of these locations there would be space for some beautification, green areas and parking or even park and ride lots. There is so much commercial property being built now – and a lot of it “further out” that these old strip malls might just have outlived their purpose as commercial property and be ready for a different use.

Beware the local-government developer cartel. Shades of DDE! CCDC, which was originally a creation of city govt., needs to have all of it’s functions put back under the control of city govt. and thus of the People.

Any improvements made within the urban renewal district are taxed, however these taxes go directly to the enlargement of the CCDC bureaucratic fifedom. Ity is enraging.

The People and city government are providing basic police, fire and other emergency services while this ” created bureaucracy” ( by city officials we elected to represent us ) gets fatter at the expense of the people. It’s time for ” team Dave” to tighten their financial waist line and do the job the people elected them for-not CCDC! Kudos to the Idaho Business Review and the Guardian for bringing this to the attention of the people of Boise.