So many great ideas sound so simple, so obvious after development and actualization, right?
Velcro. Tupperware. The cheeseburger. Buying a condo in Manhattan's West Village in 1987.
Our sardonic and wonderfully observant friends at The Onion think urban redevelopment, or infill, is no exception. In this piece,
available here, The Onion writes about how "Mayor Hits On Crazy Idea of Developing City's Waterfront, Green Spaces". From the piece:
Though the proposal [to convert unused and blighted lakefront into a family- and business-friendly hub] has received cautious support, city council president Melvin Witherspoon told reporters that the mayor's idea to open the refurbished waterfront with a weekend-long street festival was 'the unhigned ranting of a madman'.
What's especially fun for us at the Land Use Litigator is that this gem indicates the Monday-morning brilliance of and consensus behind the actualization of urban revitalization. In other words, land use is now in the parody mainstream. Reinvention, evolution and innovation is still occuring, and urban living is becoming so desirable as to appear to have been painfully obvious along the way.
Man, I can't wait for the inevitable Saturday Night Live skit about wetland mitigation.
Thanks to our friend Professor John Infranca
@JohnInfranca for alerting us to this lighthearted but consequential little piece.
