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In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
Derby, CT is a small, working-class, post-industrial town with a population which has been stagnant at about 12,000 for more than six decades.
The geniuses over at the Connecticut DOT decided that this obviously meant that the town's Main Street needed to be widened, by twice the size, destroying a number of historic buildings and uprooting numerous small community businesses in the process. That red stripe on the far left of the "After" pic is the new edge of the street.
Old buildings like that can have massive maintenance, repair, and sustained costs while also being undesirable for businesses for a lack of modern infrastructure. Given the field behind them, these weren't central to the town and likely a good call to tear down.
How the space was used after that's a different discussion.
The space will be used for a parking lot (originally was supposed to have a cycletrack, but that was deleted as well).
The project cost is $25 million. There will be long-term pavement maintenance costs that comes with the wider highway, not to mention the giant parking lot that is going in. There will be lost property tax revenue, and more death/injury. So it is highly doubtful the refurb costs of the buildings on that block would have been remotely close to all that.
A town that has been stagnant at 12000 people for 60 years doesn't spend, hell, doesnt have $25M to spend, for a project like this. There has got to be more to this story because this just doesn't make sense
Knock down buildings and widen a road, spending a lot of money and ruining infrastructure, to put in a parking lot in a town that sees no growth?