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Tonya's avatar

"the answer is in fact pretty simple: Government intervention got us here."

I always say that whatever people can do can be done more poorly and more expensively by the government.

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Hissyfit's avatar

We had Robert Moses in NYC. The cross Bronx Expressway turned the south Bronx into rubble. In Paris, they hired Andre Malraux to head modernization efforts back in the 1970s I think. Any author who makes great doodles in the margins of his writing of his cats cannot be all bad. Malraux came up with a genius solution. You buy a beautiful old townhouse? You can go wild in the interior but the facade must remain as it was. It preserved so much of the beauty without hamstringing the owners in their quest to make it the home they wanted. The huge highways are on the periphery and there was — even when I had a Paris apartment so very long ago — a bullet underground train that could convey you from one end of Paris to the other in minutes. It was built below the metro lines as I recall. They had underground parking so you could park and walk a block to the Champs Elysees. Not saying that Paris is the place I used to enjoy as a part time home anymore but I watched their approach to upgrading infrastructure and those practiced here and there were so many differences.

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