[PRCo] Re: PAT's cuts

[Fred Schneider]

"K-town" used to have about 200,000 which was 100,000 American sericemen, dependents, retirees and 100,000 Germans.   After we started chopping, I felt rather sorry because they didn't have a congressman to run to.   It wasn't just the military.   One of their biggest factories was the GM engine plant for Opals.   

You work for GM?  

On the subject of urban renewal (runinal?) ... Lancaster, PA tried it too.   David Schuyler, an F&M professor, wrote a book on the subject about how we tear down the bad neighborhoods without considering where the people will move ... it generally creates multiple bad neighborhoods as we move into the future.   He also talks about how we renewed downtown which was aging and tarnished but people went there.   No now no one goes to the block that was renewed. We will now renew it again.   The department store became a bomb fuse factory and now its empty.   The headquarters building for Armstrong Cork is empty.  The hotel ... well it was shut down for an entire year because of unrepaired defects.   Why?  No one goes to city hotels so the city retaliated and built a new one two blocks away ... a convention center ... to compete with it.  That way we can have two empty hotels.   :<)   Who pays for it?   A tax on the suburban hotels / motels.   

http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-02207-8.html


On Dec 4, 2010, at 4:58 AM, Joshua Dunfield wrote:

> On 3 December 2010 15:54, Fred Schneider <fwschneider at comcast.net> wrote:
>> 
>> On Dec 3, 2010, at 4:04 AM, Joshua Dunfield wrote:
>> Wo wohen Sie in Deutschland nun?
> 
> Ich wohne in Kaiserslautern.  (But not for the military.  I don't have
> the red formular they keep asking me for.)
> 
>> The difference between German and U. S. cities that I observed even a half century ago was that those European cities had twice the population in the same size foot print that ours would have.   I was stationed (a military term) in the city of Pirmasens, which had a land area which might accommodate about 25,000 Americans but it contained about 50,000 Germans.   Therefore the streetcar line that vanished in 1943 was replaced by an oberleitungs bus (trolley bus).
> 
> Coincidentally, I ride to work on Pirmasenser Strasse.
> 
> I don't have density numbers for Kaiserslautern.  But you're probably
> right.  Even the parts of town that are "suburban" (which are
> substantial; Allied bombs destroyed nearly half the city) are built on
> a different scale: narrow roads, small garages, smaller yards.
> 
>> ... "It's a German thing isn't it?"
>> 
>> Yes, it is.   It cannot be moved to the United States because we don't comprehend.   We attempted to make pedestrian malls but they fail because the public wants to put their car where they always did.   Remember how East Liberty failed when they tried to change people's habits back in the 1970s.   Or Biloxi or some other cities.
> 
> There's some controversy here about whether the defunct department
> store building should be turned into a mall, or whether a new mall
> should be built, or whether nothing should be built because it would
> cannibalize the pedestrian shopping areas.  This is in addition to
> general concerns about the suburban commercial strips outside town,
> which don't sound so different from concerns about big box stores in
> the US.  The sense I have is that Germans (around here, at least) are
> becoming somewhat more like Americans in these respects.  But I don't
> buy into the idea that the only way society can change is by following
> the trajectory of the US; it has to be possible to go the other way.
> (As Dwight said, the alternative to changing isn't pretty.)
> 
> East Liberty was more of an example (not the only one) of general
> incompetence leading to a bad outcome.  There were a lot of ridiculous
> notions packaged into "urban renewal", combined with some reasonable
> ideas.
> 
> -j.
> 
>