LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Miller incorrect about Kalamazoo ‘blight’

I read with fascination Trustee Chair Kenneth Miller’s explanation of urban blight in the recent Western Herald article “Downtown Expansion Discussed” from Nov. 23 on page one.

The belief of Miller that “[b]light starts at the core of a community and spreads out to other parts of the city, just like a tree” surely does not stem from his education at WMU. Such a vacuous abstraction is an insult to the intellect of the student body.

As any student enrolled in WMU’s Community and Regional Planning program could explain, “blight” is not a contagious cause of urban ills but the symptom of larger socio‑economic problems such as unemployment and poverty. Rather, according to urban policy expert Wendell Pritchett, blight is a “vague, amorphous term… a rhetorical device (Yale Law & Policy Review, vol. 21, p. 3).” A substantive retort to Chairman Miller is offered by Jane Jacobs, “Overcrowding, deterioration, crime, and other forms of blight are surface symptoms of prior and deeper economic and functional failure of the district.”

I am skeptical that Miller is capable of offering evidence demonstrating how aesthetic improvements to a nine-acre site in the Central Business District will solve Kalamazoo’s deeper economic and functional failures. In addition to the two works cited above, Waldo Library offers access to an abundance of literature on urban decline and economic revival. To take one example, economist Robert Baade and Richard Dye writing in the, “Economic Development Quarterly (available to WMU faculty and students online),” found, “Seasonal, unskilled, and low‑wage jobs are directly associated with stadiums.

Approving a stadium, then sitting back to wait for promised growth is a naïve public policy.” I encourage Miller to explore the scholarly research on urban revitalization and reconsider his support for the downtown arena/event center.

Matthew Schuld
WMU Alumnus

Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=12667

Posted by heraldstaff on Nov 29 2009. Filed under Letters to the Editor, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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