Is This the Future of Downtown Albuquerque Redevelopment?

I am a pretty big supporter of the redevelopment programs going on in downtown Albuquerque. I am also a critic of it as well. We have a great opportunity to learn from the mistakes of other cities and their redevelopment programs. Unfortunately, I'm not real sure that we are. One concern that I have is that Albuquerque and the Downtown Action Team looking to Denver as its model. A friend of mine from Denver says they took San Diego as their model. And who knows where San Diego got it. But in any case, that model revolves around bringing large corporations downtown, creating a mall-like atmosphere, and eliminating nuisances to the downtown consumer experience. There is even some talk about blocking a section of Central Ave. to traffic and create a foot mall, an idea that I think is bad in the extreme. Here they are clearing riffing on Denver 16th Street Mall, a place that has certainly brought money and people to downtown Denver, but is also an extremely sanitized experience that doesn't leave me at least with any real warm feelings toward the city.

One of the problems with downtown redevelopment is of course what to do with the homeless population. Denver's solution: set up a fake charity as an excuse to crack down on their presence downtown. Albuquerque definitely has its share of homeless folks. And sometimes they do agressively panhandle and I had someone threaten violence against me not long ago down there when I didn't give him money. I fear that Albuquerque, like many cities, will look at the homeless as enemies to the ability to consume and profit in downtown spaces rather than people with real problems that deserve real consideration. What "solutions" like Denver's do is to demonize the homeless rather than look at the facts surrounding that population, including that most of the homeless are women and children, that most homeless people are only homeless for a very short length of time, and it is only a very small percentage of the homeless population who cause major problems, who are on the streets for years, and who can get violent. This recidivism of a very few has proven both extraordinarily expensive for cities to handle and almost impossible to solve.

What we can hope for in the case of Albuquerque is for a more well-thought out response than we are seeing out of Denver, a response that both recognizes the fact that poor people do have a right to the public spaces of the downtown, that there is more to urban life than consumption and profit, and that we need to treat homelessness as part of a larger social fabric of city building rather than seeing them solely as a "problem" that needs a "solution." Alas, I am not confident that Albuquerque can or will show this kind of foresight.

Via YAL and Dexter's Lab