Urban Abandonment: One Way to Cure Congestion

Jeff Wood at Reconnecting America went to the CNU Congress in Madison and all we got was this interview with John Norquist. It happens to be a pretty timely and snappy interview, though.

Angie wrote this morning about Kaid Benfield’s ideas about “right-sizing” Detroit. They focus on how sprawl has hollowed out the inner city while the metro region hasn’t diminished all that much. In his interview with Jeff Wood, Norquist expresses a different take on Detroit:

In an interview with Ben two years ago, Norquist made this point even clearer:

You can of course defeat congestion. Environmentalists sometimes say that you can’t build your way out of congestion; that’s not true. It’s been done in Detroit, they built their way out of congestion. They built all these freeways all over Detroit and congestion is now probably their lowest priority problem. They have a lot of other problems, like they lost more than half their population, most of the jobs, the real estate values collapsed. They tore down all the streetcars by 1956 and built these freeways all over the city. So it does work, if the only priority you have is reducing congestion, you can do it by building these giant roads across cities. But then it’ll hurt the city in every other way and they hurt the national economy too, because your cities are what really drive value.