There are a number of factors which determine how expensive a city will be. One of these is a distortion of the exchange rate between currencies due to such factors as currency speculation and the raising or lowering of the value of a currency by printing money to stimulate the economy.
Another factor is what I termed "The Wage-Price Spiral", in the postings on the world and economics blog, "The Wage And Price Disparity" and "The Wage-Price Spiral Made Really Simple". This takes place when a nation improves it's industrial efficiency so that fewer people are working in industry. Those that find new jobs that are not actually producing something must "ride" on actual production so that this has the effect of driving up both wages and prices in that country, relative to countries where the majority of workers are engaged in actual production of goods or crops.
Isolation is another factor in prices, if most of what the city needs must be brought in from afar then we can expect that the city will be more expensive than if this were not the case. A good example of this is Hawaii.
But I think the most important factor in how expensive a city ends up being is it's geography. Land is the most fundamental of "The Three Fundamental Costs", as I described in the posting by that name on the world and economics blog. The most expensive cities are those where there is a lot of economic and population pressure to grow, but where the local geography severely constricts that growth. This drives up the price of land, and since that is the first of The Three Fundamental Costs, the elevated price of land finds it's way into most other costs.
One thing that tends to happen is that a city will be established centuries ago in a location that is on water or is an easily defensible location. But today, growing as a modern city, the factors which made it's founding attractive now act to constrain it's growth and drive up prices. This we saw in "The Cities Of North America", on the world and economics blog.
Here is a map link with satellite imagery and Google Street View: www.maps.google.com .
Following are cities that regularly make the lists of the most expensive, and a description of the geographical reason why:
Copenhagen, in Denmark, is not on the mainland peninsula of the country, sometimes referred to as Jutland, but is situated on an island to the east of the mainland which gives it not much room to expand as the modern city which it is today. But this must have been a very desirable location when Copenhagen was founded.
It was natural for an ideal harbor on America's Pacific coast to be the location of a growing city. but today, San Francisco finds itself on a narrow peninsula with the Pacific on one side and San Francisco Bay on the other, with no room to expand. The spiraling price of land finds it's way into everything else.
Singapore is today one of the economic wonders of the world. It was actually once a part of Malaysia, but was ejected from the country. That was long before it became the economy that it is today. But Singapore finds itself on an island, with no room to expand other than reclaiming land from the sea and, as you might expect, that land will tend to be very expensive.
Switzerland is not a big country, but it has three of the cities which regularly appear on lists of the most expensive: Lausanne, Zurich and, Geneva. Part of the reason for the prices in these cities has to do with currency issues. But all three cities are located in mountain valleys, which do not leave much room to expand, and this drives up the price of land which then drives up the price of everything else. Zurich and Geneva also share their valleys with large lakes, which may be very scenic but which further limit room for growth.
Oslo, in Norway, is also constrained by mountains. It is in a scenic valley at the end of a fjord, but these very factors leave it without much room to expand.
Tokyo and Osaka, in Japan, are two more expensive cities that find prices driven up by lack of room to expand. Tokyo Bay makes a fine harbor and an ideal place for a city. But when modern times come, it leaves a city with the bay on one side and mountains on the other.
New York was clearly established because it was not only an ideal harbor on the Atlantic, and centrally located in the early colonial U.S., but also had an abundant source of fresh water in the Hudson River. However, like so many other cities, the very factors which made it a desirable location in the beginning would constrain it's expansion as it grew into a modern city. This drives up the price of land, along with the price of everything else.
London is, of course, notorious for prices. It is not surrounded by water or mountains, as are many expensive cities. But Britain is determined to preserve it's green countryside and London is surrounded by the so-called "Green Belt", into which it is not allowed to expand. This makes land more expensive, and drives up prices. The recent influx of very wealthy people into London has driven up prices still further, making it a literal pressure cooker of prices. I made the suggestion in "Thoughts And Observations. Part Two", on this blog, that London might be permitted to expand as far as the M-25 Motorway around it to relieve some of the pressure on prices.
Hong Kong is another city where land is at a premium, and which is now the largest economic center in the world in terms of currency flow. It regained some land from the sea, as did Singapore, and as we can expect that will make it very expensive.
Basic supply and demand will eventually halt the growth of a city where there is no room by raising prices too high to continue. Notice that some north American cities never seem to be among the most expensive because they have abundant room to expand. These include Winnipeg, Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and, Philadelphia.
Prosperity is not the same thing as high prices. We saw in "The Inverse Geographic Prosperity Principle", on the world and economics blog, that if we see a big city where geography seems to dictate that there is no reason for a big city to be there, such as in the middle of a desert. Paradoxically, that means that the city must be prosperous. The less geographic reason that there is for a big city to be there, the more prosperous it will likely be if it is there.
Friday, November 28, 2014
Housing, Geography And, Economics
On this blog, in the posting "The Cities Of North America", we had a look at why cities tend to form where they do. In the free enterprise model, the development of a city is driven by economics. Some type of beneficial production arises, such as industry or mining or transportation. Workers in that production, living nearby, will buy houses with their earnings. The prices of those homes will be set by the usual supply and demand, and depending on the money that the workers are able to pay for those homes based on their wages. As demand for housing continues, tracts of new housing will grow outward from the city center.
But this neat free enterprise model of economics can sometimes break down. There can be times when workers are producing wealth, but their wages do not keep up with prices.
Land values naturally increase as the city grows, and this higher value of land finds it's way into most other prices. We saw in the posting "The Three Fundamental Costs", on this blog, that the price of land is actually the first of the fundamental costs. This is why prices of most goods and services tend to be higher in cities, the price of land finds it's way into everything else. Usually, the system of supply and demand remains in balance and wages keep up with prices.
But when there is a distortion in the system, and wages do not keep up with prices, one of the first places that the distortion shows up is in housing. When this happens, a class of housing tends to arise that falls outside the logic of the market system.
Ironically, this distortion in the free enterprise model of urban economics often comes from the very reason that the city is there in the first place. A typical example is a good natural harbor, around which a city develops. But the harbor takes up space which, in the ideal model of city growth described above, would be used for housing and other developments. This distorts the land values, making land in the city more scarce and thus more expensive that it would be if the city had an ideal flat plain on which to grow.
We saw in the posting "The Most Expensive Cities", on this blog, that the cities that are known for the highest prices are inevitably those which have both the economic reasons for being there, but also geographic constraints on their growth. This drives up the price of land, which then finds it's way into just about everything else.
The truth is that the sub-standard housing, outside the usual market system, which arises in so many cities is very much associated with inflated land prices, and cities with geographic constraints that interfere with the idealized market economics, and drive up land values and prices, are especially prone to develop such sub-standard housing. This sub-standard urban housing is sometimes referred to, in less polite terms, as a slum. It may consist of either makeshift housing, or takeover and crowding into existing structures.
The truly ironic thing about slums is that the substandard housing may be built on land that is as valuable as gold, having been driven up to such values by the scarcity of land in the city due to geographic constraints. It is the very inflated value of the land which would make proper housing built on it too expensive for the workers who would live there to be able to afford it.
New York City is historically more associated with tenements then Philadelphia simply because Philadelphia had much more room to expand, which kept land prices lower. Mumbai (Bombay) is built on a peninsula adjoining the best natural harbor on the west coast of India, but this geographic configuration made land very scarce and expensive and the sub-standard housing that it is, perhaps unfairly, known for inevitable.
Rio de Janeiro is a very populous city that has it's land constricted by both the natural harbor, and also mountainous terrain. The result is the famed "Favelas", which you can look around on Google Street View www.maps.google.com .
Possibly the largest housing development in the world, that is considered as a slum, is Cuidad Nezahualcoyotl in Mexico City. Since Mexico City is possibly the largest city in the world, and it's space is constrained by being within the Valley of Mexico, we might expect that land values would be very high and that there might be large tracts of housing which fell outside the logic of market forces. It is also completely covered by Google Street View. I spent a while looking around Cuidad Nezahualcoylotl, it is officially called a slum but also looks like a colorful place to live and is actually more of a township then a slum. (You can tell by some of the place names that the Aztec language of Nahuatl is still widely spoken in central Mexico).
Substandard housing, due to a breakdown in the free-enterprise model of city growth, does not always appear as visible substandard housing. At the time of this writing, for example, workers at Disney World in Orlando are known to live crowded into motel rooms because their wages do not make it possible to buy a home or even rent an apartment. Slums, or any substandard housing, exists when workers are doing work that is valuable to the economy but, due to some distortion in the ideal economic system, their wages cannot buy them a regular place to live.
This scenario also helps to explain why Montreal traditionally has a higher proportion of renters than other Canadian cities. This is not substandard housing, but Montreal started on an island in the St. Lawrence River with the famed hill of Mount Royal on the island. While this may have been a natural place for a settlement, it also means space constraints as both Mount Royal and the river occupied space that otherwise would have gone mostly to housing. This brought the development of apartments to rent, simply because apartments take up less space than houses.
The trend toward urbanization across the world only makes the economic balance that prevents sub-standard housing more precarious. The next downward step is when people cannot live at all on prevailing wages and crime, as well as substandard housing, spirals upward.
As we might expect, the greater the income gap in a society the more likely will be the prevalence of substandard housing. The more money the wealthy take out of circulation, the more likely there will be substandard housing. The presence of the wealthy can be expected to drive up prices and property values beyond the reach of many workers.
One solution to substandard housing, brought about by distortions in the free enterprise model of urban development, is government intervention. Within cities, this may mean the building and subsidizing of housing projects of condensed housing that does require too much expensive land. Another solution is that of the "township", built outside the city where land is less expensive. The disadvantage of a township is that it requires special transportation for workers into the city.
The most famous township in the world is, of course, Soweto (Southwest Township), to the southwest of Johannesburg. Building such a township precluded the development of substandard housing within Johannesburg, where land prices were higher. Quite a bit of Soweto is covered by Google Street View, if you want to have a look.
I have childhood memories of a television documentary about an entire new city that had been built in an effort to relieve crowding in Mumbai (then Bombay). The new city was called Navi Bombay. I suppose that the concept was similar to New Delhi being built next to Delhi.
But we must always remember that housing, as with anything to do with economics, is a balance.
The perfection of assembly line manufacturing techniques, early in the Twentieth Century, along with much more efficient agriculture so that only a few percent of the working population was required to grow food, brought the possibility of unprecedented prosperity for all. But it also brought a peril with it. The efficiency in both agriculture and manufacturing meant that fewer workers were needed.
This may seem like a good thing, but it meant that not enough money was being paid out in total wages for workers to be able to afford to buy all of the goods that the factories were producing at a rapid pace. Much of the inventory produced was just piling up in warehouses. Factories began cutting back on production, which meant that workers had even less money, and it spiraled into the devastating economic crash of 1929.
We seem to have gotten past the peril of mass manufacturing goods without paying workers enough to be able to afford those goods. But we arrived at another peril, this time with regard to housing. The widespread postwar ownership of automobiles, along with the development of air conditioning, brought the possibility of eliminating the substandard housing problem, caused by inflated land values, by making use of the virtually unlimited space for building in the U.S. southwest and Florida.
There was overabundant space to build homes, in desert cities that did not have a significant portion of their geography taken up by water. This meant that there would be no logical shortage of housing but it brought us to another peril, of people not being able to buy all of the houses that would be built. The economic crash of 2008 would be a mirror image of that of 1929, except that it would revolve around housing rather than manufactured material goods.
Notice that the housing debacle, which nearly brought a repeat of the 1929 economic crash in 2008, revolved around cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas. These are desert cities with an abundance of land available for housing developments. But those developments, like the manufacturing of 1929, were taken further than the people's wages.
This is related to "The Inverse Geographic Prosperity Principle" that we saw in the posting by that name on the world and economics blog. When we see a big city in a place, such as a desert, that geography dictates there really shouldn't be such a big city, we know that the city must be prosperous or else it wouldn't be there. But, as with 1929, production was driven too far relative to the money being paid out in wages and salaries.
That was the irony in the 2008 crash, it started in some of the most prosperous areas of the U.S. The basis of capitalism is the profit motive, trying to sell as much goods and services as possible for as much money as possible while trying to drive costs such as workers' wages as low as possible in order to maximize profit. But this risks those workers not being paid enough to be able collectively to buy all that is produced, and thus crashing the system.
All of this goes to show, once again, how economics is all about balance. The inflation of land values by a geographic distortion invites substandard housing if individual wages are not enough to afford a place to live within the market system. This is true even though the geographic distortion, often a natural harbor, may be the reason that the city is there in the first place.
But an abundance of inexpensive land for housing development invites an economic crash if total wages are not enough to buy all of the houses that are built. Simply raising everyone's wages is not a solution, it will simply result in inflation. The real solution is an ideal balance of wealth between the wealthy and the less-than-wealthy.
But this neat free enterprise model of economics can sometimes break down. There can be times when workers are producing wealth, but their wages do not keep up with prices.
Land values naturally increase as the city grows, and this higher value of land finds it's way into most other prices. We saw in the posting "The Three Fundamental Costs", on this blog, that the price of land is actually the first of the fundamental costs. This is why prices of most goods and services tend to be higher in cities, the price of land finds it's way into everything else. Usually, the system of supply and demand remains in balance and wages keep up with prices.
But when there is a distortion in the system, and wages do not keep up with prices, one of the first places that the distortion shows up is in housing. When this happens, a class of housing tends to arise that falls outside the logic of the market system.
Ironically, this distortion in the free enterprise model of urban economics often comes from the very reason that the city is there in the first place. A typical example is a good natural harbor, around which a city develops. But the harbor takes up space which, in the ideal model of city growth described above, would be used for housing and other developments. This distorts the land values, making land in the city more scarce and thus more expensive that it would be if the city had an ideal flat plain on which to grow.
We saw in the posting "The Most Expensive Cities", on this blog, that the cities that are known for the highest prices are inevitably those which have both the economic reasons for being there, but also geographic constraints on their growth. This drives up the price of land, which then finds it's way into just about everything else.
The truth is that the sub-standard housing, outside the usual market system, which arises in so many cities is very much associated with inflated land prices, and cities with geographic constraints that interfere with the idealized market economics, and drive up land values and prices, are especially prone to develop such sub-standard housing. This sub-standard urban housing is sometimes referred to, in less polite terms, as a slum. It may consist of either makeshift housing, or takeover and crowding into existing structures.
The truly ironic thing about slums is that the substandard housing may be built on land that is as valuable as gold, having been driven up to such values by the scarcity of land in the city due to geographic constraints. It is the very inflated value of the land which would make proper housing built on it too expensive for the workers who would live there to be able to afford it.
New York City is historically more associated with tenements then Philadelphia simply because Philadelphia had much more room to expand, which kept land prices lower. Mumbai (Bombay) is built on a peninsula adjoining the best natural harbor on the west coast of India, but this geographic configuration made land very scarce and expensive and the sub-standard housing that it is, perhaps unfairly, known for inevitable.
Rio de Janeiro is a very populous city that has it's land constricted by both the natural harbor, and also mountainous terrain. The result is the famed "Favelas", which you can look around on Google Street View www.maps.google.com .
Possibly the largest housing development in the world, that is considered as a slum, is Cuidad Nezahualcoyotl in Mexico City. Since Mexico City is possibly the largest city in the world, and it's space is constrained by being within the Valley of Mexico, we might expect that land values would be very high and that there might be large tracts of housing which fell outside the logic of market forces. It is also completely covered by Google Street View. I spent a while looking around Cuidad Nezahualcoylotl, it is officially called a slum but also looks like a colorful place to live and is actually more of a township then a slum. (You can tell by some of the place names that the Aztec language of Nahuatl is still widely spoken in central Mexico).
Substandard housing, due to a breakdown in the free-enterprise model of city growth, does not always appear as visible substandard housing. At the time of this writing, for example, workers at Disney World in Orlando are known to live crowded into motel rooms because their wages do not make it possible to buy a home or even rent an apartment. Slums, or any substandard housing, exists when workers are doing work that is valuable to the economy but, due to some distortion in the ideal economic system, their wages cannot buy them a regular place to live.
This scenario also helps to explain why Montreal traditionally has a higher proportion of renters than other Canadian cities. This is not substandard housing, but Montreal started on an island in the St. Lawrence River with the famed hill of Mount Royal on the island. While this may have been a natural place for a settlement, it also means space constraints as both Mount Royal and the river occupied space that otherwise would have gone mostly to housing. This brought the development of apartments to rent, simply because apartments take up less space than houses.
The trend toward urbanization across the world only makes the economic balance that prevents sub-standard housing more precarious. The next downward step is when people cannot live at all on prevailing wages and crime, as well as substandard housing, spirals upward.
As we might expect, the greater the income gap in a society the more likely will be the prevalence of substandard housing. The more money the wealthy take out of circulation, the more likely there will be substandard housing. The presence of the wealthy can be expected to drive up prices and property values beyond the reach of many workers.
One solution to substandard housing, brought about by distortions in the free enterprise model of urban development, is government intervention. Within cities, this may mean the building and subsidizing of housing projects of condensed housing that does require too much expensive land. Another solution is that of the "township", built outside the city where land is less expensive. The disadvantage of a township is that it requires special transportation for workers into the city.
The most famous township in the world is, of course, Soweto (Southwest Township), to the southwest of Johannesburg. Building such a township precluded the development of substandard housing within Johannesburg, where land prices were higher. Quite a bit of Soweto is covered by Google Street View, if you want to have a look.
I have childhood memories of a television documentary about an entire new city that had been built in an effort to relieve crowding in Mumbai (then Bombay). The new city was called Navi Bombay. I suppose that the concept was similar to New Delhi being built next to Delhi.
But we must always remember that housing, as with anything to do with economics, is a balance.
The perfection of assembly line manufacturing techniques, early in the Twentieth Century, along with much more efficient agriculture so that only a few percent of the working population was required to grow food, brought the possibility of unprecedented prosperity for all. But it also brought a peril with it. The efficiency in both agriculture and manufacturing meant that fewer workers were needed.
This may seem like a good thing, but it meant that not enough money was being paid out in total wages for workers to be able to afford to buy all of the goods that the factories were producing at a rapid pace. Much of the inventory produced was just piling up in warehouses. Factories began cutting back on production, which meant that workers had even less money, and it spiraled into the devastating economic crash of 1929.
We seem to have gotten past the peril of mass manufacturing goods without paying workers enough to be able to afford those goods. But we arrived at another peril, this time with regard to housing. The widespread postwar ownership of automobiles, along with the development of air conditioning, brought the possibility of eliminating the substandard housing problem, caused by inflated land values, by making use of the virtually unlimited space for building in the U.S. southwest and Florida.
There was overabundant space to build homes, in desert cities that did not have a significant portion of their geography taken up by water. This meant that there would be no logical shortage of housing but it brought us to another peril, of people not being able to buy all of the houses that would be built. The economic crash of 2008 would be a mirror image of that of 1929, except that it would revolve around housing rather than manufactured material goods.
Notice that the housing debacle, which nearly brought a repeat of the 1929 economic crash in 2008, revolved around cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas. These are desert cities with an abundance of land available for housing developments. But those developments, like the manufacturing of 1929, were taken further than the people's wages.
This is related to "The Inverse Geographic Prosperity Principle" that we saw in the posting by that name on the world and economics blog. When we see a big city in a place, such as a desert, that geography dictates there really shouldn't be such a big city, we know that the city must be prosperous or else it wouldn't be there. But, as with 1929, production was driven too far relative to the money being paid out in wages and salaries.
That was the irony in the 2008 crash, it started in some of the most prosperous areas of the U.S. The basis of capitalism is the profit motive, trying to sell as much goods and services as possible for as much money as possible while trying to drive costs such as workers' wages as low as possible in order to maximize profit. But this risks those workers not being paid enough to be able collectively to buy all that is produced, and thus crashing the system.
All of this goes to show, once again, how economics is all about balance. The inflation of land values by a geographic distortion invites substandard housing if individual wages are not enough to afford a place to live within the market system. This is true even though the geographic distortion, often a natural harbor, may be the reason that the city is there in the first place.
But an abundance of inexpensive land for housing development invites an economic crash if total wages are not enough to buy all of the houses that are built. Simply raising everyone's wages is not a solution, it will simply result in inflation. The real solution is an ideal balance of wealth between the wealthy and the less-than-wealthy.
June 28, 1914, Assassination In Sarajevo
Today is June 28, 2014,. Exactly one hundred years ago today, an event which first appeared to be of no great global significance took place. But it would take the world in an entirely different direction.
The story of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is well-known. The empire had annexed Bosnia, but many ethnic Slavs wanted to be free of Austrian Rule. Franz Ferdinand was the nephew of Franz Josef, and the heir to the throne since Franz Josef had no living sons or brothers. Franz Ferdinand, with his wife princess Sophie, paid a visit to the town of Sarajevo in Bosnia.
The archduke and his wife rode in an open-top car along the broad street by the river, in the motorcade with several other cars. An organization known as Young Bosnia plotted to assassinate the archduke. Seven assassins positioned themselves separately along the motorcade route so if one couldn't get the archduke, the next one would. Each was armed with a small bomb and a gun and a cyanide capsule. The first would-be assassin saw the archduke, but couldn't take action because police were right behind him.
The second would-be assassin saw the archduke and threw his bomb. The bomb missed the archduke, bounced off the back of his car and exploded next to the car behind. The blast injured several people in the car and the crowd. At seeing that the assassination attempt had not been successful the rest of the would-be assassins fled, all except one.
The archduke stopped at the town hall, at which the mayor spoke, but then decided that he wanted to visit the wounded in the hospital instead of proceeding with the planned itinerary. The driver of the archduke's car had apparently not been informed of the change in plans, and started along the previous route until someone informed him otherwise. The driver stopped the car and attempted to reverse, but the car stalled.
The remaining assassin just happened to be very close by. He was too jostled by the crowd to throw his bomb but he got off two shots with his pistol. One shot struck the archduke, and the other his wife, both would die within minutes.
The assassin was a nineteen-year-old named Gavrilo Princip. He would ultimately die in prison of tuberculosis. At first, the assassination did not seem to be extremely important. Countries outside the Austro-Hungarian Empire did not pay much attention, and neither the archduke nor his wife had been very popular at home
Since the assassin was a Serb, the Austro-Hungarian Government blamed the nearby nation of Serbia for the assassination. A list of demands was issued to Serbia, and that country did not agree with all of them. According to some, this was used as a pretext to expand the empire by taking military action against Serbia, or it is possible that the ensuing conflict was punitive in nature.
At the time, Europe was a tangle of alliances. Russia had an alliance with Serbia, Germany had an alliance with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, France had an alliance with Russia. Britain had signed the Entente Cordiale with France a decade before, and also now had a treaty of friendship with Russia. Before the summer was over, Europe would be plunged into a war like it had never seen before. Today, we refer to it as the First World War. Before there was a Second World War, it would be referred to simply as "The Great War" or "The World War".
Ironically, the assassin got his wish although he would not live to see it. He died in prison in 1918, the year the war ended. His two shots set off the war that finished not only the ruling Austro-Hungarian Empire but also the Ottoman Empire, which had previously ruled Bosnia. The two formerly competing empires found themselves on the same side in this war.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire would be separated back into Austria and Hungary and the Slavic territories which had belonged to the empire would become the new states of Yugoslavia, in the south, and Czechoslovakia, in the north. The assassin also never knew that the unsatisfactory conclusion to the war he set off would bring about an even greater war a generation later, in which the prison he was in would be a concentration camp. Gavrilo Princip is a divisive figure to this day, who some consider a hero for setting off the events which freed Slavic people from outside control.
The assassination attempt on a prominent figure and his wife, riding in an open-top car, immediately brings to mind the Kennedy assassination, almost midway in time between the events in Sarajevo and today. The struggle of the crowd to subdue the assassin after the shots were fired brings to mind the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981.
The thing that I find surprising about this assassination is, in stark contrast to the Kennedy assassination, the lack of conspiracy theories. An archduke that was not popular at home, but was next in line to the throne, just happened to be assassinated while on a visit to a territory that had been acquired relatively recently. Then, that possibly gives the empire a pretext for a military campaign against the country of birth of the assassin. This is usually the kind of thing that tabloids and conspiracy theorists have a field day with. I do not have a personal opinion on any such conspiracies.
We can say that the war was waiting to happen and if it had not been this that set it off then something else would have, somewhat like the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century. There was resentment among European countries about overseas colonies. Germany had been a united country for about forty years and thought it unfair that Britain and France had such colonial holdings, while it didn't. Germany did have some Pacific islands and Southwest Africa (Namibia) as colonies, but these were not comparable to the extent of that of Britain and France. Even small European countries like Belgium and Portugal had far more in the way of overseas colonies than Germany in 1914.
Technology not only brought much more terrible warfare when the war did happen, but the advances in communications and transportation technology helped to bring about the tangle of alliances which preceded the war. I do not consider it a coincidence that Germany and Italy finally became united countries at about the time that both railroads and the telegraph became widespread.
When the war ended the U.S., which had not itself been damaged by the war, turned the industrial capacity that it had built during the war to make America "The arsenal of democracy" to the manufacture of consumer goods. The result was "The Roaring Twenties". Factories mass-produced everything from cars to radios, like the world had never seen before.
But maybe it was more wealth than the economy was able to deal with. The trouble in America is that workers were not being paid enough to be able to afford all of the goods that they were producing, and the goods were just piling up in warehouses. Factories began cutting back on production, meaning that workers had even less money, and it spiraled into the devastating economic crash of 1929.
The effects of this calamitous crash spread around the globe. The economy of Germany was devastated by the crash. The country had used it's gold reserves to pay the ridiculous and destructive war reparations that had been imposed on it in the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the First World War. Until this economic crash, the so-called Weimar Republic was prosperous.
A party called the Nazis were one of those fringe nationalist parties which are seen often in Europe, but which rarely get more than a few percent of the vote. But with the crash, it was the Nazis that had the answer to the economic crisis by drastically expanding the military forces to absorb unemployment and getting factories running again at full capacity to produce military equipment and, as the saying goes, the rest is history.
During the First World War, Germany had transported a Russian agitator by the name of Lenin, who was in exile in Switzerland, back to Russia in the hope that he would help to set off a brewing political revolution that might incapacitate Russia's ability to continue the war. The result was Communism, which did not seem to be of much global significance at first. But the great economic crash of Capitalism in 1929 made Communism into a major world system, and this would result in a divided world after the Second World War had ended. The end of the Second World War would also bring demographic effects like the Baby Boom, particularly in the U.S., with their anthem of rock music.
All of it can be traced to those two shots fired in Sarajevo.
The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s would bring back the tactics of the First World War, with it's trenches and mustard gas. Eighty years after the assassination, the Yugoslavia that the assassin had hoped for would come apart and Sarajevo would again be in the world headlines. Eighty years after the economic crash of 1929, the U.S. economy would crash again due to people not being paid enough to buy the products that were being produced. But this time it would be the manic home-building spree in the southwest and Florida, until it was realized that people to not get paid enough money to afford all of these homes and the market crashed in a near-repeat of 1929.
The thing that I have always found so bizarre about the First World War is how enthusiastic people in many countries were for going to war. In London's Trafalgar Square, a crowd wildly cheered the declaration of war. It was as if people were bored, and the war provided some excitement. Both sides seemed to think that the war would last only a few weeks.
The First World War is sometimes referred to as "The war over nothing that changed everything". Part of what changed so much is that the war brought the end of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. The war began in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, apparently over Slavs being ruled by Austrians. When the war ended in 1918, two new Slavic nations were carved from the empire, Yugoslavia in the south and Czechoslovakia in the north. But these two new states were less than stable, being held together for decades by Communism. When that passed into history, both states came apart. As the world saw in the 1990s, Czechoslovakia came apart peacefully but Yugoslavia unfortunately didn't.
Like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire was also dismantled after the end of the First World War. New states came into being from the empire's former territories, in the same way as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. But the Ottoman Empire was the larger of the two empires and it's dismantling has had effects that are longer and more widespread. The root cause of turmoil in the Middle East today is that the region has not yet reached a new equilibrium following the end of the Ottoman Empire. The world saw the long-term effects of the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the former Yugoslavia and now, in the Middle East, it is seeing the effects of the end of the Ottoman Empire.
(Just a thought-The Austro-Hungarian Empire was somewhat unique in that both Austria and Hungary were equal partners, maintaining their own capital cities and independence from one another, but cooperated in ruling the surrounding territories. My impression was that German-speaking Austria chose to join with neighboring Hungary to create an empire because it had been excluded from the union of German-speaking states across central Europe. Austria had been the second most powerful of these states, but for leadership of the new nation of Germany it lost out to Prussia. It was thus left outside the union, as it remains today. If Austria had been included into Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire would have never existed and the First World War would maybe not have happened. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismantled, some of the German-speakers that had been left outside the union found themselves in the border region of the new nation of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, and the resulting tensions helped to bring about another world war. Finally, the not-completely-logical separation of Austria from the union of Germany was a factor in the rise of an Austrian living in Germany to power with the goal of union between the two, his name was Adolf Hitler).
The trouble is that the artificial countries created by the victorious Allies from the remnants of these two empires, following the First World War, require strong leaders to hold them together. This must go on for a long period of time, and is what I refer to as "The Strong Leader Binding Phase", as described in the posting by that name on this blog.
Such new states may be planned to encompass multiple ethic groups and religious sects, in order to prevent wars, but that is going to mean that the country will require a strong leader to hold it together. But the west does not like dictators and reflexively supports virtually any uprising against a dictator in the name of democracy, forgetting that it is the dictator that is holding the country together. It is sheer fallacy to think all that is necessary is to remove a dictator and democracy will automatically take hold.
In Iraq, put together from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire around Baghdad and Mesopotamia, the removal of Saddam Hussein did not bring anything remotely resembling democracy. What it brought was a "democratic" government that simply did not have control over the country the way Saddam did, a near-civil war situation as we saw in "Critical Situation In Iraq" on the world and economics blog and, most recently, the rise of IS. While Saddam was in power in his artificial country, with minority Sunnis Moslems like himself ruling over the majority Shiites and the non-Arab Kurds in the north he felt that he had to repeatedly launch bloody repressive actions against the Kurds and, being alarmed that his own majority Shiite population might be inclined to join the 1979 Revolution in neighboring Iran, launched the preemptive attack that led to the nearly-endless Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s which, ironically, looked like a replay of the First World War with it's trenches and use of poison gas.
By the way, in battling IS we are actually in combat with many of the same people for the third time. The first was with Saddam's army during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. After the bizarre decision was made to disband that army the soldiers, having military experience and knowing where armaments were stored but now having no way to earn a living, regrouped as the costly insurgency that went on for years. Now that stage has passed, they have regrouped again as the core of IS. The U.S. should have treated the Iraqi Army with respect, and given them a pay raise.
Now you see why Iraq had to have a dictator like Saddam, to hold it together and stop insurgencies from taking hold. By removing Saddam, we have learned once again the lesson of the necessity of dictators in artificial nations. At least IS has roots in history that the nation of Iraq didn't have. IS claims to be the legitimate caliphate and, in fact, it spans Iraq and Syria. The first caliphate, the Umayyads, were based in Damascus in Syria and the second caliphate, the Abassids, were based in Baghdad in Iraq. If it could ever capture both Damascus and Baghdad, it will have it made.
Syria is another creation of the Allies after the First World War. The so-called heartland of the Alawite sect of Shiite Islam, to which Bashar Assad belongs, is supportive of his leadership. But, generally, the Sunni Moslems in most of the rest of the country that was put together by the Allies with the Damascus and coastal area, are not supportive. This was explained in "Another View On Syria", on the world and economics blog. Once again IS, which at least has history behind it because the first caliphate was based in Damascus, is battling to replace a nation whose boundaries are an artificial creation that does not have history behind it.
From the secular west, it is sometimes easy to forget just how important his divide between Sunni and Shiite Moslems is. The Baath Party formerly had branches in both Syria and Iraq. Both Saddam and Bashar Assad's father, Hafez, belonged to it. But there was a nasty split between the two branches, with Saddam and Hafez Assad becoming rivals to the point where he supported the First Gulf War effort against Saddam, in 1991. The Assad family, as mentioned above, is from the Alawite sect of Shiite Islam, which explains their enduring links with Iran and Hezbollah, while Saddam was a Sunni Moslem.
In the posting on the world and economics blog, "A Few Words About Libya", we saw a similar scenario there. The country consisted of two historically disparate halves that were joined, the Tripoli and Benghazi sides, and which required a leader like Moammar Gaddafi to hold them together. When we support the removal of the leader, before the necessarily long "Strong Leader Binding Phase" is complete, we just get chaos rather than democracy.
Notice that there has been no corresponding split in countries like Iran, Turkey and, Egypt because these are well-rooted in history. The only exception to this is the would-be nation of Kurdistan, spanning Turkey, Iraq and, Iran.
If we break up empires and create artificial countries, we are going to need strong leaders such as kings or dictators to hold those countries together. If we get the idea that these dictators could be prematurely overthrown, we will just get a mess rather than a democracy.
The story of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is well-known. The empire had annexed Bosnia, but many ethnic Slavs wanted to be free of Austrian Rule. Franz Ferdinand was the nephew of Franz Josef, and the heir to the throne since Franz Josef had no living sons or brothers. Franz Ferdinand, with his wife princess Sophie, paid a visit to the town of Sarajevo in Bosnia.
The archduke and his wife rode in an open-top car along the broad street by the river, in the motorcade with several other cars. An organization known as Young Bosnia plotted to assassinate the archduke. Seven assassins positioned themselves separately along the motorcade route so if one couldn't get the archduke, the next one would. Each was armed with a small bomb and a gun and a cyanide capsule. The first would-be assassin saw the archduke, but couldn't take action because police were right behind him.
The second would-be assassin saw the archduke and threw his bomb. The bomb missed the archduke, bounced off the back of his car and exploded next to the car behind. The blast injured several people in the car and the crowd. At seeing that the assassination attempt had not been successful the rest of the would-be assassins fled, all except one.
The archduke stopped at the town hall, at which the mayor spoke, but then decided that he wanted to visit the wounded in the hospital instead of proceeding with the planned itinerary. The driver of the archduke's car had apparently not been informed of the change in plans, and started along the previous route until someone informed him otherwise. The driver stopped the car and attempted to reverse, but the car stalled.
The remaining assassin just happened to be very close by. He was too jostled by the crowd to throw his bomb but he got off two shots with his pistol. One shot struck the archduke, and the other his wife, both would die within minutes.
The assassin was a nineteen-year-old named Gavrilo Princip. He would ultimately die in prison of tuberculosis. At first, the assassination did not seem to be extremely important. Countries outside the Austro-Hungarian Empire did not pay much attention, and neither the archduke nor his wife had been very popular at home
Since the assassin was a Serb, the Austro-Hungarian Government blamed the nearby nation of Serbia for the assassination. A list of demands was issued to Serbia, and that country did not agree with all of them. According to some, this was used as a pretext to expand the empire by taking military action against Serbia, or it is possible that the ensuing conflict was punitive in nature.
At the time, Europe was a tangle of alliances. Russia had an alliance with Serbia, Germany had an alliance with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, France had an alliance with Russia. Britain had signed the Entente Cordiale with France a decade before, and also now had a treaty of friendship with Russia. Before the summer was over, Europe would be plunged into a war like it had never seen before. Today, we refer to it as the First World War. Before there was a Second World War, it would be referred to simply as "The Great War" or "The World War".
Ironically, the assassin got his wish although he would not live to see it. He died in prison in 1918, the year the war ended. His two shots set off the war that finished not only the ruling Austro-Hungarian Empire but also the Ottoman Empire, which had previously ruled Bosnia. The two formerly competing empires found themselves on the same side in this war.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire would be separated back into Austria and Hungary and the Slavic territories which had belonged to the empire would become the new states of Yugoslavia, in the south, and Czechoslovakia, in the north. The assassin also never knew that the unsatisfactory conclusion to the war he set off would bring about an even greater war a generation later, in which the prison he was in would be a concentration camp. Gavrilo Princip is a divisive figure to this day, who some consider a hero for setting off the events which freed Slavic people from outside control.
The assassination attempt on a prominent figure and his wife, riding in an open-top car, immediately brings to mind the Kennedy assassination, almost midway in time between the events in Sarajevo and today. The struggle of the crowd to subdue the assassin after the shots were fired brings to mind the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981.
The thing that I find surprising about this assassination is, in stark contrast to the Kennedy assassination, the lack of conspiracy theories. An archduke that was not popular at home, but was next in line to the throne, just happened to be assassinated while on a visit to a territory that had been acquired relatively recently. Then, that possibly gives the empire a pretext for a military campaign against the country of birth of the assassin. This is usually the kind of thing that tabloids and conspiracy theorists have a field day with. I do not have a personal opinion on any such conspiracies.
We can say that the war was waiting to happen and if it had not been this that set it off then something else would have, somewhat like the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century. There was resentment among European countries about overseas colonies. Germany had been a united country for about forty years and thought it unfair that Britain and France had such colonial holdings, while it didn't. Germany did have some Pacific islands and Southwest Africa (Namibia) as colonies, but these were not comparable to the extent of that of Britain and France. Even small European countries like Belgium and Portugal had far more in the way of overseas colonies than Germany in 1914.
Technology not only brought much more terrible warfare when the war did happen, but the advances in communications and transportation technology helped to bring about the tangle of alliances which preceded the war. I do not consider it a coincidence that Germany and Italy finally became united countries at about the time that both railroads and the telegraph became widespread.
When the war ended the U.S., which had not itself been damaged by the war, turned the industrial capacity that it had built during the war to make America "The arsenal of democracy" to the manufacture of consumer goods. The result was "The Roaring Twenties". Factories mass-produced everything from cars to radios, like the world had never seen before.
But maybe it was more wealth than the economy was able to deal with. The trouble in America is that workers were not being paid enough to be able to afford all of the goods that they were producing, and the goods were just piling up in warehouses. Factories began cutting back on production, meaning that workers had even less money, and it spiraled into the devastating economic crash of 1929.
The effects of this calamitous crash spread around the globe. The economy of Germany was devastated by the crash. The country had used it's gold reserves to pay the ridiculous and destructive war reparations that had been imposed on it in the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the First World War. Until this economic crash, the so-called Weimar Republic was prosperous.
A party called the Nazis were one of those fringe nationalist parties which are seen often in Europe, but which rarely get more than a few percent of the vote. But with the crash, it was the Nazis that had the answer to the economic crisis by drastically expanding the military forces to absorb unemployment and getting factories running again at full capacity to produce military equipment and, as the saying goes, the rest is history.
During the First World War, Germany had transported a Russian agitator by the name of Lenin, who was in exile in Switzerland, back to Russia in the hope that he would help to set off a brewing political revolution that might incapacitate Russia's ability to continue the war. The result was Communism, which did not seem to be of much global significance at first. But the great economic crash of Capitalism in 1929 made Communism into a major world system, and this would result in a divided world after the Second World War had ended. The end of the Second World War would also bring demographic effects like the Baby Boom, particularly in the U.S., with their anthem of rock music.
All of it can be traced to those two shots fired in Sarajevo.
The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s would bring back the tactics of the First World War, with it's trenches and mustard gas. Eighty years after the assassination, the Yugoslavia that the assassin had hoped for would come apart and Sarajevo would again be in the world headlines. Eighty years after the economic crash of 1929, the U.S. economy would crash again due to people not being paid enough to buy the products that were being produced. But this time it would be the manic home-building spree in the southwest and Florida, until it was realized that people to not get paid enough money to afford all of these homes and the market crashed in a near-repeat of 1929.
The thing that I have always found so bizarre about the First World War is how enthusiastic people in many countries were for going to war. In London's Trafalgar Square, a crowd wildly cheered the declaration of war. It was as if people were bored, and the war provided some excitement. Both sides seemed to think that the war would last only a few weeks.
The First World War is sometimes referred to as "The war over nothing that changed everything". Part of what changed so much is that the war brought the end of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. The war began in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, apparently over Slavs being ruled by Austrians. When the war ended in 1918, two new Slavic nations were carved from the empire, Yugoslavia in the south and Czechoslovakia in the north. But these two new states were less than stable, being held together for decades by Communism. When that passed into history, both states came apart. As the world saw in the 1990s, Czechoslovakia came apart peacefully but Yugoslavia unfortunately didn't.
Like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire was also dismantled after the end of the First World War. New states came into being from the empire's former territories, in the same way as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. But the Ottoman Empire was the larger of the two empires and it's dismantling has had effects that are longer and more widespread. The root cause of turmoil in the Middle East today is that the region has not yet reached a new equilibrium following the end of the Ottoman Empire. The world saw the long-term effects of the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the former Yugoslavia and now, in the Middle East, it is seeing the effects of the end of the Ottoman Empire.
(Just a thought-The Austro-Hungarian Empire was somewhat unique in that both Austria and Hungary were equal partners, maintaining their own capital cities and independence from one another, but cooperated in ruling the surrounding territories. My impression was that German-speaking Austria chose to join with neighboring Hungary to create an empire because it had been excluded from the union of German-speaking states across central Europe. Austria had been the second most powerful of these states, but for leadership of the new nation of Germany it lost out to Prussia. It was thus left outside the union, as it remains today. If Austria had been included into Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire would have never existed and the First World War would maybe not have happened. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismantled, some of the German-speakers that had been left outside the union found themselves in the border region of the new nation of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, and the resulting tensions helped to bring about another world war. Finally, the not-completely-logical separation of Austria from the union of Germany was a factor in the rise of an Austrian living in Germany to power with the goal of union between the two, his name was Adolf Hitler).
The trouble is that the artificial countries created by the victorious Allies from the remnants of these two empires, following the First World War, require strong leaders to hold them together. This must go on for a long period of time, and is what I refer to as "The Strong Leader Binding Phase", as described in the posting by that name on this blog.
Such new states may be planned to encompass multiple ethic groups and religious sects, in order to prevent wars, but that is going to mean that the country will require a strong leader to hold it together. But the west does not like dictators and reflexively supports virtually any uprising against a dictator in the name of democracy, forgetting that it is the dictator that is holding the country together. It is sheer fallacy to think all that is necessary is to remove a dictator and democracy will automatically take hold.
In Iraq, put together from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire around Baghdad and Mesopotamia, the removal of Saddam Hussein did not bring anything remotely resembling democracy. What it brought was a "democratic" government that simply did not have control over the country the way Saddam did, a near-civil war situation as we saw in "Critical Situation In Iraq" on the world and economics blog and, most recently, the rise of IS. While Saddam was in power in his artificial country, with minority Sunnis Moslems like himself ruling over the majority Shiites and the non-Arab Kurds in the north he felt that he had to repeatedly launch bloody repressive actions against the Kurds and, being alarmed that his own majority Shiite population might be inclined to join the 1979 Revolution in neighboring Iran, launched the preemptive attack that led to the nearly-endless Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s which, ironically, looked like a replay of the First World War with it's trenches and use of poison gas.
By the way, in battling IS we are actually in combat with many of the same people for the third time. The first was with Saddam's army during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. After the bizarre decision was made to disband that army the soldiers, having military experience and knowing where armaments were stored but now having no way to earn a living, regrouped as the costly insurgency that went on for years. Now that stage has passed, they have regrouped again as the core of IS. The U.S. should have treated the Iraqi Army with respect, and given them a pay raise.
Now you see why Iraq had to have a dictator like Saddam, to hold it together and stop insurgencies from taking hold. By removing Saddam, we have learned once again the lesson of the necessity of dictators in artificial nations. At least IS has roots in history that the nation of Iraq didn't have. IS claims to be the legitimate caliphate and, in fact, it spans Iraq and Syria. The first caliphate, the Umayyads, were based in Damascus in Syria and the second caliphate, the Abassids, were based in Baghdad in Iraq. If it could ever capture both Damascus and Baghdad, it will have it made.
Syria is another creation of the Allies after the First World War. The so-called heartland of the Alawite sect of Shiite Islam, to which Bashar Assad belongs, is supportive of his leadership. But, generally, the Sunni Moslems in most of the rest of the country that was put together by the Allies with the Damascus and coastal area, are not supportive. This was explained in "Another View On Syria", on the world and economics blog. Once again IS, which at least has history behind it because the first caliphate was based in Damascus, is battling to replace a nation whose boundaries are an artificial creation that does not have history behind it.
From the secular west, it is sometimes easy to forget just how important his divide between Sunni and Shiite Moslems is. The Baath Party formerly had branches in both Syria and Iraq. Both Saddam and Bashar Assad's father, Hafez, belonged to it. But there was a nasty split between the two branches, with Saddam and Hafez Assad becoming rivals to the point where he supported the First Gulf War effort against Saddam, in 1991. The Assad family, as mentioned above, is from the Alawite sect of Shiite Islam, which explains their enduring links with Iran and Hezbollah, while Saddam was a Sunni Moslem.
In the posting on the world and economics blog, "A Few Words About Libya", we saw a similar scenario there. The country consisted of two historically disparate halves that were joined, the Tripoli and Benghazi sides, and which required a leader like Moammar Gaddafi to hold them together. When we support the removal of the leader, before the necessarily long "Strong Leader Binding Phase" is complete, we just get chaos rather than democracy.
Notice that there has been no corresponding split in countries like Iran, Turkey and, Egypt because these are well-rooted in history. The only exception to this is the would-be nation of Kurdistan, spanning Turkey, Iraq and, Iran.
If we break up empires and create artificial countries, we are going to need strong leaders such as kings or dictators to hold those countries together. If we get the idea that these dictators could be prematurely overthrown, we will just get a mess rather than a democracy.
Critical Situation In Iraq
What all of this comes down to is the Strong leader Binding Phase, which we saw in the posting by that name on this blog, and also "Another View On Syria" and " A Few Words About Libya", also on this blog.
The First World War began a hundred years ago this summer, and it's repercussions are still echoing across the generations.
When a diverse country is put together artificially, it requires an extended period of time being ruled by a strong leader before it is ready to be a democracy. The breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War led to the creation of new nations, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, by cobbling together various peoples in their territories.
As you may notice, neither country lasted until the present. One complication of the decline of Communism in eastern Europe is that it was all that was holding these two artificial countries together. The Czechs and Slovaks of Czechoslovakia separated peaceably, but that was unfortunately not the case with Yugoslavia. Poland was an old country that was brought back into being after the First World War. It is still with us today because, unlike the other two, it was a natural country that was not put together artificially.
Besides the Austro-Hungarian Empire there was another empire that was dismantled after the First World War, as the price to pay for being on the wrong side. The territory of the Ottoman Empire was divided up into more artificial countries, among them are Iraq and Syria.
Just as with the former territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, these are diverse countries that were put together artificially. The only way that they can hold together is under the authority of a strong leader, and it is going to stay that way for quite some time. It might be logical to consider a dismemberment of both countries, but if they are going to stay intact then a liberal western-style democracy is out of the question.
I wrote "A Few Words About Libya" in 2011, just after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, and today you can see what I mean in expressing skepticism about the country being a democracy. Libya consists of two sides, the Benghazi and the Tripoli sides, and power has alternated between the two. King Idris, who Gaddafi overthrew in 1969, was from the Benghazi side. Gaddafi was from the Tripoli side, and that always his power base. The rebellion against Gaddafi began in Benghazi, and brought power back to that side. If Libya is to remain a united country, it needs much more time together under a strong leader before looking toward democracy.
As I have written several times here, as sectarian violence mounted in Iraq after it had been made into a democracy, the present government simply does not have control of the country like Saddam did. Saddam was a dictator because that is what was required to hold a country together that was drawn on the map by colonial officials, but which contained a religious mix of Shiite and Sunni Muslims and also an ethnic mix of Arabs and Kurds. Making it into a democracy just interrupted the Strong Leader Binding Phase, which is so important.
UNDERSTANDING IS
To understand the force that has emerged in Iraq and Syria known as IS, we must go back to what I term "The Strong Leader Binding Phase" as described in the posting by that name on this blog.
When a country is put together artificially, usually the remnants of a defunct empire, it absolutely must undergo a long period of time under a strong leader before it is ready to be a democracy. I have been writing about this for years.
We in the west often reflexively support a popular uprising against a dictator ruling such an artificial state without taking The Strong Leader Binding Phase into consideration. I have posted here several times that, now that we have made Iraq into a democracy, the government simply does not have the country under control in the way that Saddam did, and it is near to civil war.
Now, with the rise if IS, you can see just what I mean. The previous government that I wrote lacked the necessary control of the country has been removed.
The emergence of IS is the direct result of the removal of Saddam Hussein and the weakening of Bashar Assad, of neighboring Syria, by the uprising there. Both are artificially constructed countries from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire that require a long period in "The Strong Leader Binding Phase". The rise of IS is a direct consequence of the interruption of that vitally necessary phase in both countries.
Exactly the same can be said of Libya, as we saw in "A Few Words About Libya". The rule of Moammar Gaddafi represented it's Strong Leader Binding Phase and the country was not ready to have it interrupted, at least not if Libya is going to stay as one whole.
To understand why IS appeals to, and is able to recruit, volunteers from the west, it is necessary to understand the French Foreign Legion.
It used to be an organization that appealed to those with a thirst for adventure, or who are bored by the nine-to-five routine of daily life. It was ideal for military veterans who did not adjust well to civilian life. It offered the possibility of climbing in rank. It was surely the most fabled and romanticized military unit in the world.
IS has positioned itself as the new French Foreign Legion.
The First World War began a hundred years ago this summer, and it's repercussions are still echoing across the generations.
When a diverse country is put together artificially, it requires an extended period of time being ruled by a strong leader before it is ready to be a democracy. The breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War led to the creation of new nations, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, by cobbling together various peoples in their territories.
As you may notice, neither country lasted until the present. One complication of the decline of Communism in eastern Europe is that it was all that was holding these two artificial countries together. The Czechs and Slovaks of Czechoslovakia separated peaceably, but that was unfortunately not the case with Yugoslavia. Poland was an old country that was brought back into being after the First World War. It is still with us today because, unlike the other two, it was a natural country that was not put together artificially.
Besides the Austro-Hungarian Empire there was another empire that was dismantled after the First World War, as the price to pay for being on the wrong side. The territory of the Ottoman Empire was divided up into more artificial countries, among them are Iraq and Syria.
Just as with the former territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, these are diverse countries that were put together artificially. The only way that they can hold together is under the authority of a strong leader, and it is going to stay that way for quite some time. It might be logical to consider a dismemberment of both countries, but if they are going to stay intact then a liberal western-style democracy is out of the question.
I wrote "A Few Words About Libya" in 2011, just after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, and today you can see what I mean in expressing skepticism about the country being a democracy. Libya consists of two sides, the Benghazi and the Tripoli sides, and power has alternated between the two. King Idris, who Gaddafi overthrew in 1969, was from the Benghazi side. Gaddafi was from the Tripoli side, and that always his power base. The rebellion against Gaddafi began in Benghazi, and brought power back to that side. If Libya is to remain a united country, it needs much more time together under a strong leader before looking toward democracy.
As I have written several times here, as sectarian violence mounted in Iraq after it had been made into a democracy, the present government simply does not have control of the country like Saddam did. Saddam was a dictator because that is what was required to hold a country together that was drawn on the map by colonial officials, but which contained a religious mix of Shiite and Sunni Muslims and also an ethnic mix of Arabs and Kurds. Making it into a democracy just interrupted the Strong Leader Binding Phase, which is so important.
UNDERSTANDING IS
To understand the force that has emerged in Iraq and Syria known as IS, we must go back to what I term "The Strong Leader Binding Phase" as described in the posting by that name on this blog.
When a country is put together artificially, usually the remnants of a defunct empire, it absolutely must undergo a long period of time under a strong leader before it is ready to be a democracy. I have been writing about this for years.
We in the west often reflexively support a popular uprising against a dictator ruling such an artificial state without taking The Strong Leader Binding Phase into consideration. I have posted here several times that, now that we have made Iraq into a democracy, the government simply does not have the country under control in the way that Saddam did, and it is near to civil war.
Now, with the rise if IS, you can see just what I mean. The previous government that I wrote lacked the necessary control of the country has been removed.
The emergence of IS is the direct result of the removal of Saddam Hussein and the weakening of Bashar Assad, of neighboring Syria, by the uprising there. Both are artificially constructed countries from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire that require a long period in "The Strong Leader Binding Phase". The rise of IS is a direct consequence of the interruption of that vitally necessary phase in both countries.
Exactly the same can be said of Libya, as we saw in "A Few Words About Libya". The rule of Moammar Gaddafi represented it's Strong Leader Binding Phase and the country was not ready to have it interrupted, at least not if Libya is going to stay as one whole.
To understand why IS appeals to, and is able to recruit, volunteers from the west, it is necessary to understand the French Foreign Legion.
It used to be an organization that appealed to those with a thirst for adventure, or who are bored by the nine-to-five routine of daily life. It was ideal for military veterans who did not adjust well to civilian life. It offered the possibility of climbing in rank. It was surely the most fabled and romanticized military unit in the world.
IS has positioned itself as the new French Foreign Legion.
The Influx Of Wealth Into Britain
Do you really want to know what is going on in Britain today (late 2014)? Let me give my impression of it.
The present state of Britain revolves around one central fact that must be understood. It is the great volume of wealth that is being brought into London from abroad. This is affecting the entire country.
London has become a place for very wealthy people to buy homes, along with other investments. About one of every thirty-six people in London today is a millionaire. I know that one should be careful to state such a thing, but a crash in London property values is nearly unimaginable. The majority of rich people bringing wealth into London seem to be Russian and Arab.
This has affected politics in Britain, bringing the country further to the right than it would be otherwise. The reason is simple, if Britain started turning more socialist and raising taxes there would be plenty of other places that these people could take their wealth.
This rightward turn is what prompted the independence referendum in Scotland, which has long been more leftward when it comes to economics.
The rightward economic turn has also affected Britain's relationship with Europe. There is a system that redistributes wealth from the richer European countries to the poorer ones, which means Britain giving money to Europe. An increasing number of people in Britain do not feel like sharing the country's wealth with migrants from other European countries.
My personal opinion, as a native of Britain, is that it would be a shame to see it leaving Europe altogether.
Have you ever stopped to think about just how ironic things often are?
Modern capitalism began with the economic theory of Scotland's Adam Smith, which was a part of the "Scottish Renaissance". The theories of Karl Marx, which was the beginning of modern Communism was a reaction against the destructive effects of that capitalism, primarily the few rich using their great wealth to oppress the many poor. Marx was a German Jew, living in exile in London, who did most of his writing in the Reading Room at the British Museum, with Britain as the intended audience.
But the first land to accept Marxist theory was Russia, which I am sure that Marx never would have imagined. Marx's homeland of Germany, which was at war with Russia, inadvertently helped to facilitate the implementation of his theories. A Russian agitator, by the name of Lenin, was in exile in Switzerland. The Germans transported him in a rail car to Russia to help bring about a political revolution that was brewing there, which they hoped would hamper the Czar's ability to continue the war against them.
Marxism was based on atheism and joined with evolution, considering religion as "the opiate of the masses" and for collectivism to be the next step in human social evolution. Evolutionary theory, like the theories of Adam Smith and Marx, began in Britain with the writings of Charles Darwin. The irony here is that evolution very much resembled capitalism in it's operation. Capitalism is the economic manifestation, and evolution is the biological manifestation. But the two are the same thing, progressive adaptation to the environment by way of natural selection or the survival of the fittest.
It was the crash of extreme capitalism, based on the theory of Adam Smith, which boosted Marxist theory, and made it into a global ideology. In the 1920s, following the First World War, assembly line industrial production had been perfected and factories in America turned out vast quantities of manufactured goods, from cars to radios. The trouble was that the workers were not being paid enough to be able to afford to buy all of those goods, and they were just piling up in warehouses. Factories began cutting back on production, which meant that workers had even less money, and it spiraled into a devastating crash.
The Crash of 1929 really devastated Germany, Marx's homeland, which had joined the global economic order after the war. Along came a party called the Nazis, which had a solution to the economic catastrophe. The military was drastically increased, to absorb unemployment, and factories were brought back to full production making military equipment for them. Their economic system, supposedly neither capitalism nor communism but between the two, was called National Socialism. Production was undertaken by business, not by the government as in communism, but business worked for the government.
The result was war, with the western Allies which practiced the capitalism of Adam Smith on one side, and Russia (as part of the Soviet Union) which practiced the Marxism, which was a reaction against capitalism, on the other side. After that war was over, conflict continued as a Cold War between proponents of the original theories of Smith and Marx.
Another great irony is the icon of postwar American business, based on the theory of Scotland’s Adam Smith, that became far and away the most prominent Scottish name in the world. It familiarized the world with the Mc that prefixes so many Scottish names. But it had nothing to do with Scotland, or anyone from Scotland. McDonald’s Restaurant didn’t even have anything to do with anyone actually named McDonald. An American milkshake machine salesman, named Ray Kroc, bought a small restaurant that had been owned by the McDonald brothers, and he kept the name because it was familiar to area customers. The global food brand developed from there.
The next irony is how the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher aggravated Scotland, all the while carrying a copy of Adam Smith's book in her handbag as if it were a Bible. Scotland, where capitalist theory had originated, had by this time become more socialist. While London, where Marx had written the theory that would lead to communism and Charles Dickens had written extensively of the negatives of daily life under Nineteenth Century capitalism before that, had become essentially Britain's capitalist center.
What we could call the Communist manifestation of Marx ended with the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union split up. But the irony continues.Russia, led by Boris Yeltsin, turned from communism to the capitalist theory of Adam Smith instead, but proved the validity of Marx by having it end in disaster. Have you ever stopped to ponder that Soviet era Communists were proven to be absolutely right about capitalism, not by the propaganda that they issued but by the disaster that capitalism would turn out to be for their own country after it abandoned communism?
A few people in Russia got fantastically rich, referred to as the oligarchs, but most everything else was worse off until Vladimir Putin put the country on a more realistic course (and often clashed with the oligarchs). Some of the very rich brought wealth to other countries. So many bought expensive homes in London that it became known as Londongrad.
Just stop and ponder this. The city where Marx had written his theory was flooded with wealth. This flood of wealth was indirectly due to that theory. Marx's theory had supposedly been proven wrong, not in Britain but in Russia, but then the capitalist theory that Marxism was a reaction against had been proven to be even worse. Marx, in writing his theory, was reacting against the capitalist concentration of wealth by a few rich people. But now people who had gained wealth in this way were bringing it into the city where Marx had written his theory.
Could Marx have imagined that it would turn out like this?
The irony continues. Britain was brought economically to the right to keep the wealth coming in, which alienated Scotland where Adam Smith had written capitalist theory. The nationalist party in Scotland organized a referendum on independence.
This means that the referendum in Scotland on the breakup of Britain was due indirectly to wealth coming into London, much of it from Russia, in which some had concentrated wealth after the country had adapted the theory written in Scotland after the supposed failure of the theory written in London but they would find reason to take wealth out of the country after the theory written in Scotland would fail even worse than the one written in London.
Could Adam Smith have imagined that it would turn out like this?
Wealth from outside coming into London drives up prices and rents, making life more difficult for the non-wealthy, possibly creating similar conditions to those which originally inspired Marx. Maybe we can start the whole cycle again, with both sides moving closer to the center until each realizes that it has only half of the complete answer.Neither the nation state, religion nor profit motive have faded away as Marx predicted they would. Even when religion does fade away, ideologies such as that of Marx take their place as secular religions.
However, Marx might be pleased with unions, minimum wage laws, safety and working hours regulations and unemployment and social benefits, and especially mandatory public education. All of which were virtually unheard of in the Nineteenth Century.The ideal of Marxism is very much manifested online, as free applications such as this blog and my two favorite web sites, www.maps.google.com and www.wikipedia.org , but are ultimately driven by the profit motive, as defined by Adam Smith.
The present state of Britain revolves around one central fact that must be understood. It is the great volume of wealth that is being brought into London from abroad. This is affecting the entire country.
London has become a place for very wealthy people to buy homes, along with other investments. About one of every thirty-six people in London today is a millionaire. I know that one should be careful to state such a thing, but a crash in London property values is nearly unimaginable. The majority of rich people bringing wealth into London seem to be Russian and Arab.
This has affected politics in Britain, bringing the country further to the right than it would be otherwise. The reason is simple, if Britain started turning more socialist and raising taxes there would be plenty of other places that these people could take their wealth.
This rightward turn is what prompted the independence referendum in Scotland, which has long been more leftward when it comes to economics.
The rightward economic turn has also affected Britain's relationship with Europe. There is a system that redistributes wealth from the richer European countries to the poorer ones, which means Britain giving money to Europe. An increasing number of people in Britain do not feel like sharing the country's wealth with migrants from other European countries.
My personal opinion, as a native of Britain, is that it would be a shame to see it leaving Europe altogether.
Have you ever stopped to think about just how ironic things often are?
Modern capitalism began with the economic theory of Scotland's Adam Smith, which was a part of the "Scottish Renaissance". The theories of Karl Marx, which was the beginning of modern Communism was a reaction against the destructive effects of that capitalism, primarily the few rich using their great wealth to oppress the many poor. Marx was a German Jew, living in exile in London, who did most of his writing in the Reading Room at the British Museum, with Britain as the intended audience.
But the first land to accept Marxist theory was Russia, which I am sure that Marx never would have imagined. Marx's homeland of Germany, which was at war with Russia, inadvertently helped to facilitate the implementation of his theories. A Russian agitator, by the name of Lenin, was in exile in Switzerland. The Germans transported him in a rail car to Russia to help bring about a political revolution that was brewing there, which they hoped would hamper the Czar's ability to continue the war against them.
Marxism was based on atheism and joined with evolution, considering religion as "the opiate of the masses" and for collectivism to be the next step in human social evolution. Evolutionary theory, like the theories of Adam Smith and Marx, began in Britain with the writings of Charles Darwin. The irony here is that evolution very much resembled capitalism in it's operation. Capitalism is the economic manifestation, and evolution is the biological manifestation. But the two are the same thing, progressive adaptation to the environment by way of natural selection or the survival of the fittest.
It was the crash of extreme capitalism, based on the theory of Adam Smith, which boosted Marxist theory, and made it into a global ideology. In the 1920s, following the First World War, assembly line industrial production had been perfected and factories in America turned out vast quantities of manufactured goods, from cars to radios. The trouble was that the workers were not being paid enough to be able to afford to buy all of those goods, and they were just piling up in warehouses. Factories began cutting back on production, which meant that workers had even less money, and it spiraled into a devastating crash.
The Crash of 1929 really devastated Germany, Marx's homeland, which had joined the global economic order after the war. Along came a party called the Nazis, which had a solution to the economic catastrophe. The military was drastically increased, to absorb unemployment, and factories were brought back to full production making military equipment for them. Their economic system, supposedly neither capitalism nor communism but between the two, was called National Socialism. Production was undertaken by business, not by the government as in communism, but business worked for the government.
The result was war, with the western Allies which practiced the capitalism of Adam Smith on one side, and Russia (as part of the Soviet Union) which practiced the Marxism, which was a reaction against capitalism, on the other side. After that war was over, conflict continued as a Cold War between proponents of the original theories of Smith and Marx.
Another great irony is the icon of postwar American business, based on the theory of Scotland’s Adam Smith, that became far and away the most prominent Scottish name in the world. It familiarized the world with the Mc that prefixes so many Scottish names. But it had nothing to do with Scotland, or anyone from Scotland. McDonald’s Restaurant didn’t even have anything to do with anyone actually named McDonald. An American milkshake machine salesman, named Ray Kroc, bought a small restaurant that had been owned by the McDonald brothers, and he kept the name because it was familiar to area customers. The global food brand developed from there.
The next irony is how the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher aggravated Scotland, all the while carrying a copy of Adam Smith's book in her handbag as if it were a Bible. Scotland, where capitalist theory had originated, had by this time become more socialist. While London, where Marx had written the theory that would lead to communism and Charles Dickens had written extensively of the negatives of daily life under Nineteenth Century capitalism before that, had become essentially Britain's capitalist center.
What we could call the Communist manifestation of Marx ended with the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union split up. But the irony continues.Russia, led by Boris Yeltsin, turned from communism to the capitalist theory of Adam Smith instead, but proved the validity of Marx by having it end in disaster. Have you ever stopped to ponder that Soviet era Communists were proven to be absolutely right about capitalism, not by the propaganda that they issued but by the disaster that capitalism would turn out to be for their own country after it abandoned communism?
A few people in Russia got fantastically rich, referred to as the oligarchs, but most everything else was worse off until Vladimir Putin put the country on a more realistic course (and often clashed with the oligarchs). Some of the very rich brought wealth to other countries. So many bought expensive homes in London that it became known as Londongrad.
Just stop and ponder this. The city where Marx had written his theory was flooded with wealth. This flood of wealth was indirectly due to that theory. Marx's theory had supposedly been proven wrong, not in Britain but in Russia, but then the capitalist theory that Marxism was a reaction against had been proven to be even worse. Marx, in writing his theory, was reacting against the capitalist concentration of wealth by a few rich people. But now people who had gained wealth in this way were bringing it into the city where Marx had written his theory.
Could Marx have imagined that it would turn out like this?
The irony continues. Britain was brought economically to the right to keep the wealth coming in, which alienated Scotland where Adam Smith had written capitalist theory. The nationalist party in Scotland organized a referendum on independence.
This means that the referendum in Scotland on the breakup of Britain was due indirectly to wealth coming into London, much of it from Russia, in which some had concentrated wealth after the country had adapted the theory written in Scotland after the supposed failure of the theory written in London but they would find reason to take wealth out of the country after the theory written in Scotland would fail even worse than the one written in London.
Could Adam Smith have imagined that it would turn out like this?
Wealth from outside coming into London drives up prices and rents, making life more difficult for the non-wealthy, possibly creating similar conditions to those which originally inspired Marx. Maybe we can start the whole cycle again, with both sides moving closer to the center until each realizes that it has only half of the complete answer.Neither the nation state, religion nor profit motive have faded away as Marx predicted they would. Even when religion does fade away, ideologies such as that of Marx take their place as secular religions.
However, Marx might be pleased with unions, minimum wage laws, safety and working hours regulations and unemployment and social benefits, and especially mandatory public education. All of which were virtually unheard of in the Nineteenth Century.The ideal of Marxism is very much manifested online, as free applications such as this blog and my two favorite web sites, www.maps.google.com and www.wikipedia.org , but are ultimately driven by the profit motive, as defined by Adam Smith.
The Crescent Strategy In Residential Planning
This is somewhat of a local issue. In the posting on this blog titled "The City Of Five Towns", we saw how the city landscape of Niagara Falls, Canada can still clearly be seen as five towns that have merged together. Many cities have arisen from the merger of towns in close proximity, but in few places do the divisions remain so apparent.
Today, I would like to discuss another interesting feature of the landscape in this city. Like many cities in North America, the Canadian city of Niagara Falls underwent expansion as the postwar Baby Boom arrived along with the prosperity which brought widespread automobile ownership. The trouble here was that there were several pre-existing barriers to new residential neighbourhoods (neighborhoods) that were to spread outward from the original city.
Niagara Falls is where hydroelectricity is generated. Water for electric generation is brought from the Welland River, to the south of Niagara Falls, and crosses the city by way of an open canal to the power generating plants to the north of the city. This hydraulic canal was built before the postwar expansion of the city, without regard that it would cause future subdivisions to forced into tracts of available land that were not rectangular in shape.
There is also the paths across the city of high-voltage electrical lines from the generating plants, under which homes could not be built. There was the major highway, the Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW), passing through the land on which new subdivisions would be built. There were also rail lines in the area. Finally, Portage Road was built in a logical place for a road, along the cusp of the glacial impact crater that I would someday identify and write about on the Niagara natural history blog. But this left Portage Road as a curve, and not as a straight line.
The result is that the city of Niagara Falls, Canada, along with neighbouring cities Welland and St. Catharines, turned into a case study of urban planning with regard to pre-existing barriers. Blocks of homes along streets are rectangular in shape, and such rectangles fit neatly together to form new sections of the city. But here, due to the pre-existing barriers, tracts of land which would be the logical place to build new residential sub-divisions were not rectangular in shape and this made necessary some creative solutions that I think are worth explaining here.
Here is a map link: www.maps.google.com .
The city had already encountered the geometric challenge of building in non-rectangular spaces during the merger of the five towns which would make up the Canadian Niagara Falls. In the section of the city nearest the falls, around the intersection of Victoria Avenue and Centre Street, you can see that the grid pattern of the city blocks are set at an angle of about 45 degrees to that of the rest of the city. Not far away, there is Epworth Circle, and associated outer crescents, which were constructed to make use of a triangular space between a rail line and a main road. This would provide valuable experience for the postwar expansion.
The solution that came to be is what I refer to as the "Crescent Strategy" because of the numerous short residential streets, ending in a loop, which would be built into the city. These crescents are usually not actually in the form of crescents in the geometric sense, but can be called as such due to the loop at the end. The crescents of Niagara Falls are short streets of usually 8-12 homes. These are not gated communities but there is no through traffic, making them safer for young children.
The crescents are sometimes called courts, and are virtually always called courts in Welland and St. Catharines. They are also sometimes called places. This seems to have been a local idea since there are nearly no such crescents or courts in Hamilton.
This design of a short street of nice, new homes ending in a loop was effective in fitting homes into tracts of land which were not rectangular in shape due to pre-existing barriers. They seem to have become a style in themselves and found their way into areas in the Niagara Region where the conventional rectangular blocks could have been built. These crescents or courts are seen only in newer areas, not in the older parts of the cities. The squares in the older sections were themselves once farmsteads, as we saw in "Farms Of Long Ago", on the world and economics blog.
These crescents, or courts, were not the only strategy used to fit new housing developments into spaces which were other than rectangular in shape. An ideal place for some new homes was in Niagara Falls between Morrison Street and the electric power lines to the south. The problem was that the available land was triangular in shape, rather than rectangular.
But with some slick geometry, Alexander Crescent and Inglis Drive appeared with new homes. The excess space was taken up by a small park and an island where the two streets meet. No one said that a park had to be rectangular in shape. Alexander Crescent is not one of the crescents to which I am referring here because it has access at both ends, and does not end in a loop.
Not far away, is a space solution which I have not seen anywhere else. Planners managed to design streets which would leave yards as fairly close to rectangular. Except in the very center of the new development, where there would be quite a bit of space left over. The solution was Shirley Park, located so that it took up excess space behind backyards and was accessible from the street by a corridor between houses.
Also not far away was Rosedale Drive. It was a one-block residential street, but when the stream known as Muddy Run (although I read an account that it's water was actually crystal clear) was diverted underground and the Valley Way neighbourhood was built, the possibility arose of extending Rosedale Drive. The trouble here wasn't shape, it would form a neat rectangle for a city block, it was space. There was too much space for just one new street between Jepson and McRae Streets, but not enough space for two.
The solution was to build an island on Rosedale Drive. When I lived nearby as a young boy, I thought it's purpose was decorative. Now I can see in the satellite imagery that it was simply to take up space.
There seems to be practically no such creative geometry that was necessary on the U.S. side of Niagara Falls, although other-than-rectangular streets became necessary in the area of Laughlin Park.
Today, I would like to discuss another interesting feature of the landscape in this city. Like many cities in North America, the Canadian city of Niagara Falls underwent expansion as the postwar Baby Boom arrived along with the prosperity which brought widespread automobile ownership. The trouble here was that there were several pre-existing barriers to new residential neighbourhoods (neighborhoods) that were to spread outward from the original city.
Niagara Falls is where hydroelectricity is generated. Water for electric generation is brought from the Welland River, to the south of Niagara Falls, and crosses the city by way of an open canal to the power generating plants to the north of the city. This hydraulic canal was built before the postwar expansion of the city, without regard that it would cause future subdivisions to forced into tracts of available land that were not rectangular in shape.
There is also the paths across the city of high-voltage electrical lines from the generating plants, under which homes could not be built. There was the major highway, the Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW), passing through the land on which new subdivisions would be built. There were also rail lines in the area. Finally, Portage Road was built in a logical place for a road, along the cusp of the glacial impact crater that I would someday identify and write about on the Niagara natural history blog. But this left Portage Road as a curve, and not as a straight line.
The result is that the city of Niagara Falls, Canada, along with neighbouring cities Welland and St. Catharines, turned into a case study of urban planning with regard to pre-existing barriers. Blocks of homes along streets are rectangular in shape, and such rectangles fit neatly together to form new sections of the city. But here, due to the pre-existing barriers, tracts of land which would be the logical place to build new residential sub-divisions were not rectangular in shape and this made necessary some creative solutions that I think are worth explaining here.
Here is a map link: www.maps.google.com .
The city had already encountered the geometric challenge of building in non-rectangular spaces during the merger of the five towns which would make up the Canadian Niagara Falls. In the section of the city nearest the falls, around the intersection of Victoria Avenue and Centre Street, you can see that the grid pattern of the city blocks are set at an angle of about 45 degrees to that of the rest of the city. Not far away, there is Epworth Circle, and associated outer crescents, which were constructed to make use of a triangular space between a rail line and a main road. This would provide valuable experience for the postwar expansion.
The solution that came to be is what I refer to as the "Crescent Strategy" because of the numerous short residential streets, ending in a loop, which would be built into the city. These crescents are usually not actually in the form of crescents in the geometric sense, but can be called as such due to the loop at the end. The crescents of Niagara Falls are short streets of usually 8-12 homes. These are not gated communities but there is no through traffic, making them safer for young children.
The crescents are sometimes called courts, and are virtually always called courts in Welland and St. Catharines. They are also sometimes called places. This seems to have been a local idea since there are nearly no such crescents or courts in Hamilton.
This design of a short street of nice, new homes ending in a loop was effective in fitting homes into tracts of land which were not rectangular in shape due to pre-existing barriers. They seem to have become a style in themselves and found their way into areas in the Niagara Region where the conventional rectangular blocks could have been built. These crescents or courts are seen only in newer areas, not in the older parts of the cities. The squares in the older sections were themselves once farmsteads, as we saw in "Farms Of Long Ago", on the world and economics blog.
These crescents, or courts, were not the only strategy used to fit new housing developments into spaces which were other than rectangular in shape. An ideal place for some new homes was in Niagara Falls between Morrison Street and the electric power lines to the south. The problem was that the available land was triangular in shape, rather than rectangular.
But with some slick geometry, Alexander Crescent and Inglis Drive appeared with new homes. The excess space was taken up by a small park and an island where the two streets meet. No one said that a park had to be rectangular in shape. Alexander Crescent is not one of the crescents to which I am referring here because it has access at both ends, and does not end in a loop.
Not far away, is a space solution which I have not seen anywhere else. Planners managed to design streets which would leave yards as fairly close to rectangular. Except in the very center of the new development, where there would be quite a bit of space left over. The solution was Shirley Park, located so that it took up excess space behind backyards and was accessible from the street by a corridor between houses.
Also not far away was Rosedale Drive. It was a one-block residential street, but when the stream known as Muddy Run (although I read an account that it's water was actually crystal clear) was diverted underground and the Valley Way neighbourhood was built, the possibility arose of extending Rosedale Drive. The trouble here wasn't shape, it would form a neat rectangle for a city block, it was space. There was too much space for just one new street between Jepson and McRae Streets, but not enough space for two.
The solution was to build an island on Rosedale Drive. When I lived nearby as a young boy, I thought it's purpose was decorative. Now I can see in the satellite imagery that it was simply to take up space.
There seems to be practically no such creative geometry that was necessary on the U.S. side of Niagara Falls, although other-than-rectangular streets became necessary in the area of Laughlin Park.
The Controversy Surrounding Urban Renewal
PART ONE: THE IMPACT ON BUFFALO, NY OF THE KENSINGTON EXPRESSWAY
In "The Big Project Syndrome", we saw how the city of Niagara Falls, NY, is a case study of how having a major project in town, in this instance the Niagara Power Project which generates electricity, seems like a good thing in the immediate sense but can distort the landscape and thinking and leave the city worse off over the long term.
I have long wanted to write an article about Urban Renewal. This is generally defined as the rebuilding of cities in the 1960s and 1970s. Urban Renewal rebuilding took place in a number of countries, and is particularly associated with the northeastern U.S. There are a number of articles about it online.
Urban Renewal in the U.S. was a kind of Marshall Plan at home. It followed the building of the Interstate Highway System during the 1950s, and may be thought of as one of the Great Society programs. In New York State, the name that really stands out with regard to such projects is that of Robert Moses. He is probably the most important character in postwar New York State, being adept at handling the bureaucracy and getting things built.
Urban Renewal was highly controversial during it's time, and remains so today. Many of the changes were certainly positive, and it worked well in many places. But to accomplish these changes made it necessary to bulldoze historic neighborhoods and cut off the economic flow of other neighborhoods. In a few places, the results were even worse and it is the Niagara Falls that was featured as the case study in "The Big Project Syndrome" that is considered as the nadir of urban renewal, as described in the Wikipedia article on the subject. Many in Toronto consider it a great triumph to have successfully blocked construction of the proposed Spadina Expressway.
Today, I would like to focus on as a case study what is possibly the most contentious and controversial project of Urban Renewal anywhere. It is the construction of the Kensington Expressway, Route 33, across the East Side neighborhood of Buffalo, NY. As with "The Big Project Syndrome", I will do my best to write the article so that it is not necessary to be familiar with the area to understand it. The lessons of this apply anywhere in the world where there is contention over bulldozing the old to make way for the new.
Here is the map link that I usually use, with the satellite imagery and Google Street View: www.maps.google.com . For the vast majority of readers that are not familiar with Buffalo, most of the sites that I refer to here will come up in Google searches. There is a search utility that is helpful on the map and satellite imagery.
The city of Buffalo, NY lies in a natural place for a city to grow. It is situated at the eastern end of Lake Erie so that it is where ships stop that have used the lake as an east-west canal, being unable to sail any further east because of the falls in the Niagara River. Grain and iron ore, brought by ships from the Midwest along the Great Lakes, unloaded their cargo at Buffalo.
Buffalo was also at the western terminus of the Erie Canal, which connected the Hudson River in eastern New York State with Buffalo. The industrial community that grew up around this terminus was known as Black Rock. But this old canal, built in the early Nineteenth Century, could only handle small cargo boats which were typically pulled by mules on towpaths on opposite sides of the canal. Buffalo was also a natural stopover for migrants from the east, who were moving to settle the western U.S.. Some of these migrants, such as future U.S. president Grover Cleveland, decided to stay in Buffalo.
The Erie Canal had used the large Tonawanda Creek, between the far northern Buffalo suburbs of Tonawanda and North Tonawanda, as part of it's course. The canal diverged from the creek just east of where the creek empties into the Niagara River, at Tonawanda Island. The entire length of the canal from there to Black Rock, now a section of Buffalo, was filled in.
The broad stretch of Niagara Street in Tonawanda, adjacent to the Niagara River, was built over the Erie Canal that had been filled in. Because of high ground in Tonawanda along the river, a part of the river itself was used as the canal. One towpath was built along the shore, and the opposite one some distance out in the river. This was later filled in out to the towpath separating the canal from the river to form Niawanda Park. Finally, the long section of the canal from where the South Grand Island Bridge is now located to the terminus near Lake Erie in Buffalo was filled in and the Interstate 190 Highway that we have today was built over it.
Buffalo took on the role of turning the grain and iron ore from the Midwest into finished products. The eastern shore of Lake Erie had some of the largest grain mills in the world, which can be seen today in the massive grain elevators just south of downtown Buffalo, and the vast complexes of Bethlehem and Republic Steel to the south of that. If anyone living nearby does not have an appetite when arriving home from work, the scent of baked grain will give them one.
But all of that changed in the late 1950s when the Welland Canal was built across the Niagara Peninsula in neighboring Canada, as part of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Ships could now sail all the way to the sea, and no longer needed to unload their cargo in Buffalo. While the Seaway probably made the entire region better off, as a whole, in the long term, the Welland Canal effectively short-circuited the major economic reason for Buffalo's existence, at least for the economy of that time.
As the construction of the Welland Canal was short-circuiting Buffalo, Buffalo was similarly short-circuiting a major part of itself. The postwar suburbs were growing to the east of Buffalo, based on families owning cars, and it was decided that a faster route from the suburbs to downtown was needed.
Just as the Erie Canal, running north-south parallel to the Niagara River across north Buffalo, had been filled in and a section of the Interstate 190 (I-190) had been built over it, an elegant residential street in Buffalo was removed and the section of the Kensington Expressway (Route 33) from downtown Buffalo to the northeast was built in it's place.
It remains the most controversial example of Urban Renewal that I am aware of. Humboldt Parkway had been designed by the famed landscape artist Frederick Law Olmsted. Until it's removal in 1958, for this highway project, it was supposed to be one of the most attractive residential streets in Buffalo. The contested section of the Kensington Expressway is the curving portion that can be seen on the map, extending from downtown to where it meets the Scajaquada Expressway (Route 198) and the remains of Humboldt Parkway, and then proceeds eastward as the east-west section of the Kensington Expressway which is not as controversial.
Building a highway within a city is a perilous thing to do, even though traffic volume may make it necessary. It can disrupt the fabric of the community and short-circuit the established business patterns. The highway may act as a barrier, cutting a long-established neighborhood in two and greatly reducing interaction between the opposite sides. It seems less risky to build a beltway around a city than an expressway within it.
Then there is the possible environmental consequences both of the highway itself, and the cars that drive along it. The LaSalle Arterial Highway, in Niagara Falls, NY affected the water drainage patterns in such a way that it hindered runoff when the tremendous volume of snow from the Blizzard of 1977 melted, and this caused chemicals that had earlier been buried under a residential neighborhood in the adjacent Love Canal to emerge from the ground quickly, and it ended up as national headlines the following year.
Put simply the Kensington Expressway, Route 33, created an easy bypass of the East Side of Buffalo, which threatened to make it economically irrelevant. The East Side of Buffalo is the area to the east of the downtown stretch of Main Street, Route 5 on a map.
The result is that the economic activity of the East Side has shifted eastward, to postwar suburbs such as Cheektowaga, but the original East Side is still there. The most troubled neighborhoods in cities are those that have been short-circuited by highways in just such a way. It makes it so that anyone who does not live in these older sections of the city really does not have to go there. The East Side is still known for sites such as the Broadway Market, once visited by President John F. Kennedy, but that was there before the Kensington Expressway was built.
My conclusion is that an expressway through a city should ideally function as a high-speed street, without traffic lights, that showcases the surrounding city. The trick is in simple geometry, it must work in harmony with the surrounding street pattern instead of working against it.
The Scajaquada Expressway is not far from the Kensington Expressway in question, some distance to the west of it. In contrast to the Kensington, the Scajaquada seems to work in harmony with the surrounding city. It crosses the main north-south streets at right angles so that it brings traffic in as it showcases the area. The Scajaquada was built over part of Humboldt Parkway also, but it's geometry is not at all destructive like that of the Kensington.
(Note-If you have heard of the Scajaquada Expressway before, it may be from the section "The Very Special Escarpments Of Buffalo And Fort Erie" in the posting "All About The Appalachians", on the geology blog www.markmeekearth.blogspot.com . This expressway is actually built along a valley around the northern end of the West Side Escarpment, as described in that posting. Buffalo State College, along the Scajaquada, is actually built on the northern tip of that escarpment).
On the opposite side of Buffalo, the further east-west eastern section of the Kensington Expressway works in harmony with the street pattern in a way similar to that of the Scajaquada Expressway. Bailey Avenue, Route 62, is a main north-south business street further out on the East Side of Buffalo that intersects with this section of the Kensington, and is doing well. But the main streets parallel to Bailey Avenue that are closer to the curving inner section of the Kensington, Jefferson Avenue between Main Street and the Kensington and Fillmore Avenue on the opposite (east) side of the Kensington, are economically cut off by it.
The East Side of Buffalo, the section of the city to the east of the downtown section of Main Street (Route 5) is closest to the new eastern suburbs so that it is the section of Buffalo that is sacrificed most in the quest to build a faster route from those suburbs to downtown. The West Side of Buffalo, the area between the downtown stretch of Main Street west to the Niagara River has not been affected as much. It is only the Lower West Side, centered along Niagara Street, Route 266, (not the same Niagara Street as mentioned earlier in Tonawanda) that shares the debilitating economic and housing stock issues of the East Side.
But it can be easily seen on the map that the Lower West Side is also short-circuited, in a way similar to the East Side, by the so-called Niagara Section of the Interstate 190 Highway (I-190). This section of the highway is the one along the Niagara River and the lake shore on the American Side where the Niagara River meets Lake Erie. This area also has environmental issues from the exhaust of trucks waiting to cross the Peace Bridge to Canada.
The West Side of Buffalo has the thriving Elmwood Avenue (Route 384) district, popular with students at Buffalo State College. There is all manner of businesses and organizations occupying the mansions of Delaware Avenue, mostly built in the Nineteenth Century by those who made their fortunes in Buffalo.The reason that most of the West Side of Buffalo tends to do better than the East Side is simply that the West Side does not have anything to short-circuit it's economic activity like the Kensington Expressway that cuts diagonally across the East Side. Not only is the Kensington completely out of harmony with the surrounding street pattern, but it is mostly in a trench so that it hides the area rather than showcases it.
North Buffalo, north of the Scajaquada Expressway, is also doing fairly well because it doesn't have a Kensington Expressway to cut it in half and strangle it's economic activity. It's most prominent street is Hertel Avenue. It doesn't have an expressway bringing in traffic like the Scajaquada does to the West Side's Elmwood Avenue. But neither does it have an expressway carrying traffic past it and away from it like Jefferson and Fillmore Avenues, on the East Side.
No such expressway was built across North Buffalo because the suburbs to the north, Kenmore and Tonawanda, are older than the suburbs to the east, like Cheektowaga. The postwar expansion and building boom didn't make a new highway across North Buffalo because the suburbs to the north didn't grow as much and traffic routes from the northern suburbs into the city were already well-established. The North Buffalo section of the Interstate 190 (or I-190) Highway and the I-290 (Youngmann) Highway across Tonawanda are not at all out of harmony with the street pattern, and showcase the area rather than working in opposition to it.
It is not fair to blame the economic struggles of the East Side of Buffalo entirely on the building of the Kensington Expressway. (Note-The difference between an expressway and any other highway is that the expressway gets you somewhere that you could have gotten to on other streets, but it gets you there faster). The West Side of Buffalo gained Buffalo State College while the East Side lost the old War Memorial Stadium. "The Rockpile", as the stadium was affectionately known, was itself built in an earlier bout of Urban Renewal, the public works projects of the Great Depression. The stadium was finally replaced by a new stadium in Buffalo's southern suburbs.
A nearby success story is the Larkin Square project. The Larkin Company was a large mail-order soap company that did not make it through the Great Depression of the 1930s, but left Buffalo two massive buildings which have been put to very good use. The buildings today are full of many different businesses.
The Central Terminal, at the intersection of Paderewski and Curtiss Drives, adjacent to the rail tracks on the East Side of Buffalo, is one of the most magnificent structures in the area. It towers over the southern part of Buffalo's East Side. The terminal was opened in 1929, and was the place at which countless thousands of people embarked to or arrived from New York City, or other points east, by train.
But within a few decades, people would be travelling much more by car and by plane than by train. Today, the structure lies virtually abandoned and seems like an ill omen for the entire East Side. My hope is that what was done with the Larkin Buildings could also be done with the Central Terminal.
Another factor to consider in evaluating the success of Urban Renewal is that it's era coincided with the mass movement of manufacturing overseas. It is this that is responsible for a lot of urban decline, not Urban Renewal. The builders planned for projected population growth, which did not occur as planned because so many manufacturing jobs went away.
When redesigning a city, it it impossible to please everyone. No matter how it turns out, there will always be those saying "We shouldn't have built this" or "We should have built that".
What Urban Renewal really comes down to is cars. Do we want a city built for people, or do we decide to bulldoze that and replace it with a city built for cars? Having everyone driving comes with a price in older neighborhoods and urban landscapes that were not designed for such traffic volume. We want to preserve historic neighborhoods and the familiar patterns of the city, but we don't want to spend an hour a day in a traffic jam and then a half-hour looking for a place to park.
PART TWO: THE RESULTS OF BUILDING THE INTERSTATE 190 AND THE LEWISTON-QUEENSTON BRIDGE ON NIAGARA FALLS, NY
The city of Niagara Falls, NY is sometimes held as the classic example of the failure of Urban Renewal as described, for example, in the Wikipedia article on the subject. As we saw in Part One, on this blog, Urban Renewal was the movement mostly from the 1950s to the 1970s in rebuilding cities to accommodate increased automobile traffic.
(The NY in Niagara Falls, NY is the abbreviation for New York State, to differentiate it from the Canadian city across the river which is also called Niagara Falls).
Business in Niagara Falls, NY is fine during the summer tourist season, but then curtails sharply for most of the year. It commonly gets blamed on the extensive Urban Renewal project which rebuilt it's downtown. My feeling is that this deserves a closer look because, while controversial, Urban Renewal has worked just fine in other places.
It is claimed that Urban Renewal made the downtown of Niagara Falls, NY more difficult to navigate. But anyone who has done much travelling knows that a lot of towns and cities are not really easy to navigate and, in many cases, this adds to their charm. This is especially true if several nearby towns have gradually merged into a city, leaving the city with several different sets of street patterns.
It is also true that Niagara Falls, NY has lost a lot of factory jobs in recent decades. The city became an industrial center based on the inexpensive electrical power generated by the drop in the water level represented by the falls. But, once again, a lot of cities have similarly lost industrial jobs. Pittsburgh underwent both the loss of it's steel mills and extensive Urban Renewal, which is generally considered as a success.
The saga of the Love Canal, where a neighborhood was built over what had been a dump where industrial waste chemicals had been buried, certainly didn't help. But other cities have recovered from their tragedies, and the Love Canal was far away from downtown Niagara Falls, NY, at the opposite end of the city.
In the posting "The Big Project Syndrome", we saw Niagara Falls, NY as a case study in how the construction of the massive power project adversely affected both the thinking and the landscape of the city. In Part One of this posting, we saw how the construction of an expressway within the nearby city of Buffalo, NY turned out to have very adverse effects on the traditional flow of business within Buffalo.
It is my conclusion that what is really behind the economic decline of Niagara Falls, NY is neither downtown Urban Renewal nor loss of factory jobs. It is actually a situation very similar to that of Buffalo, as described in Part One, the construction of a highway within the city during the era of Urban Renewal. Building a highway within or across a city is a perilous thing to do as it can completely alter the flow of commercial activity.
Here is the map link that I usually use with the satellite imagery and Google Street View: www.maps.google.com .
The highway across Niagara Falls, NY that I am referring to is the Interstate Highway 190 or simply the I-190. This highway cuts across Niagara Falls, NY to link the North Grand Island Bridges with the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge between the U.S. and Canada, which is to the northwest of the North Grand Island Bridges. The I-190 goes right across the power project that we saw in "The Big Project Syndrome", and the raised berm on which much of the highway in the area is constructed is made from the soil and rock excavated during the construction of that power project and it's attached reservoir.
The I-190 both brings business to the Niagara Falls, NY area, but also cuts off the downtown and the older western half of the city. I find that the highway creates a sharp dividing line that drastically changed the commercial flow pattern. The area that it feeds is to the east of it, and the area that it cuts off is to the west of it.
The trouble is really the gap that exists between the highway and the city of Niagara Falls, NY, to the west of it. Just west of the highway, between it and downtown, is a massive landfill, industrial areas, railroad tracks and, plenty of electric power lines. With this highway as the main traffic conduit of the area this gap, which can be readily be seen in the satellite imagery, makes downtown Niagara Falls and other business districts to the west just too far out of the way to easily get to.
This highway was opened in the early 1960s, and the destructive effects would not become apparent for many years. This is because the factories of the area were still booming. These factories were mostly in the southwestern part of Niagara Falls, NY, along Buffalo Avenue which runs parallel to the Niagara River, and in another industrial district in the north end of Niagara Falls, NY. As long as these factories were there, it brought plenty of business activity to Niagara Falls, west of the I-190.
It was only when most of these factories closed or drastically reduced their staff that the city began a steep economic decline and it was mainly due to the divisive effect of this highway, which did not become apparent before, and not to the "failure" of Urban Renewal downtown.
Niagara Falls, NY is built in a kind of a square that is formed by the right angle in the Niagara River, with the wide upper river running east-west and the narrow lower river running north-south. The falls at Niagara are at the intersection of the upper and lower river. It is easy to see how the I-190 cuts off this portion of the city diagonally.
When the I-190 directly connected the North Grand Island Bridges to the newly-built Lewiston-Queenston Bridge to Canada, it changed the entire flow pattern of the area. The Village of Lewiston, to the north of the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge and the power project (with the large reservoir), certainly gained because the highway brought traffic right to it. A new business district would form to the east of the highway, in the eastern half of Niagara Falls NY known as LaSalle along Niagara Falls Boulevard (Route 62 to the east of the I-190) and in the adjacent Town of Niagara, along Military Road (Route 265), but the rest of Niagara Falls, NY, to the west of the highway, would be cut off.
The flow of business within the city of Niagara Falls, NY, west of the I-190, is now much more east-west than north-south. The main east-west business street in this area, Pine Avenue (Route 62 to the west of the I-190), has survived much better then the main north-south business street, which is Main Street (Route 104 near and parallel to the lower Niagara River). This is because the I-190 runs mostly north-south and this made Pine Avenue (Route 62 to the west of the I-190) more in harmony with it, being closer to perpendicular to the I-190, than Main Street which is closer to parallel with the direction of the I-190 and thus more out of harmony and more likely to be cut off by it.
Main Street also appears on the map or satellite imagery to run near and parallel to the Robert Moses Parkway, and thus to be cut off by it. But this is not a busy highway, and there has long been talk of removing it.
Hyde Park Boulevard (Route 61) runs diagonally across Niagara Falls NY, some distance west of the I-190 in a mostly north-south direction. This is directly out of harmony with the I-190, running nearly parallel to it, and is not much of a business district, being more residential and industrial in nature.
Highland Avenue is a former business district in the north end of Niagara Falls, NY, parallel to and between Main Street and Hyde park Boulevard. It is also cut off by the new route patterns.
Is it only a coincidence that, since the I-190 and the power project was built, Niagara Falls NY has lost one of it's two business dimensions by having it cut off and has also lost half of it's population? The new police station was put on the most afflicted section of Main Street, to at least put something there as well as to deter crime.
The I-190 was built on the opposite side of the factory district, clearly seen in the satellite imagery between the southern portion of Hyde Park Boulevard (Route 61) and 56th Street, from downtown. This makes downtown Niagara Falls, NY more difficult and out of the way to get to from the highway.
The I-190 did bring business in, but this prompted the business activity to migrate east from the highway, rather than west. Both of the main business conduits to the east of the I-190, Niagara Falls Boulevard (Route 62 east of the I-190) and Military Road (Route 265) are in harmony, near perpendicular, to the highway. The highway had the effect of diverting traffic that might have gone to the west of it toward the afflicted areas of Niagara Falls, NY, to the east instead. A critical mass of business started a spiral to the east of the highway, rather than to the west.
The booming business district that was created by the building of the I-190, to it's east, does not continue far to the east. On Niagara Falls Boulevard (Route 62), to the east of Military Road (Route 265), the business district fades into mostly motels. The former Summit Park Mall, at the eastern end of Niagara Falls, NY off Niagara Falls Boulevard, did not survive when it surely would have if it had been closer to the all-important I-190.
It is really amazing what a sharp division in business activity this highway has created. There used to be two department stores a very short distance from one another, within easy walking distance. One store was really no better than the other, both were the same type of store. The difference was that one was just east of the I-190, and the other was just to the west of it. The one just east of the I-190 (K-Mart) has been there for about half a century, and is still there today. The one a short distance away, to the west of the I-190, has been several comparable stores (including Twin Fair and Gold Circle), but none can survive there and the building has long been vacant.
On Niagara Falls Boulevard (Route 62) if you go under the I-190 from east to west, you will go from a bustling business district to suddenly seeing a long-abandoned gas station, with it's parking lot overgrown with weeds, and a large abandoned former office building. If You go under the I-190 from east to west on Packard Road or Porter Road (Route 182), you will go from a business district lined with busy stores to a former large shopping complex that is now virtually empty.
Even retail giant Wal-Mart has been affected by this stark division in business created by the I-190. When the company first opened a store in the area, it was just to the west of the I-190. But when the store was to be expanded to include a grocery store, instead of expanding the existing store the company decided to build an entirely new store, this time to the favored east of the I-190.
"West of the I-190" could be a byword that essentially means an economic dead zone and, unfortunately, downtown Niagara Falls, NY lies in this zone.
The northern section of Military Road (Route 265), east of the I-190 and north of Packard Road (Route 182) did not develop into a business district anything like that south of Packard Road because it is close to, and also directly parallel to, the I-190. This puts it out of harmony with the I-190. The change in direction of the I-190 to north-south changes this and puts the portion of Military Road (Route 265) to the south of Packard Road (Route 182) in harmony with it so that it thrives as a business district.
Of course, "The Property Order", which we saw in the posting by that name on the world and economics blog, is an important factor here also. The move to newer terrain to the east provided the chance to start the property order over to accommodate widespread automobile ownership.
The LaSalle Expressway that can be seen on the map and satellite imagery runs parallel to Niagara Falls Boulevard, east of the I-190. It does not significantly affect it because the expressway is sparsely-used and does not lead to any business district. There is a massive landfill that stands out in the satellite imagery. We can tell that it was there because the I-190 curves around it. This is the landfill that I referred to in "The Big Project Syndrome" that would have been ideal space for a modern industrial park.
Niagara Falls, Canada, across the lower Niagara River to the west of downtown Niagara Falls, NY, has gone through the same issues as Niagara Falls, NY, such as the building of a power plant and the decline of industrial jobs. The only real advantage that the Canadian side has it that the falls can be seen more directly from that side. Yet, the Canadian side of Niagara Falls does not seem to "die" in the winter as much as the U.S. side does.
The fundamental alignment of Niagara Falls, Canada is north-south, but it has several prominent east-west business streets. The fundamental alignment of Niagara Falls, NY, in contrast, is east-west. It has retained it's business district in that direction, Pine Avenue (Route 62 west of the I-190), but not the business district in the north-south direction, Main Street.
But look at the highway system of Niagara Falls, Canada on the map or satellite imagery. The Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW) is congruent to the I-190 on the U.S. side. But the QEW and the 420 which is perpendicular to it are both in alignment with the grid of the street pattern. There is no cross-cutting or short-circuiting of the street pattern. The QEW is perpendicular to the east-west business streets, and so it operates in harmony with those streets.
Queen Street, in Niagara Falls, Canada, is Main Street's nearby Canadian sibling. Both are the same type of street, an old-style business district. Yet, being not cut off in the way that Main Street is, is doing well and not just in businesses for locals. But it is also true that the Canadian power plants have been there for longer, are further from the city, and not much of the landscape of Niagara Falls, Canada is taken up by power lines as Niagara Falls, NY is.
North Tonawanda, NY is a smaller city east of Niagara Falls, NY. It is a case in point of a similar city, but one which has been unencumbered either by highways or a power plant. North Tonawanda has also undergone transitions over time. The Erie Canal made it a collection point for the lumber that was shipped from it. It's nickname is still "The Lumber City". After the decline of the canal due to railroads and much bigger boats, it industrialized until most of that was eventually lost.
North Tonawanda has no highways near it. In comparison with neighboring Niagara Falls, it has no shopping district bringing in people from outside like that to the east of the I-190. But neither does it have a dying downtown, like that cut off by the I-190.
Pine Avenue (Route 62 west of the I-190) survives, being the business district within Niagara Falls, NY that is best aligned in harmony with the I-190. But most of it is not really a shopping district that brings in people from outside, rather it is mostly everyday businesses that serve locals.
Buffalo Avenue (Route 384), east if the I-190, survives as a business district. Even though it is perpendicular to the I-190, and has a ramp to it, it does not thrive as a shopping district like the area to the north. Rather, it also continues as a district of mostly "local" businesses catering mainly to those who live nearby. This section of Buffalo Avenue east of the I-190, which also includes the adjoining section of Cayuga Drive (Route 265) that it curves into, is in the older section of LaSalle (the eastern half of Niagara Falls, NY) and thus has the issue of "The Property Order" as we saw in the posting by that name on the world and economics blog. There is not the room for massive development and the street is not wide enough for the traffic volume that it would bring.
Conversely the little-used LaSalle Expressway, which runs parallel to Buffalo Avenue some distance to the north, actually helps to preserve this Buffalo Avenue business district. This is done not by bringing traffic to it but by somewhat isolating it. There are few underpasses to get past the LaSalle Expressway, and this encourages residents who live south of this highway to use these local businesses at times rather than getting to the busier business district to the north.
The challenge for downtown Niagara Falls, NY is to bring people in after the end of the summer tourist season, even though the changing patterns brought about by the I-190 make it out of the way and not easy to get to. The construction of the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge, at around the same time as the power project and the I-190, made it so that the Rainbow Bridge, which leads right into Niagara Falls, NY, is no longer the busiest border crossing point in the area.
Previous efforts to revitalize the downtown in the off-season have been the Rainbow Mall and the Festival of Lights. The more recently built casino, appears to be doing well for itself but has not brought prosperity to the surrounding area. There is nostalgia among older Niagarans for Falls Street before Urban Renewal and the building of the I-190, but the truth is that if this downtown street were still there it would probably fare no better than the downtown does today.
In "The Big Project Syndrome", we saw how the city of Niagara Falls, NY, is a case study of how having a major project in town, in this instance the Niagara Power Project which generates electricity, seems like a good thing in the immediate sense but can distort the landscape and thinking and leave the city worse off over the long term.
I have long wanted to write an article about Urban Renewal. This is generally defined as the rebuilding of cities in the 1960s and 1970s. Urban Renewal rebuilding took place in a number of countries, and is particularly associated with the northeastern U.S. There are a number of articles about it online.
Urban Renewal in the U.S. was a kind of Marshall Plan at home. It followed the building of the Interstate Highway System during the 1950s, and may be thought of as one of the Great Society programs. In New York State, the name that really stands out with regard to such projects is that of Robert Moses. He is probably the most important character in postwar New York State, being adept at handling the bureaucracy and getting things built.
Urban Renewal was highly controversial during it's time, and remains so today. Many of the changes were certainly positive, and it worked well in many places. But to accomplish these changes made it necessary to bulldoze historic neighborhoods and cut off the economic flow of other neighborhoods. In a few places, the results were even worse and it is the Niagara Falls that was featured as the case study in "The Big Project Syndrome" that is considered as the nadir of urban renewal, as described in the Wikipedia article on the subject. Many in Toronto consider it a great triumph to have successfully blocked construction of the proposed Spadina Expressway.
Today, I would like to focus on as a case study what is possibly the most contentious and controversial project of Urban Renewal anywhere. It is the construction of the Kensington Expressway, Route 33, across the East Side neighborhood of Buffalo, NY. As with "The Big Project Syndrome", I will do my best to write the article so that it is not necessary to be familiar with the area to understand it. The lessons of this apply anywhere in the world where there is contention over bulldozing the old to make way for the new.
Here is the map link that I usually use, with the satellite imagery and Google Street View: www.maps.google.com . For the vast majority of readers that are not familiar with Buffalo, most of the sites that I refer to here will come up in Google searches. There is a search utility that is helpful on the map and satellite imagery.
The city of Buffalo, NY lies in a natural place for a city to grow. It is situated at the eastern end of Lake Erie so that it is where ships stop that have used the lake as an east-west canal, being unable to sail any further east because of the falls in the Niagara River. Grain and iron ore, brought by ships from the Midwest along the Great Lakes, unloaded their cargo at Buffalo.
Buffalo was also at the western terminus of the Erie Canal, which connected the Hudson River in eastern New York State with Buffalo. The industrial community that grew up around this terminus was known as Black Rock. But this old canal, built in the early Nineteenth Century, could only handle small cargo boats which were typically pulled by mules on towpaths on opposite sides of the canal. Buffalo was also a natural stopover for migrants from the east, who were moving to settle the western U.S.. Some of these migrants, such as future U.S. president Grover Cleveland, decided to stay in Buffalo.
The Erie Canal had used the large Tonawanda Creek, between the far northern Buffalo suburbs of Tonawanda and North Tonawanda, as part of it's course. The canal diverged from the creek just east of where the creek empties into the Niagara River, at Tonawanda Island. The entire length of the canal from there to Black Rock, now a section of Buffalo, was filled in.
The broad stretch of Niagara Street in Tonawanda, adjacent to the Niagara River, was built over the Erie Canal that had been filled in. Because of high ground in Tonawanda along the river, a part of the river itself was used as the canal. One towpath was built along the shore, and the opposite one some distance out in the river. This was later filled in out to the towpath separating the canal from the river to form Niawanda Park. Finally, the long section of the canal from where the South Grand Island Bridge is now located to the terminus near Lake Erie in Buffalo was filled in and the Interstate 190 Highway that we have today was built over it.
Buffalo took on the role of turning the grain and iron ore from the Midwest into finished products. The eastern shore of Lake Erie had some of the largest grain mills in the world, which can be seen today in the massive grain elevators just south of downtown Buffalo, and the vast complexes of Bethlehem and Republic Steel to the south of that. If anyone living nearby does not have an appetite when arriving home from work, the scent of baked grain will give them one.
But all of that changed in the late 1950s when the Welland Canal was built across the Niagara Peninsula in neighboring Canada, as part of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Ships could now sail all the way to the sea, and no longer needed to unload their cargo in Buffalo. While the Seaway probably made the entire region better off, as a whole, in the long term, the Welland Canal effectively short-circuited the major economic reason for Buffalo's existence, at least for the economy of that time.
As the construction of the Welland Canal was short-circuiting Buffalo, Buffalo was similarly short-circuiting a major part of itself. The postwar suburbs were growing to the east of Buffalo, based on families owning cars, and it was decided that a faster route from the suburbs to downtown was needed.
Just as the Erie Canal, running north-south parallel to the Niagara River across north Buffalo, had been filled in and a section of the Interstate 190 (I-190) had been built over it, an elegant residential street in Buffalo was removed and the section of the Kensington Expressway (Route 33) from downtown Buffalo to the northeast was built in it's place.
It remains the most controversial example of Urban Renewal that I am aware of. Humboldt Parkway had been designed by the famed landscape artist Frederick Law Olmsted. Until it's removal in 1958, for this highway project, it was supposed to be one of the most attractive residential streets in Buffalo. The contested section of the Kensington Expressway is the curving portion that can be seen on the map, extending from downtown to where it meets the Scajaquada Expressway (Route 198) and the remains of Humboldt Parkway, and then proceeds eastward as the east-west section of the Kensington Expressway which is not as controversial.
Building a highway within a city is a perilous thing to do, even though traffic volume may make it necessary. It can disrupt the fabric of the community and short-circuit the established business patterns. The highway may act as a barrier, cutting a long-established neighborhood in two and greatly reducing interaction between the opposite sides. It seems less risky to build a beltway around a city than an expressway within it.
Then there is the possible environmental consequences both of the highway itself, and the cars that drive along it. The LaSalle Arterial Highway, in Niagara Falls, NY affected the water drainage patterns in such a way that it hindered runoff when the tremendous volume of snow from the Blizzard of 1977 melted, and this caused chemicals that had earlier been buried under a residential neighborhood in the adjacent Love Canal to emerge from the ground quickly, and it ended up as national headlines the following year.
Put simply the Kensington Expressway, Route 33, created an easy bypass of the East Side of Buffalo, which threatened to make it economically irrelevant. The East Side of Buffalo is the area to the east of the downtown stretch of Main Street, Route 5 on a map.
The result is that the economic activity of the East Side has shifted eastward, to postwar suburbs such as Cheektowaga, but the original East Side is still there. The most troubled neighborhoods in cities are those that have been short-circuited by highways in just such a way. It makes it so that anyone who does not live in these older sections of the city really does not have to go there. The East Side is still known for sites such as the Broadway Market, once visited by President John F. Kennedy, but that was there before the Kensington Expressway was built.
My conclusion is that an expressway through a city should ideally function as a high-speed street, without traffic lights, that showcases the surrounding city. The trick is in simple geometry, it must work in harmony with the surrounding street pattern instead of working against it.
The Scajaquada Expressway is not far from the Kensington Expressway in question, some distance to the west of it. In contrast to the Kensington, the Scajaquada seems to work in harmony with the surrounding city. It crosses the main north-south streets at right angles so that it brings traffic in as it showcases the area. The Scajaquada was built over part of Humboldt Parkway also, but it's geometry is not at all destructive like that of the Kensington.
(Note-If you have heard of the Scajaquada Expressway before, it may be from the section "The Very Special Escarpments Of Buffalo And Fort Erie" in the posting "All About The Appalachians", on the geology blog www.markmeekearth.blogspot.com . This expressway is actually built along a valley around the northern end of the West Side Escarpment, as described in that posting. Buffalo State College, along the Scajaquada, is actually built on the northern tip of that escarpment).
On the opposite side of Buffalo, the further east-west eastern section of the Kensington Expressway works in harmony with the street pattern in a way similar to that of the Scajaquada Expressway. Bailey Avenue, Route 62, is a main north-south business street further out on the East Side of Buffalo that intersects with this section of the Kensington, and is doing well. But the main streets parallel to Bailey Avenue that are closer to the curving inner section of the Kensington, Jefferson Avenue between Main Street and the Kensington and Fillmore Avenue on the opposite (east) side of the Kensington, are economically cut off by it.
The East Side of Buffalo, the section of the city to the east of the downtown section of Main Street (Route 5) is closest to the new eastern suburbs so that it is the section of Buffalo that is sacrificed most in the quest to build a faster route from those suburbs to downtown. The West Side of Buffalo, the area between the downtown stretch of Main Street west to the Niagara River has not been affected as much. It is only the Lower West Side, centered along Niagara Street, Route 266, (not the same Niagara Street as mentioned earlier in Tonawanda) that shares the debilitating economic and housing stock issues of the East Side.
But it can be easily seen on the map that the Lower West Side is also short-circuited, in a way similar to the East Side, by the so-called Niagara Section of the Interstate 190 Highway (I-190). This section of the highway is the one along the Niagara River and the lake shore on the American Side where the Niagara River meets Lake Erie. This area also has environmental issues from the exhaust of trucks waiting to cross the Peace Bridge to Canada.
The West Side of Buffalo has the thriving Elmwood Avenue (Route 384) district, popular with students at Buffalo State College. There is all manner of businesses and organizations occupying the mansions of Delaware Avenue, mostly built in the Nineteenth Century by those who made their fortunes in Buffalo.The reason that most of the West Side of Buffalo tends to do better than the East Side is simply that the West Side does not have anything to short-circuit it's economic activity like the Kensington Expressway that cuts diagonally across the East Side. Not only is the Kensington completely out of harmony with the surrounding street pattern, but it is mostly in a trench so that it hides the area rather than showcases it.
North Buffalo, north of the Scajaquada Expressway, is also doing fairly well because it doesn't have a Kensington Expressway to cut it in half and strangle it's economic activity. It's most prominent street is Hertel Avenue. It doesn't have an expressway bringing in traffic like the Scajaquada does to the West Side's Elmwood Avenue. But neither does it have an expressway carrying traffic past it and away from it like Jefferson and Fillmore Avenues, on the East Side.
No such expressway was built across North Buffalo because the suburbs to the north, Kenmore and Tonawanda, are older than the suburbs to the east, like Cheektowaga. The postwar expansion and building boom didn't make a new highway across North Buffalo because the suburbs to the north didn't grow as much and traffic routes from the northern suburbs into the city were already well-established. The North Buffalo section of the Interstate 190 (or I-190) Highway and the I-290 (Youngmann) Highway across Tonawanda are not at all out of harmony with the street pattern, and showcase the area rather than working in opposition to it.
It is not fair to blame the economic struggles of the East Side of Buffalo entirely on the building of the Kensington Expressway. (Note-The difference between an expressway and any other highway is that the expressway gets you somewhere that you could have gotten to on other streets, but it gets you there faster). The West Side of Buffalo gained Buffalo State College while the East Side lost the old War Memorial Stadium. "The Rockpile", as the stadium was affectionately known, was itself built in an earlier bout of Urban Renewal, the public works projects of the Great Depression. The stadium was finally replaced by a new stadium in Buffalo's southern suburbs.
A nearby success story is the Larkin Square project. The Larkin Company was a large mail-order soap company that did not make it through the Great Depression of the 1930s, but left Buffalo two massive buildings which have been put to very good use. The buildings today are full of many different businesses.
The Central Terminal, at the intersection of Paderewski and Curtiss Drives, adjacent to the rail tracks on the East Side of Buffalo, is one of the most magnificent structures in the area. It towers over the southern part of Buffalo's East Side. The terminal was opened in 1929, and was the place at which countless thousands of people embarked to or arrived from New York City, or other points east, by train.
But within a few decades, people would be travelling much more by car and by plane than by train. Today, the structure lies virtually abandoned and seems like an ill omen for the entire East Side. My hope is that what was done with the Larkin Buildings could also be done with the Central Terminal.
Another factor to consider in evaluating the success of Urban Renewal is that it's era coincided with the mass movement of manufacturing overseas. It is this that is responsible for a lot of urban decline, not Urban Renewal. The builders planned for projected population growth, which did not occur as planned because so many manufacturing jobs went away.
When redesigning a city, it it impossible to please everyone. No matter how it turns out, there will always be those saying "We shouldn't have built this" or "We should have built that".
What Urban Renewal really comes down to is cars. Do we want a city built for people, or do we decide to bulldoze that and replace it with a city built for cars? Having everyone driving comes with a price in older neighborhoods and urban landscapes that were not designed for such traffic volume. We want to preserve historic neighborhoods and the familiar patterns of the city, but we don't want to spend an hour a day in a traffic jam and then a half-hour looking for a place to park.
PART TWO: THE RESULTS OF BUILDING THE INTERSTATE 190 AND THE LEWISTON-QUEENSTON BRIDGE ON NIAGARA FALLS, NY
The city of Niagara Falls, NY is sometimes held as the classic example of the failure of Urban Renewal as described, for example, in the Wikipedia article on the subject. As we saw in Part One, on this blog, Urban Renewal was the movement mostly from the 1950s to the 1970s in rebuilding cities to accommodate increased automobile traffic.
(The NY in Niagara Falls, NY is the abbreviation for New York State, to differentiate it from the Canadian city across the river which is also called Niagara Falls).
Business in Niagara Falls, NY is fine during the summer tourist season, but then curtails sharply for most of the year. It commonly gets blamed on the extensive Urban Renewal project which rebuilt it's downtown. My feeling is that this deserves a closer look because, while controversial, Urban Renewal has worked just fine in other places.
It is claimed that Urban Renewal made the downtown of Niagara Falls, NY more difficult to navigate. But anyone who has done much travelling knows that a lot of towns and cities are not really easy to navigate and, in many cases, this adds to their charm. This is especially true if several nearby towns have gradually merged into a city, leaving the city with several different sets of street patterns.
It is also true that Niagara Falls, NY has lost a lot of factory jobs in recent decades. The city became an industrial center based on the inexpensive electrical power generated by the drop in the water level represented by the falls. But, once again, a lot of cities have similarly lost industrial jobs. Pittsburgh underwent both the loss of it's steel mills and extensive Urban Renewal, which is generally considered as a success.
The saga of the Love Canal, where a neighborhood was built over what had been a dump where industrial waste chemicals had been buried, certainly didn't help. But other cities have recovered from their tragedies, and the Love Canal was far away from downtown Niagara Falls, NY, at the opposite end of the city.
In the posting "The Big Project Syndrome", we saw Niagara Falls, NY as a case study in how the construction of the massive power project adversely affected both the thinking and the landscape of the city. In Part One of this posting, we saw how the construction of an expressway within the nearby city of Buffalo, NY turned out to have very adverse effects on the traditional flow of business within Buffalo.
It is my conclusion that what is really behind the economic decline of Niagara Falls, NY is neither downtown Urban Renewal nor loss of factory jobs. It is actually a situation very similar to that of Buffalo, as described in Part One, the construction of a highway within the city during the era of Urban Renewal. Building a highway within or across a city is a perilous thing to do as it can completely alter the flow of commercial activity.
Here is the map link that I usually use with the satellite imagery and Google Street View: www.maps.google.com .
The highway across Niagara Falls, NY that I am referring to is the Interstate Highway 190 or simply the I-190. This highway cuts across Niagara Falls, NY to link the North Grand Island Bridges with the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge between the U.S. and Canada, which is to the northwest of the North Grand Island Bridges. The I-190 goes right across the power project that we saw in "The Big Project Syndrome", and the raised berm on which much of the highway in the area is constructed is made from the soil and rock excavated during the construction of that power project and it's attached reservoir.
The I-190 both brings business to the Niagara Falls, NY area, but also cuts off the downtown and the older western half of the city. I find that the highway creates a sharp dividing line that drastically changed the commercial flow pattern. The area that it feeds is to the east of it, and the area that it cuts off is to the west of it.
The trouble is really the gap that exists between the highway and the city of Niagara Falls, NY, to the west of it. Just west of the highway, between it and downtown, is a massive landfill, industrial areas, railroad tracks and, plenty of electric power lines. With this highway as the main traffic conduit of the area this gap, which can be readily be seen in the satellite imagery, makes downtown Niagara Falls and other business districts to the west just too far out of the way to easily get to.
This highway was opened in the early 1960s, and the destructive effects would not become apparent for many years. This is because the factories of the area were still booming. These factories were mostly in the southwestern part of Niagara Falls, NY, along Buffalo Avenue which runs parallel to the Niagara River, and in another industrial district in the north end of Niagara Falls, NY. As long as these factories were there, it brought plenty of business activity to Niagara Falls, west of the I-190.
It was only when most of these factories closed or drastically reduced their staff that the city began a steep economic decline and it was mainly due to the divisive effect of this highway, which did not become apparent before, and not to the "failure" of Urban Renewal downtown.
Niagara Falls, NY is built in a kind of a square that is formed by the right angle in the Niagara River, with the wide upper river running east-west and the narrow lower river running north-south. The falls at Niagara are at the intersection of the upper and lower river. It is easy to see how the I-190 cuts off this portion of the city diagonally.
When the I-190 directly connected the North Grand Island Bridges to the newly-built Lewiston-Queenston Bridge to Canada, it changed the entire flow pattern of the area. The Village of Lewiston, to the north of the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge and the power project (with the large reservoir), certainly gained because the highway brought traffic right to it. A new business district would form to the east of the highway, in the eastern half of Niagara Falls NY known as LaSalle along Niagara Falls Boulevard (Route 62 to the east of the I-190) and in the adjacent Town of Niagara, along Military Road (Route 265), but the rest of Niagara Falls, NY, to the west of the highway, would be cut off.
The flow of business within the city of Niagara Falls, NY, west of the I-190, is now much more east-west than north-south. The main east-west business street in this area, Pine Avenue (Route 62 to the west of the I-190), has survived much better then the main north-south business street, which is Main Street (Route 104 near and parallel to the lower Niagara River). This is because the I-190 runs mostly north-south and this made Pine Avenue (Route 62 to the west of the I-190) more in harmony with it, being closer to perpendicular to the I-190, than Main Street which is closer to parallel with the direction of the I-190 and thus more out of harmony and more likely to be cut off by it.
Main Street also appears on the map or satellite imagery to run near and parallel to the Robert Moses Parkway, and thus to be cut off by it. But this is not a busy highway, and there has long been talk of removing it.
Hyde Park Boulevard (Route 61) runs diagonally across Niagara Falls NY, some distance west of the I-190 in a mostly north-south direction. This is directly out of harmony with the I-190, running nearly parallel to it, and is not much of a business district, being more residential and industrial in nature.
Highland Avenue is a former business district in the north end of Niagara Falls, NY, parallel to and between Main Street and Hyde park Boulevard. It is also cut off by the new route patterns.
Is it only a coincidence that, since the I-190 and the power project was built, Niagara Falls NY has lost one of it's two business dimensions by having it cut off and has also lost half of it's population? The new police station was put on the most afflicted section of Main Street, to at least put something there as well as to deter crime.
The I-190 was built on the opposite side of the factory district, clearly seen in the satellite imagery between the southern portion of Hyde Park Boulevard (Route 61) and 56th Street, from downtown. This makes downtown Niagara Falls, NY more difficult and out of the way to get to from the highway.
The I-190 did bring business in, but this prompted the business activity to migrate east from the highway, rather than west. Both of the main business conduits to the east of the I-190, Niagara Falls Boulevard (Route 62 east of the I-190) and Military Road (Route 265) are in harmony, near perpendicular, to the highway. The highway had the effect of diverting traffic that might have gone to the west of it toward the afflicted areas of Niagara Falls, NY, to the east instead. A critical mass of business started a spiral to the east of the highway, rather than to the west.
The booming business district that was created by the building of the I-190, to it's east, does not continue far to the east. On Niagara Falls Boulevard (Route 62), to the east of Military Road (Route 265), the business district fades into mostly motels. The former Summit Park Mall, at the eastern end of Niagara Falls, NY off Niagara Falls Boulevard, did not survive when it surely would have if it had been closer to the all-important I-190.
It is really amazing what a sharp division in business activity this highway has created. There used to be two department stores a very short distance from one another, within easy walking distance. One store was really no better than the other, both were the same type of store. The difference was that one was just east of the I-190, and the other was just to the west of it. The one just east of the I-190 (K-Mart) has been there for about half a century, and is still there today. The one a short distance away, to the west of the I-190, has been several comparable stores (including Twin Fair and Gold Circle), but none can survive there and the building has long been vacant.
On Niagara Falls Boulevard (Route 62) if you go under the I-190 from east to west, you will go from a bustling business district to suddenly seeing a long-abandoned gas station, with it's parking lot overgrown with weeds, and a large abandoned former office building. If You go under the I-190 from east to west on Packard Road or Porter Road (Route 182), you will go from a business district lined with busy stores to a former large shopping complex that is now virtually empty.
Even retail giant Wal-Mart has been affected by this stark division in business created by the I-190. When the company first opened a store in the area, it was just to the west of the I-190. But when the store was to be expanded to include a grocery store, instead of expanding the existing store the company decided to build an entirely new store, this time to the favored east of the I-190.
"West of the I-190" could be a byword that essentially means an economic dead zone and, unfortunately, downtown Niagara Falls, NY lies in this zone.
The northern section of Military Road (Route 265), east of the I-190 and north of Packard Road (Route 182) did not develop into a business district anything like that south of Packard Road because it is close to, and also directly parallel to, the I-190. This puts it out of harmony with the I-190. The change in direction of the I-190 to north-south changes this and puts the portion of Military Road (Route 265) to the south of Packard Road (Route 182) in harmony with it so that it thrives as a business district.
Of course, "The Property Order", which we saw in the posting by that name on the world and economics blog, is an important factor here also. The move to newer terrain to the east provided the chance to start the property order over to accommodate widespread automobile ownership.
The LaSalle Expressway that can be seen on the map and satellite imagery runs parallel to Niagara Falls Boulevard, east of the I-190. It does not significantly affect it because the expressway is sparsely-used and does not lead to any business district. There is a massive landfill that stands out in the satellite imagery. We can tell that it was there because the I-190 curves around it. This is the landfill that I referred to in "The Big Project Syndrome" that would have been ideal space for a modern industrial park.
Niagara Falls, Canada, across the lower Niagara River to the west of downtown Niagara Falls, NY, has gone through the same issues as Niagara Falls, NY, such as the building of a power plant and the decline of industrial jobs. The only real advantage that the Canadian side has it that the falls can be seen more directly from that side. Yet, the Canadian side of Niagara Falls does not seem to "die" in the winter as much as the U.S. side does.
The fundamental alignment of Niagara Falls, Canada is north-south, but it has several prominent east-west business streets. The fundamental alignment of Niagara Falls, NY, in contrast, is east-west. It has retained it's business district in that direction, Pine Avenue (Route 62 west of the I-190), but not the business district in the north-south direction, Main Street.
But look at the highway system of Niagara Falls, Canada on the map or satellite imagery. The Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW) is congruent to the I-190 on the U.S. side. But the QEW and the 420 which is perpendicular to it are both in alignment with the grid of the street pattern. There is no cross-cutting or short-circuiting of the street pattern. The QEW is perpendicular to the east-west business streets, and so it operates in harmony with those streets.
Queen Street, in Niagara Falls, Canada, is Main Street's nearby Canadian sibling. Both are the same type of street, an old-style business district. Yet, being not cut off in the way that Main Street is, is doing well and not just in businesses for locals. But it is also true that the Canadian power plants have been there for longer, are further from the city, and not much of the landscape of Niagara Falls, Canada is taken up by power lines as Niagara Falls, NY is.
North Tonawanda, NY is a smaller city east of Niagara Falls, NY. It is a case in point of a similar city, but one which has been unencumbered either by highways or a power plant. North Tonawanda has also undergone transitions over time. The Erie Canal made it a collection point for the lumber that was shipped from it. It's nickname is still "The Lumber City". After the decline of the canal due to railroads and much bigger boats, it industrialized until most of that was eventually lost.
North Tonawanda has no highways near it. In comparison with neighboring Niagara Falls, it has no shopping district bringing in people from outside like that to the east of the I-190. But neither does it have a dying downtown, like that cut off by the I-190.
Pine Avenue (Route 62 west of the I-190) survives, being the business district within Niagara Falls, NY that is best aligned in harmony with the I-190. But most of it is not really a shopping district that brings in people from outside, rather it is mostly everyday businesses that serve locals.
Buffalo Avenue (Route 384), east if the I-190, survives as a business district. Even though it is perpendicular to the I-190, and has a ramp to it, it does not thrive as a shopping district like the area to the north. Rather, it also continues as a district of mostly "local" businesses catering mainly to those who live nearby. This section of Buffalo Avenue east of the I-190, which also includes the adjoining section of Cayuga Drive (Route 265) that it curves into, is in the older section of LaSalle (the eastern half of Niagara Falls, NY) and thus has the issue of "The Property Order" as we saw in the posting by that name on the world and economics blog. There is not the room for massive development and the street is not wide enough for the traffic volume that it would bring.
Conversely the little-used LaSalle Expressway, which runs parallel to Buffalo Avenue some distance to the north, actually helps to preserve this Buffalo Avenue business district. This is done not by bringing traffic to it but by somewhat isolating it. There are few underpasses to get past the LaSalle Expressway, and this encourages residents who live south of this highway to use these local businesses at times rather than getting to the busier business district to the north.
The challenge for downtown Niagara Falls, NY is to bring people in after the end of the summer tourist season, even though the changing patterns brought about by the I-190 make it out of the way and not easy to get to. The construction of the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge, at around the same time as the power project and the I-190, made it so that the Rainbow Bridge, which leads right into Niagara Falls, NY, is no longer the busiest border crossing point in the area.
Previous efforts to revitalize the downtown in the off-season have been the Rainbow Mall and the Festival of Lights. The more recently built casino, appears to be doing well for itself but has not brought prosperity to the surrounding area. There is nostalgia among older Niagarans for Falls Street before Urban Renewal and the building of the I-190, but the truth is that if this downtown street were still there it would probably fare no better than the downtown does today.
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