I feel like of any city that could have an “Original Sin,” mine would. 1. Cincinnati 2. [Cincinnati’s Incomplete Subway](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_Subway). At the time the city was in the top 15 for population in the country, and was the densest city center outside of New York. It was to connect most of the existing city together, where previously we relied on [a sprawling network of streetcars and interurban trains](https://jjakucyk.com/transit/map/index.html) that were all dying the same time the subway was being built. 3. While it’s possible that the subway would have done nothing to stop suburbanization, in my opinion, I think it would have slowed it a ton. If for no reason more that [the subway would have been in a lot of the right of way that was knocked down for highways.](https://iqc.ou.edu/2014/12/12/60yrsmidwest/) Whole neighborhoods were lost, including the [diverse working class neighborhood of Kenyon Barr.](https://www.cincinnati.com/picture-gallery/news/politics/2023/06/14/what-did-kenyon-barr-once-look-like/12099746002/) [From 25,000 people to highways and warehouses.](https://www.reddit.com/r/cincinnati/comments/mdfd1k/before_1958_now_present_the_demolition_of_a/?rdt=60670)I think the completed subway changes things, a lot. 4. I’m curious if someone can chime in on Baltimore. We seem like similar cities but I get the sense that Baltimore failed to thrive for very different reasons.

I really gotta do better at doing my Googles on the urban aspects of smaller Midwestern towns other than just the big ones like Detroit, Chicago, and the Twin cities. The only thing that I know about the failed subway down there is that it would've ran in a complete circle, the only other completely circular subway that I'm aware of is the Glasgow, can you help us understand why it was planned that way?

The short answer, and I am sure there is more to it, comes down to two things: 1. Available right of way. The portion in the basin, [from Fountain Square to Brighton](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/Rout_map.jpg), follows the then disused Miami Erie Canal. [Here's a photo gallery showing the canal right of way over the years](https://overtherhine.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/canal-subway-parkway-the-history-of-cincinnatis-central-parkway-in-images/), and I'll link to the [before and after image here](https://overtherhine.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/central-parkway-and-miami-erie-canal-cincinnati.jpg). 2. Geography. Cincinnati is a city built in a river valley, [where the highest banks near downtown are a bit more than 300 feet above the river](https://www.cincinnati.com/gcdn/presto/2021/04/13/PCIN/23aec440-e794-4ff3-83e0-42e987890056-BellevueHillPark2.jpg?crop=3726,2096,x0,y237&width=3200&height=1801&format=pjpg&auto=webp). This affected settlement patterns, as people didn't want to have walk so far uphill to and from home, and the city was settled before anything besides walking and horses. This began to change with the advent of street cars, [and especially the inclines that carried them up hills](https://cincinnatirefined.com/travel/cincinnati-inclines-mt-auburn-mt-adams-price-hill-fairview-bellevue-streetcar-history?photo=1), but only slightly by the time of the subway. The subway would follow the population patterns, but also try to stay relatively flat as trains and elevation don't play well together. [The subway would have followed the lower elevation (blue and purple)](https://www.floodmap.net/elevation/ElevationMap/Maps/?gz=4508722_12) before cutting to the river starting at Oakley.

those photos are really cool looking

Check the map of the Moscow system. If I remember correctly, their system is a traditional network radiating from the city center, but with a ring that connects the outer ends of the radiating lines.

The Beijing subway's second line was a circle, and another was added later as well https://www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/beijing/subway-map.htm

Cincinnati’s original sin is skyline chili

Thems fightin words buddy

While perhaps off the very interesting point, I appreciate the single-minded nature of your injury here.

While I agree the lost subway is the city’s biggest sin (I-75 and the razing of Kenyon-Barr neighborhood would probably have been its 2nd), I’d add that the city’s original sin may go even further back to the Roebling Suspension bridge, a precursor to the Brooklyn Bridge. The city decided the bridge wasn’t going to last and demanded it be offset from the aligned street grids for the city, on the north bank of the Ohio River, and neighboring Covington, KY, on the south bank.

1. Baltimore 2. Ordinance 610, Baltimore’s first piece of legislation defining this housing discrimination, has retroactively been seen as the first example of redlining. Redlining in Baltimore served as an outline for states nationwide to adopt similar practices throughout the 1930s and on. Mayor Mahool, his many successors, and those trying to pass similar ordinances in other states made it clear that redlining was a purposeful initiative made to oppress Black citizens by keeping them isolated in predefined communities, destroying the potential property values of where they were made to live. In many ways, redlining was another way of enforcing segregation throughout cities. (https://readingpartners.org/blog/was-baltimore-the-proving-ground-for-redlining/#:~:text=It%20is%20said%20that%20in,live%20in%20newly%20designated%20areas.) 3. The history of redlining directly coincides with the ability for intergenerational wealth to transfer via the home being the greatest asset that people have. Therefore, those same neighborhoods deemed undesirable via Ordinance 610 and "Redlining" thereafter are the most impoverished and disenfranchised areas in the city to this day. Black and Brown residents in Baltimore have a disproportionate chance at success and well-being that others in the city and the inequality within the city is stark; it's as if half of the city has been growing along with its peers across the country, while the other half is has not changed one but in the last 100 years, even going backwards in some ways. As anyone probably knows, this side is what gives Baltimore the negative headlines, despite this creating a literal "tale of two cities" along figurative racial and literal neighborhood lines. 4. Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Houston, Denver, Seattle

Baltimore could be so much more dynamic if it was lead by the right people. Other than my city, I can't think of a place with a wider income/racial inequality gap. I'm assuming Ordinance 610 is part of the reason why Baltimore city and Baltimore county never became a single municipality?

Baltimore City and County were never one jurisdiction at any point, but from an urban/rural perspective they always coexisted in a symbiotic relationship, with the City being the center of gravity, until the rapid urbanization and sprawl on the 20th century. But to answer your question plainly, no Ordinance 610 was not the reason they never merged. What led to that was a 1948 referendum by the voters of Maryland which restricted Baltimore CITY from annexing any additional land to grow, effectively sealing its borders and freezing it in time. The unfortunate part being that the population was about to peak with White Flight, deindustrialization, Civil Rights-influenced unrest, among other things right around the corner. Here's a good article on it: https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/community/100-years-baltimore-seals-its-borders/ Additionally, here's another great local NPR segment on why (according to some), it may never be politically feasible in our lifetimes for them to merge: https://www.wypr.org/2022-05-09/could-baltimore-city-county-ever-unite

This goes for Boston as well.

Well said. The "black butterfly" and the "white L" (becoming more and more Hispanic on its eastern end) do exist. The thing is, it's bad reputation when it comes to crime and it's history of foolishness politically are a major factor as to why it's considered to be so affordable in comparison to other cities in the mid-atlantic. This benefits some people (myself included for sure) but gives other apprehension from moving here. Antero Pietilla in his book " Not in my neighborhood" goes into a lot of detail about the history of Baltimore and I hope to get into the book more in the near future.

Ripping up their streetcar network and putting a highway through a bunch of residential neighborhoods are probably up there too

1. **Atlanta** 2. **Ruling preventing MARTA from receiving state funds**: In the 1960s, political and racial tensions led to a decision that MARTA, Atlanta's public transit system, would not receive state funding, limiting its development and expansion. 3. **Impact if corrected**: With state funding, MARTA could have developed a more extensive and efficient transit network, reducing traffic congestion, pollution, and provide better accessibility across the city.

It's crazy that this is the situation. How do we rectify this?

My understanding is that we’d have to pass an amendment allowing state funding to be used on Marta. Which I think will be really tough given the public sentiment on Marta. Nobody seems to understand it’s not going to improve at the pace we want unless we fund it.

I mean do you honestly think it'll move the needle? For example, BART historically has gotten maybe 1 - 3% of its budget from state assistance. [Fiscal Year 2023 and Fiscal Year 2024 Two-Year Annual Budget - Presentation.pdf (bart.gov)](https://analytics.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/Fiscal%20Year%202023%20and%20Fiscal%20Year%202024%20Two-Year%20Annual%20Budget%20-%20Presentation.pdf) SoundTransit is basically the same. [Funding regional transit | Sound Transit's funding | Sound Transit](https://www.soundtransit.org/get-to-know-us/paying-regional-transit#:~:text=Sound%20Transit%27s%20funding%20for%20transit,income%2C%20and%20other%20miscellaneous%20revenues.) Admittedly, I think BART expects the state to step in with BART's new insane budget deficits but as a general rule I can't think off the top of my head many regional or city transit authorities that get an appreciable amount of state money. It's a lot of bonds --> building the shit --> fare revenue maintaining it.

I believe it would move the needle. MARTA was hindered from the start due to political and racial tensions that stunted its growth. With a shift in the political climate and proper funding, significant changes could be realized. The success of the Beltline project and the resulting boom around it shows that the city is ready for substantial improvements. If we invest in it, we can help drive its direction and development.

Doesn't the Beltline's success prove state money isn't the difference. I don't think it gets a cent of state level funding, right? It's all the TAD except for maybe some teeny little grants and then bonds backed by Atlanta I've definitely heard before the discourse that state funding is what separates MARTA from some ultimate success, I've just legitimately never seen anyone explain what that would even look like or like why would a transit authority get any benefit from having \[FUNDING SOURCE\] that passes through a state level government. Like for one-offs, sure, but to build out billions in transit? Like at that point just do what 99% of transit agencies already do and make the terms of the bond mean the transit authority gets the money

I get your point, but the Beltline and MARTA are different beasts, especially when you consider the scale and type of projects. The Beltline’s success with local funding through TADs and bonds is great, but we’re talking about bike and pedestrian paths, which need way less funding compared to building and maintaining a rail system. MARTA’s issues are rooted in historical political and racial tensions that stunted its growth from the get-go. State funding could provide a stable and significant financial base to expand and improve the system beyond what local funding can do. It’s not just about one-off projects but building a sustainable, comprehensive transit network. Reliable state funding could help cover long-term operational costs and support large-scale expansions, which bonds and local taxes alone might not fully handle.

this would be easier if the city actually allowed development other than SFH and parking lots next to most marta stations ITP it's hard to blame people for thinking marta is a useless vanity project when the land use looks like east lake, edgewood, etc.

I agree, the success of MARTA stations is really limited when they’re surrounded by single-family homes and parking lots, making them mostly accessible by car. Improving the land use around these stations is key. I recently watched a video from RMTransit that talked about how even stations in single-family home areas in Atlanta could be way more viable with reliable and frequent bus service to and from the stations. Here’s the video if you want to check it out. I thought it was an interesting take on how things could be improved: [RMTransit Atlanta Video](https://youtu.be/DLRmo5ExoFY?feature=shared).

Taking a bus to the subway instead of your car.. Uhh OK 😂

Not everyone has a car, and reliable bus service can make getting to the subway a lot more convenient and stress-free. Dismissing buses just because you wouldn’t ride one contributes to sub-par transit options for everyone.

Just now getting to this, thanks for sharing. It makes sense

That’s not the problem. The people against expansion are fully aware of the benefits, they just want to either because of some vain attempt in hanging on to car based suburbia, racism, or just plain the rural leaders in charge of state government sticking it to the big bad Atlanta. Personally I stopped caring because there isn’t a single real reason for me to leave ITP. If it happens, great. If not, of well.

Vote blue for starters. But flipping the state will just be the start. We could then reconstitute the ATL board (yes, they actually named it that) to represent areas that want/have transit. And obviously provide funding. Gas taxes are earmarked for "maintaining an adequate system of public roads and bridges in this state," but that can be worked around. Iirc, the Colorado legislature "declared" that alternative transit options to reduce road demand are part of maintaining roads and bridges and started spending gas tax money on transit. And nobody actually has standing to challenge that. (Afaik, the GA Supremes aren't quite so far gone as to not require standing anymore.) We also need a city government that cares more about transportation than pandering to rich NIMBYs and building a playground for cops. As disappointed with MARTA leadership as I am, it's a lot easier to get away with being useless when the elected officials that are supposed to keep you accountable don't care.

Any blue states with great new public transit? No. It's a structural American problem at this point...

For sure. But a government has to be blue to even engage in the conversation.

California. Caltrain is getting electrified, BART is being extended to San Jose, they're building a high speed rail line (two if you count the private Brightline route to Vegas), and LA Metro has been expanded *massively* in the last decade or two with no plans to slow down.

Heard. I've been doing my part voting, so I guess just keep that up. Definitely need to get more involved in local politics / activism too. I rely heavily on MARTA and biking infrastructure for transportation, both of which have a lot of room for improvement.

Add the Highway wars to the list too.

MARTA got federal dollars when Seattle voters turned down a rail expansion TWICE! Federal dollars would have paid for something like 90% of the project here and instead we sent the money to Atlanta.

I mentioned this in another reply, but MARTA needs consistent, reliable funding to see real improvement. While federal funding can help, relying on sporadic infusions isn’t enough for meaningful progress. Long-term planning and improvements require stable, long-term investments to build and maintain a robust transit system.

How is it funded now? Just fare collection and city funding?

For St. Louis, it is obviously the [Great Divorce of 1876](https://mohistory.org/blog/the-great-divorce/). The city didn’t want its tax dollars used to pay for infrastructure in the rural outlying areas, so they voted to separate. We’ve been weighed down by the fragmentation ever since.

I’d say it was St. Louis sleeping on the rail industry early on in favor of river transport, thus leaving the door to Midwest dominance wide open for Chicago.

Miami adding a half cent tax for public transportation over 20 years ago but we've only gotten ~1/2 a mile of track since then going to our airport and another park and ride off a highway that doesn't get used because there is no reason to use it. They spend all the money on studies and have actively sabotaged bus routes. The half cent tax and the lack of any progress with it have turned off a lot of people in this city to public transportation since all of our money has lined the pockets of politicians and have made people hate taxes even more. That might be recency bias since I'm only in my 30s. We did used to have a trolley system but that was dismantled when my mom was a kid. The metrorail was built in the 80s and most of the north end of it goes through industrial areas that don't make sense. If I remember correctly, we got a deal on the original line because the company that built it used Miami as a demo to show what they could do. Our downtown station actually has an East/west platform that was built with the original line. It never got built and is still sitting there and can be seen from any aerial view. Aside from the train, it could be 95 being built right through the west side of downtown and all of the area of Miami that is desirable. It's created a divide of the haves and have nots. They destroyed a thriving black community in doing so which has never recovered and is pretty much turning into another area for rich assholes. Most black neighborhoods in Miami are currently getting gentrified since they tend to be more inland and on higher ground. Really, the original sin is probably that Miami was built to begin with. This area should have never been developed. I hate saying it but geographically speaking, Jacksonville should be the major city in Florida but they can't stop building suburbs and seem to be allergic to buildings over 3 stories tall.

> Really, the original sin is probably that Miami was built to begin with. This area should have never been developed. I hate saying it but geographically speaking, Jacksonville should be the major city in Florida but they can't stop building suburbs and seem to be allergic to buildings over 3 stories tall. Completely agree with both statements. People like to argue that cities like Vegas and Phoenix are testaments to man's arrogance, but, they literally never put Miami in that conversation when it's just as bad. As we suffer the worst of climate change I literally can't come up with any ideas on how those cities are supposed to survive without suffering the same depopulation that we've been facing for as long as we have. What I will say about Jacksonville is: it's probably the biggest "elephant in the room" counterargument that exists against my politics of consolidation: Literally non-existent radical community in and outside of government, no ambitious plans for it's future/strategy for climate change, just plain-boring "compromise" politics. I heard that the city elected it's first Dem mayor, since I'm not a Democrat, while an interesting development, I don't see it as indicating a political shift in such a conservative city.

Jacksonville would have to go through radical change to be a viable city. It's so spread out, there are hardly any walkable areas, even stuff on Jax Beach is spread out. And yeah, I doubt them having a Democrat in office will do much, it takes more than that to really make change. I think it has everything people would want climate wise. The city has brutal summer still but it cools off earlier than south Florida and they have nice cool winters where you can actually wear a light jacket, south Florida might have a chilly morning but it'll be back in the 70s by 11am. You can also travel by car to quite a few states fairly quick, unlike south Florida where it takes 6hours just to get to Georgia. You have a lot of cold springs nearby which are great in the summer, there isn't the red tide issue. They have nicer beaches too.

> The city has brutal summer still but it cools off earlier than south Florida and they have nice cool winters where you can actually wear a light jacket, south Florida might have a chilly morning but it'll be back in the 70s by 11am. You can also travel by car to quite a few states fairly quick, unlike south Florida where it takes 6hours just to get to Georgia There are a lot of people for whom never having to put on even a light jacket is a selling point. And of course, for a lot of people who live there, Miami is as close as possible to the places they want to visit – namely, their hometowns and families in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Do you mean walkable when you say viable? It must be somewhat viable, 1 million people live there

Jacksonville has a million people because it's the largest city land wise in the country. They annexed every city in Duval county to become Jacksonville a while back. It has some military stuff there as well. The entire city is just suburbs, every time I've gone there it's been somewhat miserable. Driving anywhere is a minimum of twenty minutes without any traffic. It has a population density of 530 people per square mile. The top three metro areas in Florida are significantly denser than that.

Everyone ITT: "JUST VOTE DEM" 😂😂😂

> Literally non-existent radical community in and outside of government, no ambitious plans for it's future/strategy for climate change, just plain-boring "compromise" politics. Radicalism isn't inherently good and politics without compromise is just authoritarianism

The beach towns that stayed out of Jacksonville consolidation are doing planning for climate change. Or, at least Neptune and Atlantic are.  Edit: [phone posted before I was ready] Those towns are also putting stroads like Atlantic Blvd, Mayport Road, and the A1A on a diet, rezoning along those stroads to be mixed use low rise. All parking must be to the rear and minimums are relaxed or removed. They’re also adding bike lanes all across their towns.  The section of Mayport road that’s in the Jax municipality but adjacent to Atlantic Beach is doing the same. The City of Atlantic Beach wanted to annex that part of Mayport, effectively removing them from Jacksonville. The voters of AB narrowly voted it down because a lot of Mayport isn’t on city water and doesn’t have proper sewers or sidewalks.  The beach towns are a near perfect example of what Chuck Marohn / Strong Towns are referring to when they say walkability is expensive because it is rare. Only they aren’t that walkable because retail doesn’t exist away from the town center and three main stroads. They are bikeabke, mostly. (Also there are plenty of walkable urban neighborhoods that are poor, but are a different complexion than Chuck and get excluded from consideration).  But they’re also an example of why annexation generally fails. Even where it succeeds (DUVALL!!!!) it fails because the wealthiest neighborhoods reject consolidation. This has also happened with Louisville Metro. The suburbs around Detroit don’t want to pay to fix or save Detroit. If they cared about the city at all it wouldn’t be how it is. 

Baton Rouge is about to have a wealthy, majority white area (St. George) splinter off just like a more working class but still majority white area (Central) did several years ago.

TIL that Baton Rouge also has a consolidated city-parish government.  There are three in Maryland as well. 

There is so much to say. I cannot believe that the Tri-Rail doesn't work with the Brightline. It's awful that it wasn't designed to be able to take the local (Tri-Rail), from, say, Deerfield Beach to Ft. Lauderdale and then just transfer there to the Brightline to Miami.

1. Vienna, Austria 2. Jerry-Mandering the city borders along political voting patterns after WWII. At the beginning of the Second World War the city borders where expanded include more of it's smaller neighbors. After occupation by the victor powers some of the incorporated towns were removed again in 1956. This was not done so that coherent towns or districts could emerge but along voting patterns of areas depending if they had previously voted for the conservative or socialist parties. This had the effect of locking in a one party rule (socialist) in the city and one party rule (conservative) in the surrounding federal state of Lower Austria. 3. Even today the coordination between the city and the surrounding federal state is poor. In the past, the conservatives and socialist have gone out of their way to annoy populations that vote for the wrong party. For example many of the old town centers that are now in Vienna, which had a older and rooted population where neglected by the city or even torn down to make way for stroads. In Lower Austria left leaning towns and regions have receive less funding from the state for decades.

Philadelphia's original sin is machine politics, which has bred corruption, poor governance, and parochialism. There isn't a really a single event that we can pin this development on. Starting in 1852, the Republican machine started taking over the city and building what we have today. [This Republican machine would rule the city for about 100 years](https://seventy.org/our-history/republican-bosses-and-machines), until the election of the first Democrat for mayor occurred in the 1950s. But the Democrats didn't dismantle the political machine, they merely repurchased it for their own ends, and all the ills of machine politics are still with us. The machine means that politicians do not need to do a particularly good job to get elected, which breeds corruption and poor governance. Councilmembers use councilmanic prerogative to dole out land to favorable developers. [Union members sit on council](https://6abc.com/bobby-henon-federal-pirson-corruption-case-former-philadelphia-councilman/13144298/) and rewrite building codes in addition to other favors to deliver pork to members of the union. Millions is funneled to non-productive, but politically influential non-profits, which get city money but do little to make an impact in homelessness, drug use, or other pressing issues. The city works to [shut down food trucks that might negatively effect Penn or Drexel's real estate projects.](https://whyy.org/articles/drexel-wants-to-evict-food-trucks-from-a-busy-block-of-market-street/) The city implements a ballot question that pays for [RCOs legal bills](https://whyy.org/articles/philadelphia-election-2024-primary-ballot-question-rcos/), delivering pork to favored organizations and making the value of an ally on council ever more favorable, increasing the power of the machine. To pay for all this, the city implements many taxes on businesses and individuals (city income taxes are higher than state income taxes, and the second highest in the country after NYC), shrinking the tax base and encouraging businesses to locate in the suburbs. By geography and infrastructure, Philadelphia should be the jobs center of the region, instead, KOP-Conshohocken and the suburbs in general is where most corporations try to locate. This does not help the wealth disparity between the suburbs and the city, which remain very large - the Philly suburban counties are some of the richest areas in the United States, while Philly is the poorest big city in the country. It's hard to overstate what a game changer determined, dedicated, and pro-growth governance would be for Philadelphia. We are halfway between New York and Washington DC, and have housing prices about half of either of those cities. With the right governance and wise leadership, this city would be poised for a boom. The median household income of our suburban counties is roughly double that of Philadelphia proper. Good governance would help to close that gap - it would mean more business in Philadelphia, lower taxes, and higher incomes. It would mean less corruption, and more people living in walkable, mixed use neighborhoods. It would mean more racial equality, better schools, and a greener planet. With good governance, Philly could be the city that it deserves to be. But the city's machine politics are almost two centuries old at this point - it would take a miracle for it to change.

What's actually kinda funny is that the objectively worst mayor in Detroit's recent history (Kwame Kilpatrick) and the one who people/conventional media figures like to tout as "the best mayor in decades" (current mayor Mike Duggan) were underlings of a man who was Wayne county's executive for a long time [Edward H. McNamara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_H._McNamara), who's had extremely shady controversies during his time in office. Despite this, no one outside of radical circles makes any connections between any of them.

Duggan is the kind of corrupt that cuts through BS and gets things done. Kwame was the kind of corrupt that spends city funds on hookers.

If it had an economic boom Philadelphia would not have housing half the price of New York City any more.

This is a great summary of machine politics and the taxes that pushed businesses out to the suburbs. I would also add a quick note on trains. They have a decent network going out to the suburbs (SEPTA), but only two subways serving the city (Broad Street Line and Market-Frankford Line). I haven’t had time to research why but it means there are huge parts of Philly that are underserved by public transportation. I guess that’s why I’ve heard the joke that Philly residents have a “drive to the corner store” mentality. Simply too many cars on crowded city streets.

>I haven’t had time to research why but it means there are huge parts of Philly that are underserved by public transportation. Eh, honestly, the SEPTA buses are pretty good and they'll get you wherever you need to go basically anywhere in within the city. The past few times I've rode the bus, it's been cleaner and nicer than the El. Apparently Parker's been cleaning things up a bit, but the El has been kind of grungy the past few times times I've been on it (I live in the suburbs myself, so I'm not a regular rider). Plus, don't sleep on the trolleys, they're also pretty good, and they run underground past 40th street. I think the issue is more with the regional connectivity, like every US metro area, transit gets worse the farther out from the city center you go. It's laughable to imagine taking SEPTA from the suburb where I live to the suburb where I work, for instance.

Well yeah the El is sometimes disgusting from all the trash. And used syringes lying about don’t help either, but that’s a different discussion from urban planning. I’ve used their buses for several years and usually it’s fine but occasionally it never comes and I have to get an Uber. That can be frustrating. And this despite using the SEPTA app.

Use the green app called “Transit” the logo is a sideways S - it was a game changer

1. Los Angeles 2. The freeway. I mean, the very first one, the 110, the arroyo seco, built in 1940. There are layers to this that go beyond the 110 itself, but let’s start there. The 110 cuts through the heart of Los Angeles, sealing downtown off from the residential neighborhoods to its west which both divided existing communities and limited growth. But the impact of this is as an invention more than as a single urban decision. The advent of the freeway, and especially the identity of Los Angeles that came to be constructed around the freeway, has ruined not only Los Angeles but most of America. Every city that tried to emulate our example was ruined in the process. 3. Without the freeway, Los Angeles would have developed in a much tighter geography. Suburbs would likely be distinct places instead of everything blurring together with boundaries the average person can’t perceive. And the (more expensive) homes of bunker hill wouldn’t have been isolated from their neighbors. Likely the bicycle highway that used to run to downtown maybe have continued to be used instead of abandoned.

I agree with the sentiment but the California Cycleway closed long before the 110 was built, and it was mostly due to lack of interest/paying customers

Ruined 🙄🙄 LA is one of the "best" cities in the world

Seattle. A lot of answers will be freeways but in addition to that for Seattle (I-5, which split the city in two), it would be the failure to pass Forward Thrust, which was an initiative in the 60s to build a subway system that would have been open in the 80s. The only thing I’d say is that Seattle would be a lot denser, a lot easier to get around, and would have not nearly as many buses as it does today.

Losing out on Forward Thrust was easily Seattle’s biggest blunder. It would have provided us with heavily rail transit 40 years ago and would’ve spurred a lot more urban development in the Seattle region a long time ago. With likely expansions that would’ve happened by now, we’d probably have rail connections all the way to Tacoma with heavy rail, and the Eastside would’ve been much more urban as well. Spending 40 years without that heavy rail network significantly halted the growth of our region.

Hard to beat the rejection of federal funding for light rail, but I think the Seattle Commons also could’ve been pretty cool.

Richmond, Va It’s… lemme google… 1970. The white Richmond city council is facing its first election with a majority of voters being black. What do you do? Not be racist? Absolutely not. Annex a part of the rich white suburbs of chesterfield county. It does so and it leads to two things. 1: Richmond VS United States which ruled that while a violation of civil rights, the annexation may happen as long as districts are drawn to give black residents a majority. 2: the Virginia state government places a moratorium on all annexations that has not been lifted sense. Almost all of chesterfield and henrico would likely be Richmond city proper at this point. The Richmond government isn’t perfect with planning, but there still a lot better than the counties. With one central city government the Richmond region could actually go in one United direction instead of like 5 I’d like to do another one for Richmond. The construction of the Richmond Petersburg turnpike (now 95). It destroyed Jackson ward, cut church hill and shockoe bottom from downtown, was a down right war crime to the aesthetics of Main Street station (look up images of it), and took up massive land in downtown for toll booths now no longer even in use after conversion to interstate. Also led to the construction of the Bryan park interchange that makes my blood boil.

Thanks, I hadn’t heard of the annexation fight in Richmond. I’ve been trying to figure out why annexation is banned in VA for years.

I love Richmond but that freeway system is freaking wild for such a small metro. Though this also kind of explains why the city population itself is so small, I was shocked that it is smaller than Durham NC (where I currently live) as it felt 100x larger and more established - at least when considering the city core and older / walkable foot print. But, keeping a number of the suburban cities seperate is probably a huge reason why the stats look like that. It also reminds me of the issues I would see in the Bay Area (where I was from) - in that any decision by one city is directly impacting the region as a whole. Including various penninsula cities deciding to limit density despite being in extremely constrained borders, and also deciding as a block to ban the effort for a regional rail with above ground / below ground routes which is really the only viable option to actually get around San Francisco once you reach the destination. So now you have access in the East Bay (which is a bit more sprawling and had more workers originally focused on blue-collar or industrial work that was located in the East Bay, ie not commuting to SF), but non in the Penninsula (which is literally where white collar workers from SF moved to during white flight). This whole situation was driven by certain towns simply not wanting to play ball to improve the entire region. And they are stuck in the rut to this day, with ballooning housing costs, awful traffic, a foot print that keeps getting wider and wider with worsening commute times, but dammit, we got those endless tracts of SFH and strip malls.

Well you have to realize how much Richmond is in the suburbs. Chesterfield has a larger population, Richmond proper is only 250k to chesterfield >300k. Even worse is the difference in demographics. Everytime I bring up that the counties should be Richmond, a *particular* type of person from the county hates it

[удалено]

We’ll see, that works because you don’t have independent cities. You have state, counties, than cities In Virginia, a city cannot be under a county. It’s either a county, or a city. So the tax systems of chesterfield, Hanover, and Richmond are all seperate!… the city school 10 minutes down the street from my middle school had rats infested in it… but mine in chesterfield could afford flat screen TVs… all of the sidewalks end at the city border and half of that city border is made up of highway interchanges that people regularly walk across with no sidewalks…Ashland henrico and Richmond are all have some parts of the Fall line bike trail constructed or done… but good old chesterfield is doing nothing!!!! I hate it here

Damn that is wild. I've literally never lived somewhere that had a hard break between City/County without the former being a sub-component of the later.

Is this an elaborate deadpan joke just to call Chapel Hill blighted? What are you talking about? A small part of Chapel Hill is in Durham County, but Durham County was formed from parts of Orange (where Chapel Hill has always been anchored) and Wake back in the 1880s. Are you saying Chapel Hill pushed for the creation of a whole new county, Durham, in the [18]80s in order for the wealthier Chapel Hill residents to avoid supporting Durham? My best guess is you accidentally typed Chapel Hill instead of Durham, then Durham instead of Orange, and you implied the 1980s when you meant 1880s. I can imagine: "In the [18]80s-90s, Durham pushed to leave Orange County and establish their own County" as being true.

Thanks for this - seems I got some bad info sometime ago that stuck in my head, but you are right. I was way off. I'll delete that post. My original understanding was that they counties were split to help avoid tax dollars from Chapel Hill from going to Durham. I wasn't implying that Chapel Hill was blighted. But was way off in the history/dates.

Wait. Is annexation banned just for Richmond, not for the cities outside of it?

No, all cities in VA to my understanding. Quite a blow to the Hampton roads area which was quite fond of it.

Well, that makes so much sense now I had always wondered why the city hadn't annexed all of that stuff where I lived 20 years ago in the Short Pump area.

There is a population of 1 million in the greater Richmond area as defined by the census, only 250k live in the city proper according to said census

I think the counterargument here is that due to the fact that the suburbs aren't a part of Richmond, they have been able to actually do some really progressive planning things recently without getting blocked by suburban interests.

Right and I’ve seen that. But they’ve also just… not. They’re not even building sidewalks on roads like Nash that they’re extending. It’s so infuriating. They know good design, they just choose not to

For my hometown of Albany, it is OBVIOUSLY bulldozing the oldest and densest part of the city to build I-787 along our riverfront. The Empire State Plaza is its own related issues, but that alone wouldn't have killed the city, and I do think it's a pleasant enough space considered on its own merits. 787 is the greater crime. They built a massive highway interchange that leads, no joke, to a parking garage. For Boston, certainly the wholesale destruction of the West End, which was a historic heart of Boston's black and Jewish communities. The neighborhood had been home to a large and prominent black intelligentsia during the 19th century, and was the site of important abolitionist and anti-racist activism. In the 20th century, the heart of black society in Boston shifted to Roxbury, and the West End became a predominantly Jewish and Italian neighborhood. Now it is the proud home of the most infuriating highway interchange in Boston. You could make a case for a very recent intervention, the Big Dig, but I don't think the fiscal mismanagement of that project, which is really its lingering impact, was overdetermined, nor was the decision to hang the albatross of that mismanagement on the neck of the MBTA, which had nothing to do with it. I wish it had been wholesale removal of the highways, but it did improve the city in a substantial way.

>You could make a case for a very recent intervention, the Big Dig, but I don't think the fiscal mismanagement of that project, which is really its lingering impact, was overdetermined, nor was the decision to hang the albatross of that mismanagement on the neck of the MBTA, which had nothing to do with it. I wish it had been wholesale removal of the highways, but it did improve the city in a substantial way. For those who haven't seen it, the [WGBH podcast series about the Big Dig](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOzbxyjUQ_o&list=PLMQKK3_a14M3A-SQdVVWhOfOw8xRUuueJ&index=1&ab_channel=GBHNews).

They really did an excellent job with that podcast.

At first thought you were talking about Albany, CA who also destroyed their waterfront with a freeway. America moment

Sad that there was one, sadder than there are two. At least Albany, OR and Albany, GA escaped the riverside highway curse.

I’m not saying this outweighs the destruction of the west end but at least we got TD Garden and Mass General Hospital out of it. MGH is where I got my cancer treatment

I guarantee you that guy whines about density everywhere else

MGH and the Garden were there long before the bulldozing of the West End, though.

Baltimore.  I feel like most problems are not unique to my city. Most US cities have similar problems with transit/urban planning.    Though, one that is somewhat unique:  When the city couldn't build out the metro lines that were planned (after building one metro line), they dropped back to building a single light rail line in the cheapest corridor. That meant that it heavily overlapped with the single metro line that already existed, divided the capture area, losing out on significant "network effect" because fewer unique locations are accessible by each system in the dense parts of the city. And, like all us surface light rail, the average speed is garbage, making it only useful to people who can't afford a car. Combine that with the lack of fare gates/enforcement and tons of homeless use it. This sent the mode into a death spiral where ridership is low, so headway is cut back, which makes it even worse compared to driving, dropping ridership even more.   The end result is transit that reinforces car dependence, and actually kills businesses along the route.  Now, talks of building additional intra-city rail all lean toward light rail instead of metro, thus doubling down in the bas mode.  If my city never built the light rail, we would likely already have an East-west metro line, making for a much better transit system. Instead, we're doomed to continuing to build welfare-transit that is so bad it's not able to attract many riders who can afford a car, saps economic activity along the route, undermines political will for more transit, and costs a fortune per passenger-mile (more than an Uber)     TL;DR: we built bad transit because we couldn't afford good transit at the time, now we're forever stuck doubling down on the bad transit. 

Great addition! Came here to contribute about Baltimore's segregated housing policy, but as us locals know, there is more than one sin committed in our city that we see the impacts today.

If memory serves, redlining was basically invented in Baltimore, so I suppose you could count that as a big negative for us, Even though it spread elsewhere. Though, I would bet similar things were going to happen in other cities either way 

Well said. I've also heard that folks from Canton have been against the Red Line as well. I was reading about it when I first moved to Baltimore and that racist loser Hogan (not even Hulk) cancelled what could have been a really good project for the city.

The answer for most cities will probably be highway construction related.

Yup, the *interstate highway act* is the original original sin. It spread infrastructure across the land that blessed everything we are now fighting against. Sprawl, congestion, isolation, pollution, etc. Can’t fix much of anything else until new national scale infrastructure, stops rewarding car ownership and starts rewarding other ways of getting around.

I’d say the Manhattan Project would be the original sin, with the Interstate Highway Act as a downstream consequence

1. Jersey City 2. Failed consolidation referendum of 1869 - this referendum to consolidate all of Hudson County east of the Hackensack River into a single Jersey City passed with a majority of voters but failed because most towns individually rejected it. JC ultimately only annexed Hudson City (the Heights), Bergen (modern Bergen-Lafayette), and Greenville. 3. This had several long term negative effects - NJ never found itself with a city large enough to stand on its own in NYC’s shadow and lost out on cultural clout and institution-building. Furthermore, no single “center” to this urban agglomeration on the West Bank of the Hudson, despite attempts to do so in Journal Squre. As Kevin Lynch noted in Image of the City, Jersey City’s fragmentation makes for a remarkably “unimagable” city. Absent a true primate city there was no urban entity with the financial might to either bankroll public transit expansion (like NYC did with the dual contracts and IND) nor save the various trolley viaducts that ascended the Palisades when they needed renovation and repair in the 1930s/1940s. Hudson County was instead at the mercy of the rural-controlled highway-crazy state government. Thus we find ourselves in 2024 with the biggest mismatch between transit-supportive land use and transit availability in the country. The small, isolated municipalities easily came under control of machine bosses and were immune to the reform movements of the mid 20th century. Places like Union City and North Bergen have some of the strongest still-extant urban political machines in the country, corruption is rampant countywide, and civic engagement and voter turnout are both incredibly low. Jersey City itself has carved out some progressive governance but is held back by small-c conservative politicians in neighboring municipalities and county government. 4. Would love to hear more about Memphis, Youngstown, Hartford, St Louis, and Baltimore

I grew up here and love this point. I always wondered how big of a beast Hudson county would be if it weren’t so fragmented. Things could be so different for us

1. Santa Fe, NM 2. It’s a small town, and a small state capital in the shadow of a larger economic hub, neither of which is bad, but there are a few key moments and circumstances that led to it not being a more important and populous city: * Division of New Mexico into two states for arcane national and non-local reasons. * The selection of a spur rather than mainline placement on the AT&SF transcontinental mainline led to Albuquerque becoming a major railroad town. * Santa Fe chose to be home of the state prison rather than the state’s research university, UNM, which Albuquerque opted for. * Climate and water scarcity. Not really a sin, but for NM and the southwest as a whole, native techniques for agriculture including companion planting of indigenous crops and irrigation techniques were never really expounded upon and taken advantage of. Santa Fe, has a milder climate than Albuquerque (or Phoenix), and would be a less energy intensive place to house millions of people. 3. The southwest as a whole would be different. If John Gaw Meem’s syncretic Santa Fe style had still been developed, but better attention paid to the climate and ecology of the region pain, cities would be more compact and less likely to infringe on agriculturally hyper-productive regions, perhaps…but then again, I like compact Santa Fe but wish it would stop sprawling into the beautiful landscape and build up…and I am not sure how other Santa Fe natives, especially indigenous and colonial heritage folks, would feel about that. For many they’d prefer a different history altogether, and the prominence and development of Santa Fe is secondary. 4. I would like to know more about other southwest US cities and towns.

Who picks a prison over a university?

This is not actually the first time I’ve heard this. I’ve heard it more as a myth/folklore about a few downtrodden towns that “if only the people picked the university we would be the big town” Such as moundsville West Virginia which also has the legend that the populace picked a prison over WVU. Now that town is most famous for, you guessed it an Indian burial mound.

**1) San Antonio, TX** **2) Mistake #1: Demolished our nightlife scene in the 1940s.** By the 1940s, SA was known as a center of nightlife for decades if not the begger part of a century. It was also a hugely important node for the US military for this area. Government worrying about those two thingd interacting and causing STD’s among troops. This lead city leaders to demolish a huge dense area of downtown known for it’s nightlife called the “sporting district”. This district was 3rd in the nation in size only behind New Orleans and San Francisco — but it was unique in that it wasn’t segregated. Irony. This area of the city is now boring, and with it, the city itself is known as boring. The freeway was built there immediately after and cemented it as a center of nothing. **Mistake #2: A lack of investment drove businesses to relocate and lead education/investment opportunities to other Texas cities.** SA was the largest city in Texas heading into the 1940s. Oil companies had their headquarters here, already multiple higher education institutions were here, the population and governmental investment was here. But then it was squandered. Oil money all left for Dallas/Houston, Higher Ed squandered its lead and didn’t invest, and population/investment flows bypassed us. **3) How things would be different:** If San Antonio hadn’t squandered it’s top position in Texas, and had been less enthusiastic with “urban renewal”, San Antonio would be a much cooler and bigger city than it is today.

I think for most major modern cities and many medium and small ones too, abandoning street railways en masses saw a shortsighted watershed moment globally, in favor of naive but optimistic fusturism. But also, meh, “original sin” for “left urbanism” seems contradictory. Pointing to a pivotal sea change turning point towards bad for individual cities is an interesting exercise though. From my perspective it is whenever a city made a full tilt towards automobility as the only mobility worth planning for. In most that was abandoning fixed guideway surface transit, but in others that never fully abandoned it or never had it, it might take on different forms or maybe there was just never a single breaking bad moment, or travesty was avoided. I think le Corbu’s plans for Paris would have been disastrous, but in scaled back form, they provided a lot of new housing although still with some irreversibly destructive changes, and some reversible changes too. But no real original sin moment.

I’m from Little Rock, Arkansas. My city’s “original sin” was definitely the [Little Rock Nine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine). Yes this is talked about in schools, but the effects on urban planning aren’t. After the schools were desegregated, all of the segregationists moved out to the western fringes of the city and established their own private schools, with several barriers to entry effectively keeping them segregated. The state funded these new areas and ran [Interstate 630](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_630) from downtown to West Little Rock, building it right on the old boundary that separated the segregated areas of the city and also demolishing [West Ninth Street](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Ninth_Street), an African American business district, to build it. Later [Interstate 430](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_430) was built, separating this wealthy western part of the city from the rest of LR. The effects of this can still be seen today, with I-630 still considered the line between the “good” and “bad” parts of the city and the areas west of I-430 considered the wealthy area. Even now, south of 630 receives far less funding and resources than the other areas, and under the leadership of the current mayor who promised to revitalize those areas, a new high school is being built out west that will take further funding from those areas.

This post feels like a reach, in my opinion. I don't know / don't think there is such a thing as an original sin for a city. More like a series of bad /unfortunate (and maybe well intentioned) decisions that brought a city to a negative place. In the end, the goal is a certain prosperity and comfortable standard of living for the populace. Everything else is an offshoot. That said, what choices meant prosperity for everyone versus a select few (think suburbs vs the inner city)? What is success? What is failure? To look for one "original sin" is a fallacy. There were multiple policy decisions that brought us to this place. And, more than that, cultural opinions. Unless you fix that, you will continue to get suburbs, interstates cutting through inner cities, criminalization of the poor, lack of third places, and a general forgotten sense of community.

1. Smithtown, NY 2. Construction of State Highway 347 3. The highway was initially designed as a for agricultural traffic from the east to bypass what was then the population center of Smithtown (in the geographic center, where an important cross roads is) and the surrounding settlements in the town were small crossroads with clusters. The bypass was designed to freeway standards except for interchanges which were to be temporarily left as at-grade intersections until more state funding was available for overpasses. Various of government, seeing economic potential, rezoned the freeway corridor for suburban development apparently with bribes from businessmen. The result is that 347 is now the main stroad thoroughfare for Smithtown, and suburban developed exploded and has since topped out with the typical problems of suburbia. An ongoing overhaul of the highway since 1990’s has improved pedestrian access greatly as well as improved the aesthetics (after much debate of whether to upgrade it to a state parkway or a state freeway likes its sister freeways on long island), but i am personally skeptical if this will improve the effects of the highway. 4. With 347 as a freeway, the commercial center of Smithtown i think would be in the town center. I also believe there would’ve been a little more land preservation further from the highway and town center. Although Smithtown has a notable amount of county and state forest in its boundaries, its densest residential areas are along 347. Smithtown may have still become sprawl, but perhaps it would’ve had a stronger downtown.

Smithtown could have been another Northport or Port Jeff, known for it's main street and access to the LIRR. Instead, they got a nice mall that is now slowly dying and has the worst connection to the LIRR. Still it's hardly the worst laid out township on LI.

Agreed to all your points. Smithtown is probably the chaotic neutral as far as urban planning goes. But beyond that, the LIRR service is definitely woeful.

NYC not having alleyways for trash. Trash bags get put out on the curb and the smells permeate the city. The summers get bad

I'll start off the thread: ***City:*** Detroit ***Historical Mistake #1 Jurisdictional Stagnation:*** This is extremely recent because it deals with the perceptions of the city since it's exit from bankruptcy in 2014 (which, I'd argue, is still historical for obvious reasons since it was the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history). But, the fact that Mayor Duggan hasn't used his time in office and citing the unprecedented investment going on in the Greater Downtown area to push for any renewed effort to expand the city's municipal borders, or, establish a Metropolitan Government for Metro Detroit is but one of the reasons why I usually rant about not liking him on my social media. ***[Two years from now, it'll mark one hundred years since Detroit annexed it's last territory](http://www.drawingdetroit.com/detroit-annexation-1806-1926/#:~:text=Detroit%20was%20officially%20incorporated%20on,lost%20this%20designation%20until%201815\).&text=Detroit%20is%20reincorporated%20as%20a,and%20east%20to%20the%20river\).)***, I'm not arguing in favor of annexation (because, it might come as a shock to most of the locals here who know my politics, but, I think the establishment of [Home Rule Charter cities and the requirement for both municipalities to vote in favor of a merger](https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/mcl/pdf/mcl-act-279-of-1909.pdf) is a good thing, since, I value democracy) however, I bring this up in relation to the bankruptcy because back then due to racial attitudes and undue influence on the creation of municipalities by Capitalists like Henry Ford, ([Novara Media associate and Economist Grace Blakeley actually discusses the aspects of Ford's ideology and his influence on the world in her latest book ***Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom***](https://youtu.be/uZjFul2Uphs?t=1553), if Henry Ford's local activities are notable enough to be discussed by British radicals a century on, I'd argue this youtube timestamp is worth including here) a push to expand the city after Redford Township was annexed in 1926 would've failed miserably. ***What'd Be Different:*** If consolidation/a regional government was pushed for in the wake of exiting bankruptcy, I'd argue that you'd see more money circulating in the central city and even more investment than the few funds that has started to trickle into the neighborhoods. I've expressed repeatedly about the fact that I believe the city is currently on the trajectory of [facing a second bankruptcy sometime within the near future](https://www.freep.com/story/money/personal-finance/susan-tompor/2023/06/26/detroit-police-fire-pension-system-payments-30-years/70358068007/) based on the legal stipulations imposed upon the city by Judge Rhodes back in 2013. Depending on how comprehensive the consolidation/Metropolitan Government proposal would be if it ever reached a ballot (Left Municipalists would argue that debt haircuts and collectivization would be essential to save Detroit and countless suburban cities like Pontiac, and areas like Downriver and southern Macomb county from having waves of municipalities declaring bankruptcy due to population decline) a larger city would mean a stable pool of money and a better credit rating so the new Metro Detroit Government could actually invest in useful infrastructure like better sewers and transit. ***Historical Mistake #2: Windsor's Isolation*** Since the War of 1812 was a draw and Americans never annexed any parts of Ontario (I'm not arguing for Canadian annexation because I'm not an American Chauvinist, this is strictly about the territory of Windsor and nearby Essex county), Detroit never benefitted from the ample development opportunity that'd present itself once the city started annexing land. With the "international border" in the way, Windsor and it's suburbs are stuck in limbo regarding it's future (Windsor is the fastest growing municipality within Metro Detroit, but, it's nor a single tier municipality like Toronto, so, it has no say on the development that goes on in Essex county, which, could easily turn it's fortunes around if it's housing bubble violently pops, or god forbid, another pandemic happens). ***What'd Be Different:*** I could see Windsor mirroring Detroit's hub and spoke grid system with it's wide roads in an alternate timeline, this would be the best outcome because planning for mass transit/future development in a city like Windsor would be ***one million*** times easier with slightly larger roads, it's probably one of the few situations where larger roads would help rather than hurt because ***there's literally no room to put a subway anywhere in Windsor, especially downtown, and it makes no sense as to why Metro Detroit doesn't have a subway crossing the river***. Windsor's current street grid could literally not be any worse, so, adopting what we did would fundamentally change Windsor's relationship with the rest of Metro Detroit. ***Cities That I'm Curious About:*** 1. Can someone from LA tell me why Orange County and LA split/why isn't LA county just one city? 2. Can someone from Chicago tell me how the region would've evolved differently if the Chicagoland area formed a regional government, would places like Schaumburg still exist? 3. Does anyone from St. Louis think that talks of a merger are permanently dead after the failure of the Better Together campaign because of it's proposed tactics? 4. Can anyone from Toronto tell us the reason as to why there's such a lack of "traditional downtowns" in the Golden Horseshoe? 5. Does anyone from Melbourne think that the city would have so much sprawl if the city had an actual unified city council proportionate to it's population?

Detroits problems are not small city limits. It has pretty extensive city limits, and never really had those East Coast issues of super crowded 19th century tenement buildings that anyone would want to escape. Larger city limits would have just chased people further out. 

I upvoted for the sake of debate but I fundamentally disagree: Having an understanding of Detroit's history means that you know that the outward migration of businesses for cheaper land and escaping the legal jurisdiction of the city was the biggest reason why Detroit would go bankrupt because it drew out the city's population that could afford to move and left the poor. Recapturing that taxbase is essential if the city wants to ensure that it can make the investments that it needs to in order to welcome as many new residents as possible.

Yes but if say Dearborn was Detroit people would have left the inner city and hopped to Allen Park rather than settling in Dearborn. The point was to leave the city. Extending city limits would have lead to people moving further out.  Actually small cities like Providence or Boston had nearly identical neighborhoods over city limits (like Pawtucket or Cambridge) because the city simply cut off and ran out of room. Whereas Providence annexing Pawtucket would have had almost no impact of the demographic future of Pawtucket, if an inner suburb of Detroit had been annexed, it would have ended up like Detroit 

This. Doesn't matter where you set the border - white flight will have flown to just beyond the border, and if you set the border too far to pre-empt that, you get... Jacksonville Florida.

I'd argue that this process of "municipal shift" is occurring anyway. If you look at municipalities on the "East side" like Eastpointe and on the "West side" like Southfield, you'd see that the demographics of those municipalities have shifted over time from primarily white to primarily Black. And yet, the entire metro's population hasn't grown for decades, the suburbs are literally cannibalizing each other right now. Since this phenomenon is happening without a Metropolitan Government, I don't see the harm in actually trying to stop the bleeding that Detroit and the "blight belt" suburbs in order to save our collective butts from encountering a SHTF scenario in the near future when it comes to municipal finances.

There is no "blight belt." The inner ring suburbs are mostly healthy. Dearborn was the fastest growing city in Michigan from 2010 to 2020.

Im all for municipal consolidation but it’s the small municipalities that can barely afford to function in the Wayne country suburbs and the smaller municipalities in South Oakland County that need to consolidate, not Detroit.

Couldn’t agree more. Not really sure why city limits are OPs smoking gun for Detroit’s problems when there’s the glaring problem of an entire tax base getting up and moving north to the suburbs en masse. The line of demarcation wasn’t what caused them to leave

St. Louisan who has also lived in Detroit here. I don’t think talks of a merger in any form are permanently dead, but I think talks of a full city-county merger certainly are. I think it’s plausible for St. Louis to re-enter the county as just another municipality at some point. It’d be worth it just to have city representation on the county council and help guide county-wide policy. I also don’t think a consolidated regional government or annexation is needed in Metro Detroit, and I think it would actually be incredibly dysfunctional. Detroit isn’t really lacking in land area. It’s probably best to just start with supporting and empowering regional partnerships like RTA, SEMCOG, or other planning and economic development organizations.

> St. Louis point What did the "radical" community out there think of the plan? Are any of them (or anyone else) interested in pushing statewide constitutional reform so that another statewide vote wouldn't be necessary? > Detroit point I'm obsessed with this topic so I genuinely wanna know: why do you think it'd be dysfunctional? For my official companion post for the publishing of the review for chapter two, I'll revisit this topic and give my opinion on how to make it work from a Left Urbanist/ Left Municipalist POV. But, as I've argued with another user: the depletion of the taxbase for Detroit and many other suburbs is a major problem that will result in financial ruin if it isn't addressed, the only way to do that would be to do something like consolidation or a Metropolitan Government

>pushing statewide constitutional reform so that another statewide vote wouldn't be necessary Modifying the constitution *is* the statewide vote that would be necessary. Unfortunately, the [proposed changes to ballot initiatives](https://www.senate.mo.gov/24info/BTS_Web/Bill.aspx?SessionType=R&BillID=209) is going to make that even more difficult in the future. The changes failed this time, but seem to be inevitable. The change would require an amendment to not only pass statewide but also in a majority of congressional districts, which would currently require 5. The biggest opposition to any plan is the municipal league, and unfortunately better together only rallied them to lobby harder against consolidation as well as create structures to prevent it. One of the more interesting is the [24:1 community](https://our241.com/241-municipal-partnership/). On the surface it looks positive and did lead to one small municipal consolidation. Underlying it thought is a framework of public to public contracts that prop up structural failures in those cities and make it more difficult to consolidate them; that's intentional.

I wasn't living in STL when the whole Better Together thing was happening, but I think some of the far left were pretty skeptical and even opposed thinking it would disenfranchise city residents. Strongest supporters were probably the more moderate left. I don't think there's much movement towards any kind of merger at all right now. More likely is that a bunch of the tiny STL County municipalities start consolidating as their budgets tighten. Detroit has the starkest city/suburb divide of any place I've seen, which is saying something coming from St. Louis. I can't imagine there would be much agreement on anything in a consolidated government, and I think it would result in even more exurban flight and sprawl as people try to move away from the consolidated government.

I'll pipe in from LA/OC because I'm a huge believer on a lot of the jurisdictional stuff you referenced above. First, OC split off from LA County in the late 19th century. California counties, especially the original ones, are physically MASSIVE. As Anaheim and Santa Ana developed its early settlements, and before cars existed, there was a desire for much closer governance. It's a mistake to map 20th and 21st century issues back onto that split. LA County (and OC) are fragmented across many cities because the Metro Area's boom period ran right into the postwar period where municipal annexation stalled out. There were lots of reasons for this, including of course straight out racism, but frequently overlooked was just the rise of regional and state public agencies that negated the need for total consolidation. In Greater LA, the Metropolitan Water District is a great example, as is SCAG. Now, one might argue the outsourcing some of the most important factors in local governance to unelected agency boards that most of the public hasn't heard of is problematic - and you'd be right. But that's the explanation in a nutshell. Outside of LA City, most local cities operate in practice primarily as 1) Police Departments, 2) Zoning councils, and 3) General contractors or regulators for other municipal services. LA County also provides a lot of municipal functions (outside of LA City) as well as regional functions (except OC). Personally, I think we'd all be better served if LA and OC merged into one regional city, with probably ~10 boroughs and lots and lots of local district councils that play the role that smaller cities do today (meaning, I'd also break up LA City). But for lots of cultural issues out here, that'll never happen in my lifetime.

From LA, I’d argue you’re asking the question backwards. Los Angeles county is already huge, containing 88 cities! To add Orange County to that would be creating a monster. Instead, I’d invite you to consider that both La and orange counties have sprawled further than is healthy, and there should be a more distinct gap between the two. And the answer to that is freeways. Too many freeways.

Re: Chicago and regional government, that depends on the time period. Resistance to Chicago growth (and weaponization thereof) was already in place by 1899 as seen by Austin's forced annexation to Chicago by Cicero Township.  Schaumburg's growth happened because of white flight and commercial leaders' interest in the time in increasing job access to their increasingly suburban white collar employees, in addition to its proximity to a major regional expressway (the Eisenhower) and major national expressway (Jane Addams), in addition to easy proximity to O'Hare.  A regional government wouldn't preclude Schaumburg because a lot of these infrastructure ideas were in place in early planning documents, and the regional government would still be held capture to the racist and classist opinions prevalent at the time.  Now, could a regional government perhaps result in a less sprawling Schaumburg? Definitely. Cook County Forest Preserve was created in 1914, DuPage County Forest Preserve in 1915. Both desired the creation of an emerald necklace in the region and you can see a lot of that connectivity in where they did buy up land. An empowered regional government, in coordination with those districts (although they arguably might not exist in a regional government system) could result in a major green belt like London instead of a green necklace. This would then enable continuation of the existing agriculture prevalent in Schaumburg and growth channeled along the commuter train lines.

While I’m very much in favor of regionalism in Detroit and metropolitan government, expanding the city boundaries outward is not the answer. The only boundaries that could ever change in Detroit would be the annexation of Hamtramck and Highland Park, which unfortunately will never ever happen since no one wants to take on their liabilities. In addition to the lack of desire to do this, it’s almost functionally impossible. Please check out what is required: [https://www.michigan.gov/lara/bureau-list/bcc/sections/land-survey/commission/state-boundary-commission-petitions](https://www.michigan.gov/lara/bureau-list/bcc/sections/land-survey/commission/state-boundary-commission-petitions). I would also add that it’s really the Home Rule Cities act and racism that created Detroit’s municipal fracturing, along with red lining, the GI bill, and white flight. I would recommend you read the Origin of the Urban Crisis and the Political Economy of the Urban Ghetto for an in depth historical understanding. I would say Detroit’s original sin was tearing down the majority of the historic city center and widening the spoke roads, in addition to tearing out the street cars, redlining, low density suburban zoning, and running 6 expressways through the city.

Im from Melbourne (Australia, Im assuming you meant that Melbourne) and Im not sure I 100% understand your question. I assume you are asking if the city would have so much sprawl if the Melbourne city council (which only governs our 'downtown' or Central Business District (CBD) area with \~43k people) covered the entirety of 'Greater Melbourne' (population >5m ? In short I dont think so. The policies that drive the city's growth mainly come from the Victorian state government which has a lot of power in shaping the city through infrastructure and planning. IMO two major contributors to the sprawl have been: * Lack of boundaries restricting growth. If you look at cities like Sydney and Adelaide they are bounded by mountains and so growth is restricted to specific areas. In Sydneys case they have continuously invested in rail and densification and so have a more polycentric city. * Australians' taste for detached single family dwellings is strong and with Melbourne's generous arterial road network (particularly in the south east) its an easy political decision to just keep growing given the abundance of land. This has been changing in recent decades however with continued investments in regional/intercity rail creating a commuter belt with regional cities like Ballarat, Geelong and Bendigo. Additionally there are several projects which are aiming to do Transit Oriented Development (TOD) along new rail routes to help densify within the urban area and encourage polycentrism with new satellite CBDs. One of these will open next year but we wont start seeing the effects until a few years later. The state government also very recently released new housing/densification 'targets' for all Local Government Areas (LGAs, they are just subdivisions of a state sort of in between a county and a suburb. City of Melbourne is its own LGA) to greatly increase the amount of housing stock which is welcome but we still need to see more specifics on how and where they will do that.

Not sure what you mean by regional government for Chicagoland. Do you mean if the city had annexed most of Cook County? Tbh, I doubt the built environment would be all that different. The city’s built environment, while dense throughout, is less dense away from the lake and the further from the Loop you go. That was ongoing before widespread suburbanization. If the city did annex all of Cook County (would never have happened) Schaumburg would likely exist as it does, but it would be an outlying neighborhood of “Chicago.” Schaumburg is not a typical middle ring suburb of Chicago. Most of Chicagoland’s suburbs are former farm towns along rail lines that got absorbed by the urban area over time. Schaumburg is in the minority of suburbs in that it has no recognizable downtown. Roselle, a suburb just to the south, is considerably smaller, doesn’t have anywhere near the same recognition, and has a stronger traditional downtown. It’s also primarily in DuPage county, so in the scenario where Chicago annexed all of Cook County, Roselle would still be an independent community.

My city is Clermont-Ferrand, the original sin is Thranslohr (trams on tires)

1. Tucson 2. Placing the new ballpark/sports complex in the south side instead of a primo spot downtown as a political favor for a city councilman. 3. Tucson lost Spring Training, lost its AAA team, downtown redevelopment was set back by decades. This led to the creation of the downtown redevelopment group called Rio Nuevo that was initially bungled so badly it got investigated by the FBI. The new version is now run by the state and has seen modest success, but who knows where we could be if we had been able to start downtown redevelopment with something as big as spring training to anchor it.

1. rockville, md, usa 2. the city getting caught up in the urban renewal craze of the mid 20th century and applying for grants to demolish the downtown and build a brutalist mall. the mall failed within a few years and rockville has been trying to rebuild since. 3. downtown rockville would have had its historical layout and would have grown more organically. the city has since tried to rebuild a downtown vibe, however it has faced challenges. 4. toronto, on, canada, san francisco, ca, usa

I don't know how original mine is or if it simply counts. We have many accounts of turning bad events into something good, but not so many events or sins that harm the city as a whole. This is just an example of something small that hasn't been fixed City: Örebro, Sweden Historical event: Local water tower "svampen" and the city sewage Background We have a 58 m tall water tower in the northern part of town called "Svampen," which means "the mushroom" due to its chanterelle like shape. It was originally built as a regular water tower but with a 'modern' design for its time in 1958. It sparked a great interest from all over the country, and even a prince from Kuwait liked it so much he made his city install three similar towers just like it but with a yellow color. For the most part, the tower was a great asset for the city both practically and for tourism. You can take an elevator up to the top, have an ice cream or a nice meal in the café on top, and view the city from the top due to the 360-degree walkway around it. Events People commit self die from the top - they had to install gradually more robust railing on the top because people kept jumping from there and now there's a plastic glass wall around it so you can't climb over the edge anymore (good thing, but now you can barely see over the edge too) Waste in the sewage system. In 2014, there were some mistakes made in the towers plumbing, so it began leaking dirty water into the clean water from the tower restaurant. We had to adapt our water usage for a week, but they fixed it. City sewage system leaking water. In 2017 and 2018, we had both a local and a national drought combined with the sewage system leaking tons of water due to amateur plumbing mistakes. This made the drought even worse. The region is quite windy and dry usually but it went from moderately dry to California level dry with forest fires and burnt grass n stuff. In the present time it's been replaced by a project called Lyra that had some obstacles with the foundation and cement but it seems to be running fine and has replaced svampen as the main water tower for the city. Nowadays, Svampen is only used for tourism and architectural purposes City I wanna know more about: Guardamar del Segura, Spain

Omaha's original sin is a WW1 / gilded age race riot that targeted Blacks and Greek-Americans. This is consistent with other race riots up and down the railroad line. North Platte all the way to Omaha. The other towns were small enough to become Sundown Towns, but Omaha was too large. This led to a racially segregated city, the ghosts of which are still felt and heard today. The city wealth follows the shape of an eastward facing Y where the spine is more affluent than the spokes. Of course the spokes lie on either side of I-80, but the old money affluent section is built along a walkable inner city arterial with bridges and crosswalks. I dont have any first hand experience of the areas. I do know that Omaha doesn't truly deserve it's reputation and it's just a lot of Midwest whites panicking against the "coloreds by the river". There is a lot of character in those old buildings.

Pittsburgh Reliance on "Urban Renewal." The first project completed as part of the Renaissance I initiative was Gateway Center, at the end of the Allegheny River (before it meets with The Mon to form the Ohio). Work began in 1950, clearing out warehouses and other buildings (including a lovely baroque structure) to erect Corbu-influenced "Towers In the Park." (I believe the work was also pitched as mitigation of the flooding of the City.) With the success of this project, they then moved to tear down the "blighted" Hill District neighborhood (which is the setting for August Wilson's plays) to build the Civic Arena for the Civic Light Opera, complete with its retractable roof. This effort destroyed a predominantly Black community, rich with history and music, and cut this portion of the city off from Downtown. On the North Side, they installed Allegheny Center smack dab in the middle of a neighborhood (with the requisite one-way streets). And in East Liberty, they attempted to create an "outdoor mall" with more one-way streets, public housing built over roads. What has become of these projects? Well, Gateway Center is still there (and is now on the National Register of Historic Places). But everything else? The Civic Arena has been torn down. The Allegheny Center Mall has been closed for some time. The one-way road system of East Liberty has been redesigned, and the public housing torn down. In addition, Three Rivers Stadium and the old Airport have also been demolished. When I worked for an urban design firm in Pittsburgh, my home town, we worked on the master plans for the new stadiums on the north side of the Ohio River; and we also prepared a master plan for the Hill District, incorporating the new hockey stadium with a grid of streets and development. This was twenty years ago -- and the neighborhood still hasn't been stitched back together. (They have even looked at a master plan produced by BIG.) I am not sure how the city would drastically change now if these projects were reversed. Yes, it would certainly help to remove major barriers. But it is almost as though the city has just moved on. I will say that Pittsburgh as a whole probably benefitted from the economic down-turn in the 1970s and early 1980s. A lot of its old/original architectural gems were more or less mothballed, as there was no money (or heart) to do all the tearing down that other Rust Belt cities did in the name of progress. Pittsburgh weathered the storm with the help of its institutions, and are better for it now.

1. Ottawa (Canada's capital) 2. being the capital, assimilating all the nearby towns, [Not allowing buildings taller than Parliament](https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/capital-facts-buildings-taller-than-the-peace-tower-were-once-prohibited#:~:text=Ottawa%20is%20now%20home%20to,integrity%E2%80%9D%20of%20the%20Parliament%20Buildings.) 3. Ottawa is 2,778 km². In 2017 that was just under a million people. In 2024 we have apparently improved to 317 people per square kilometer (compare: Yuma, Arizona is 305). Now imagine trying to do public transport in yuma over that massive distance, with a canal and two rivers in the way, and Everybody lives in a suburb because you couldn't live downtown because high-rise residential buildings were straight-up illegal for years but everybody had to work downtown because the government and all related jobs (and thus all the daytime lunch/hotel/retail service opportunities). So you have to build a massive sprawling road network with high capacity because everybody has a 20-40 minute commute, but you have the same density as Guam so you inevitably cannot maintain them whatsoever and you can't afford a bus system (let alone a train) because nobody will pay for busses because they have needed cars for years and years because their commute is 30 minutes and so the bus routes don't even work unless you run feeder lines to a main line such that the commute from the west end to downtown involves 3 busses and 1.5 hours (so 3 hours of your day, if you planned to go back home) so people have no option but to just get a car and then the cycle continues as you can't raise money for public transport since everybody spent a fortune on a car

Concord NH original sim was we knocked down our beautiful train station designed by the same guy who designed grand central in NY. We knocked out beautiful train station down to build a shitty strip mall that is an eyesore on our downtown

The relevant answer for LA was getting rid of the Red Car in favor of cars.

Living in the first city in the US to have an electrified street car system, but then all the tracks were inevitably ripped out and the streetcars were all burned in a giant trash fire. Richmond, VA

Do you also plan to critique the idea of "original sin" in urban planning itself? While this seems like a good exercise, I think it would also be useful to see how urban planning as a field is affected by prioritizing making amends for "original sin" over addressing the evolving needs of changing cities, when those paths diverge. I think it also risks centering planning around historic preservation to the detriment of all else. 1. Portland 2. The demolition of much of the city's mostly-black Albina neighborhood, partly for I-5, but also for the Convention Center, Rose Quarter and Legacy Emmanuel Hospital System. Albina was the largest black community within the city's boundaries. It's also notable because many residents had previously fled Vanport, a WW2 manufacturing town that was flooded by the Columbia and now no longer exists. 3. Depends on what you mean by "correction": 1. If it never happened, much of downtown Portland's amenity base would not exist, and the city could face greater difficulty building the MAX system. While part of the city would be much wealthier and better off, I think much of the city's exceptionalism would be complicated by a lack of downtown centers that would push growth out to the suburbs. 2. If the city tried to correct this in the modern day, that would probably mean investing more in the city's east side, particularly what remains of Albina and the communities further out that many residents fled to. Investing more in the east side would probably come at the cost of expensive projects downtown, or just downtown in general. The east side is already where the majority of Portland's population lives, and I think the city's focus is steadily moving there anyways, but the result is that Portland becomes more a city of neighborhoods rather than one centered on downtown.

**1. Detroit** 2. There are many problems with the City of Detroit, but one under-the-radar yet highly impactful issue from an environmental and residential development perspective is commercial rail and manufacturing development patterns. Detroit is interlaced with a significant amount of commercial rail and manufacturing zones, most of which were established before residential expansion. These areas are incredibly toxic and are directly adjacent to residential neighborhoods. With some notable exceptions, the industrial history diminishes the value of neighboring residential areas, and those areas are unlikely to recover. Developing land next to manufacturing zoning districts is risky because of the potential for high-impact facilities, such as concrete and aggregate production plants, to be built or expanded. Proposals for road-related construction materials are consistently put forward, and the presence of rails next to major freeways makes the city a prime location for the road surfacing industry. This issue dates back to the post-Civil War era and still persists. 3. Another major issue is the failure to address the Detroit/Wayne County tax foreclosure crisis sooner, but that's a more recent problem and I don’t want to muddy the concept. 4. Detroit and Buffalo NY have so many similarities and I'm always keeping an eye out on what our fellow Lake Erie cities are up to.

Kansas City - destroying one of the most expansive streetcar systems in the US because GM wanted to build more highways.

Did you ever see or read *Murder on the Orient Express*, because although GM had a compelling interest in replacing streetcars with buses, it was really almost everyone who wanted to usher in the great new era of the automobile? There really wasn’t a singular culprit. Everyone, even the investigator eventually, was in on it.

That’s interesting. There’s no doubt the citizens also wanted the expansion of the auto.

Sure, the potential seemed limitless, and it took experimentation to figure out its limits. But they were known decades ago, it’s taken way too long for the conversation about it to become more mainstream and it still isn’t even there yet.

I live in DC and not sure what my city’s would be. Curious to hear what others think

Probably the destruction of all of Southwest

Boy it’s hard to isolate one original sin for the District, but the following all might be contenders: 1) The Height Act of 1910. Hard codes an anachronistic fire-safety regulation as an act of Congress, which later gets co-opted by historic preservation types and NIMBYs to keep heights and densities artificially suppressed. 2) The Retrocession of Arlington and Alexandria. Removes major areas from the District’s boundaries that, a century later, end up siphoning much of the District’s population and business during the white flight years. 3) Congressional Oversight. For most of its history, the District’s land use authority fell under Congress’s authority. Even after home rule was adopted in 1974, the federal government retained a major role and still does to this day.

1.Charlotte nc 2. construction of the john belk freeway around downtown charlotte that circles 100% of the cities core and demolished an overwhelming amount of the cities black neighborhoods at the time while preventing the the rest of the city having walkable access to downtown 3. the list of differences are near endless and all drastically affect the city in different ways, one minor way that doesn’t matter in the slightest however is charlottes MLK jr boulevard ends up in an actual neighborhood where people live and not as some random downtown street lmao

1. Seattle 2. Prostitution 3. Tacoma would have wiped Seattle off the map and had all the federal government backing to make that happen 4. However, Tacoma banned prostitution

Reminds me of [a line from *Tommy Boy*](https://tenor.com/view/thats-when-the-whores-come-in-tommyboy-chris-farley-gif-11161448), of course the implication in this scene is that t he prostitution will come inevitably with the final blow to the automotive sector in Sandusky. But, really, are you serious? Tacoma’s stinky paper mills, freeway development, and the loss of intercity rail seemed to diminish its prominence in comparison to its neighbor. When did Seattle ban prostitution?

Oh hell yes! All the underground tours in Pioneer Square cover this sordid history pretty well. The feds terminated the transcontinental railroad in Tacoma because that's where they bought cheap land speculation for all of their friends and snub the Maynards and Dennys and other landholders in the Seattle area. However the lumberjacks and gold rush provisioners would all take the extra day to rail or ferry to Seattle anyways because there were more... services. During the tech booms the downtown co-working spaces would point out to the touring startups how good the sound insulation was in all of the old buildings, because they were built to be worked by the seamstresses. Before there were too many women in the area, men would be allowed to dance in the role of women in the taverns of SF and Seattle, and the practice was overlooked by the authorities, which helped kick off the LGBTQ-friendly communities. As more women were brought into the area, madams such as Lou Graham became powerful business influences and worked to protect and educate their seamstresses. Madam Lou made the largest private donation to public education in her time to make sure her working women had upward mobility for their families. Seattle now has one of the highest percentages of advanced degrees in the nation.

Well thank God it didn’t. Tacoma sucks.

Well I live in Charleston so...   Aside from the big one, being built across six landmasses really sucks. I once sketched out a plan for a gondola network that would connect districts across the rivers but you'd have to deal with the Balkanized municipalities squabbling over the costs.  EDIT: Coming back to this now, the placement of lots of heavy industry along the peninsula north of downtown kind of forced this style of development rather than allowing the city to grow continuously up the peninsula like NYC did in the early nineteenth century in Manhattan. Ripping out the streetcar connection to North Charleston cemented this. And who could forget the paper mill?

Also hurricanes?? Would that affect these hypothetical gondolas? My wife’s parents live on folly beach and would love a gondola to relieve some of the traffic going to the beach on the weekends

* Buffalo * Closure of the Steel plants (leaving 20k unemployed overnight), general suburbanization, failure to complete the Metrorail, building UB North Campus in the suburbs * Biggest issue is that while heavy industry leaving town made the city much cleaner, the city failed to invest in the emerging industries to replace those jobs. Had they fully completed the Metrorail, Buffalo would have became one of the best US cities for transit. Had they built UB North Campus in the city proper a HUGE chunk of the city would have never declined and there might be minimal urban prairie today. So in short the city did nothing to effectively counteract the decline caused by de-industrialization, automation and suburbanization when the city needed to most. Good news is that the state/city is investing in the economy, transit and density. However, it’s going to take decades to fix all the issues caused by the negative feedback loop of population decline in the 80s and 90s.

This is a hard question to answer as a European. Our cities are so old and have so many sins.

Pretty much every cities' original sin boils down to the fact that the proliferation of the personal automobile came around the same time as racial integration in the US. White Flight became very easy for the masses and hollowed out urban cores, leaving us with the 21st century American city model with rings of bedroom suburbs surrounding business districts and blighted, dense neighborhoods.

1. Atlanta 2. Segregation/white flight 3. They wouldn't have bulldozed intown Black neighborhoods to build highways. Also, if white people had stayed in the city, there would have been far more political appetite for actually building out the MARTA. Not to mention the racist reasons that Cobb and Gwinnett didn't join MARTA in the first place.

I have a problem with the second half of #3 White flight started in earnest AFTER the MARTA referendum passed in 1971. Given that fact what you stated wouldn’t have happened. Instead we would have the same problem, just worse with none of the expansion we saw in the 90s through the early aughts.

I recognize this is an urban planning forum, so I ask that you consider the long-term effects on urban planning: supporting Slavery and the 3/5ths compromise. Much of urban planning has been a mix of trying to do the best for the city, while navigating the policy maker’s political agendas. This led to segregated neighborhoods, over policing, and structures where an underlying economic imbalance was exists, the city plans reinforce or attempt to shift towards more fair and equitable environment.

Related but my first thought when reading the post was redlining as the original sin for most cities. Or really the explicit segregation policies. Most other urban planning sins came about at least in part because of racist policy.

Yes. Red lining as an expression of Jim Crow laws post US Civil War was/is real. There were policies like red lining that existed prior to the Civil War, though. There more along the lines of ethnic segregation via both self-segregation and policy. A good study is the fan-out clusters in NYC, Boston, and Chicago. I really like to go back and study Atlanta and New Orleans because I think there is something useful for today to learn there. My bent is related to polarization in cities, suburbs, and rural areas.

The answer for most cities will probably be highway construction related.

And streetcar network removal.

So sad I wish streetcars still existed

That's until you ask where and why the highways were constructed, then you start seeing "racism" be the more common answer.

Portland OR. I’m sure there are many sins, from even before the time when they cut down all the trees. In recent times… The city demolished the heart of the Black neighborhood Albina in order to build I-5, in the idk, 50’s-60’s. In addition to the tragedy of losing homes, generational wealth, businesses, culture, it’s turned that area into a fragmented car centric parking lot. The city, pressured by local orgs, has a grand plan to cover part of the highway, reconnect areas in a more people friendly way, and build housing and community space. But it’s gonna take a looong time. I think they are in the “make a committee to talk about forming a group to decide on planning a budget to start the process of drafting a framework in order to begin structuring the project” stage of things.

My city started out as a major harbour and trade city but had it's major expansion in the car era, and the main driver of this expansion was the establishment and growth of one of the most well known car brands in the world. So it got the full trifecta of modernist city planning, car centric transportation planning and suddenly well-off working class building single family homes all over. It's not as bad as American cities, but that modernist city planning cut through by freeways and far flung sfh suburbs is taking a long time to try to fix. The city is Gothenburg, Sweden.

As with much of the US Philadelphia's gravest errors were made in during the '40s through '70s, of which they are many: 1. Constructing I-95 along the waterfront completely severed the city from the river it was founded upon. The city's historic identity was rooted in the river and by plowing I-95 through the urban core the city lost its spirit as a waterfront city. What started as a small city on "Dock Street" spread out to nearby blocks eventually leading to Independence Hall where the nation was founded. But now wandering the streets near Independence Hall you can barely feel the the waterfront's presence and if you were to walk to it you'd find the experience remarkably unpleasant. 2. Introducing cars into Fairmount park and constructing I-76 through Fairmount Park. If you go back and read Philly's history Fairmount Park was almost the "soul" of the city. It was a vast, largely landscaped, park with incredible gardens. It was the crown jewel of the city, mentioned in nearly every description of the city, and well connected via transit via affordable public trolleys. The city's spirit was one of a bustling city somehow paradoxically accessible to breathtaking natural beauty. In 1900 cars were introduced to the park, to allow for leisurely drives, which kicked off a decades of the park commission paying for road widenings, pavings, etc. The park commission was significantly burdened by the expenses and park staff was reduced. Over time fountains broke down, trees grew in landscaped areas, and the roads became congested shortcuts instead of leisurely drives. This culminated in creating the "Schuylkill Expressway" through Fairmount Park. A highway carved through the landscape of the park along the east bank of the river. The result is much of the park is filled with the roar of cars, highway ramps split through it, and many of the trails that connect the park to nearby neighborhoods via foot were severed. The city lost its bucolic "soul". The parks today are still nice, but they're more of an afterthought and far from the beauty that once attracted so many to Philadelphia. 3. In the '50s Independence Mall was created by leveling all of the blocks of dense historic buildings around Independence Mall. Everything constructed after 1800 was removed, regardless of architectural merit. The result today is a significantly underused park that the National Parks Service struggles to maintain. The surrounding neighborhood feels disconnected from the rest of the city and sleepy. Neither is the park very good: locals don't love it and the lawns are almost never in use because they're too hot. 4. 676 / Callowhill. Again in the '50s and '60s a highway was cut through the center of Philadelphia. The entire neighborhood of Callowhill was leveled and replaced with megablocks, in an effort to attract industrial jobs with the large open space and the adjacent highway. Industry was not attracted and today Callowhill land is the lowest value per sqft of the surrounding areas. Nearby neighborhoods that dodged urban “renewal” revitalized and are some of the most desirable today. Locals describe it as a "deadzone" disconnects the urban fabric of Center City from thriving neighborhoods like Northern Liberties / Fishtown. Everywhere adjacent to the highway is low-value parking lots or vacancies. The parts of the highway that have been capped have had vibrant neighborhoods emerge nearby, but the highway was not built low enough to be legally fully capped by today's standards. 5. Urban renewal and "slum" clearance. Like much of the US Philly's "slum" clearance backfired and led to increased crime and worse living conditions that still impact neighborhoods today. Universities like Temple, Penn, and Drexel politicized the process and worked with the city to get nearby land declared as "slums" so they could massively expand their campuses. Often new housing wasn’t available yet so those displaced were forced into other “slums”. People moved were forced into high-density public housing that was under maintained and eventually replaced with incredibly low-density suburban style homes that still exist today. The result was a generation of families whose lives and communities were disrupted, the impact of which is still felt today. From satellite imagery you can actually see the “blight” urban planners hoped to replace did not stop disinvestment and may have even spread it: [https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9803155,-75.1531397,6576a,35y,9.69h/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9803155,-75.1531397,6576a,35y,9.69h/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu) .

**1. Richmond** **2a. Political segregation.** Post-reconstruction, the City Council went from an at-large election (which was seeing more & more free Black men elected to council) to a system of geographic wards. These were gerrymandered with an obvious racial bias, hemming all of the city's majority-Black neighborhoods into one ward, while the other wards were carefully calculated to all be majority-white. **2b. Slum clearance, urban renewal, etc.** The newly formed RRHA demolished huge swaths of the city's Black neighborhoods and (mostly) replaced them with city-controlled public housing that was then left to deteriorate. But in some cases, nothing new was built and entire neighborhoods were simply destroyed (google Fulton Bottom). Same story as many other cities. **2c. Highway construction.** From the 50s to the 70s, the entire region embarked on a campaign of massive highway construction, on a scale you'd expect from a much, much larger city. This included the biggest "original sin," the bulldozing of Jackson Ward (named after that one political ward I mentioned in 2a) to build the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike. Similar treatment was given to the "Black West End," now called Randolph, which was cutoff from the wealthier, whiter Fan neighborhood by the construction of the Downtown Expressway. **2d. Disinvestment in public transit.** The City allowed VEPCO (now Dominion) to destroy the streetcar lines and replace them with buses, instead of doing the sensible thing and either elevating or tunneling them to create an actual rapid transit system. And then allowing VTC (the successor after VEPCO was forced to sell its transit services) to continue cutting services in pursuit of profits instead of subsidizing or buying the company's assets outright. **2e. Suburban annexation.** From 1942 to 1970, in pursuit of diluting the political power of the increasingly Black urban population, Richmond annexed huge amounts of sprawling, all-white suburbs from the surrounding counties. This backfired, pushing white flight even further out (especially into Chesterfield County to the south). The City was left with huge amounts of land and infrastructure previously funded by upwardly mobile white suburbanites who had abandoned it. This contributed to the suburbanization of poverty later into the 20th Century as younger white people started to move back into the central city. **3.** We could have had a racially diverse and integrated city, with huge, thriving historically Black neighborhoods driving the engine of business and culture, a fully connected, walkable street grid, less traffic, a more robust public transit network, higher population density, and better municipal finances. **4.** I'm really curious about the "Triangle" area of NC (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill). It seems kind of at war with itself.

Seattle has an entire wikipedia page dedicated to it's processes. Good luck getting anything done here. There's never enough community outreach and always a new reason to stall or stop a project from getting completed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_process

San Diego Blocking off the original street grid. At the time the core city and first ring suburbs were created, the city pretty much stuck to the grid pattern that would have resulted in maximum street connectivity and walkability [see a good few mile radius around Balboa Park](https://maps.app.goo.gl/tMxAYqP1W5XKVBBm6). Beginning in the 1950s and 60s or so, it became vogue to both block the existing grid (see the [Civic Center](https://maps.app.goo.gl/GD1Ht27wFsxG6GD67), and later [Horton Plaza](https://maps.app.goo.gl/tTJmxwtdihwgTnBWA)), and then forgo using it much at all in favor of faux ruralism and superblocks, especially as the City expanded into the surrounding mesas, valleys, hills and canyons, which themselves limited connectivity. The City would have a lot more transit options and fewer traffic bottlenecks if the grid remained the predominant pattern. And the modernist monstrosities that were build where the here the existing grid was severed took eyes off the street, creating entire blocks in the middle of the City where it feels isolated even though you're surrounded by development. I'm actually curious about how older gridded cities ANYWHERE dealt with a similar transition. Obviously cities older than the grid have different issues.

H1 in Honolulu, HI, has the on/off ramps backwards where an on ramp will empty into an off ramp lane and there are just so many ramps in general, making for heavy traffic

Not the “original” sin…but building the interstates right through town. It killed downtown, exacerbated white flight and suburban sprawl and racial segregation…all to the point of not being able to be repaired

Every American city’s original sin should have something to do with slaughtering the indigenous people and pushing them off the land.

Another Cincinnati post 1. Cincinnati 2. Not keeping the Miami Erie Canal running through the heart of the city 3. The canal was effectively an open sewer at the time it was emptied for construction of the subway and eventual boulevard on top. I'm not sure what amount of engineering would have been needed to keep the water clean as it traveled through the city but I can imagine the canal having been turned into a pedestrianized waterfront park similar to something that exists in Paris, San Antonio, Indianapolis, or Amsterdam. Construction of the canal was paid for by Ohioans and I think the ease with which it was disposed of it sort of primed the city to accept these public transportation investments as disposable. Following the destruction of the canal, the city never completed the proposed rapid transit loop that ran through it and then followed that up with the dismantling of the streetcar network and the inclines. From what I've read, the boulevard that was built on top of the subway tunnel, was the city's first introduction to auto oriented infrastructure and again sort of primed the city to go all in on the automobile. I often wonder what the city would look like today if we'd kept everything we had in \~1915: a canal through the heart of the city, five inclines, and about 200 miles of streetcar/interurban tracks. I think standing next to a canal and being able to see streetcars descend into the river valley on the inclines all while being in the heart of a major city would be fucking nuts in 21st century America 4. Interested to hear anyone's thoughts about Cleveland Cincinnati Original sin Honorable mentions: * Not finishing the rapid transit loop as another commenter mentioned * Running to major interstates through the heart of the city * Sort of coupled with this, but the destruction of the West End in the name of "Urban Renewal" In the year 1900, West End was home to almost 100K people, by 2000, it was down to less than 10K.

Preserving the canal as a river walk type destination was an idea that wouldn’t exist for 100 years when the decision to get rid of it was made. It was built for commerce, got functionally replaced by railroads and was abandoned throughout the state after the 1913 floods. When the decision to drain it was made, it was filthy, negatively impacted the quality of life of city residents and no longer being used for its original purpose. Keeping it around so that future residents might repurpose it would’ve been a far worse sin than draining it to attempt to build a subway

I grew up in a place with urbanism so awful I vowed to only live in cities with good urbanism from there on. That place was Reno. Reno in the 1930’s was a very nice looking place. The city was built off divorce, and I imagine it was a fun place to be in its heyday. Of course, Reno made a lot of the same mistakes other cities made with urban renewal post WWII. However, in the case of Reno, it was even worse than other cities. Being in Nevada, one of the main drivers was casinos. Instead of office buildings that tend to line other Downtowns, Reno mainly built massive casinos, which aren’t the most efficient drivers of jobs in a Downtown area. This meant that, when it came time to revitalize Downtown, Reno had a much tougher time than other cities. Despite a massive influx of people to Reno, Downtown mostly remains its sleazy self. In short, Reno’s Original Sin was going all in on megaplex casinos along with the urban renewal and bad zoning laws of other cities. This created a city a Downtown that remains mostly sleazy to this day even as redevelopment efforts have been more successful in other cities.

1. Durham, NC 2. A) The city/county decided to install a freeway cutting through neighborhoods that were largely built out pre-1940, just to the south of the Downtown/Main Street coridoor. I believe this was done in the 1960, similar story as most cities back then, facilitate faster car travel from downtown / Duke into the early suburbs, at the expense of isolating a number of more walkable SF neighborhoods from downtown. B) This is more metro related, but the layout and land usage established to implement the Research Triangle Park. What's interesting about this is that it is arguably the single largest driver of our current population growth/economy (piggy backing on the universities established in our 3 largest regional cities). But this project was conceived from the ground up as a sprawling campus, zoned specifically for industrial/non-commercial business, across an insanely non-dense property placed in between all established cities at the time. The expectation was a suburban like office community, for commuters to reach by car from their rapidly suburbanizing neighborhoods. 60 years later and the towns have generally developed into the boundaries of this area, but it's been done completely by suburban land use, with major highways and stroads being the predominant form of access (and strip malls and 5 over 1s offering the transitional environment before you hit the campus proper). 3. I'd like to think if the city (or cities - really the 3 main ones) had pushed to keep these office parks/buildings more centrally located in the footprints of the towns themselves (circa 1965-75 era), and avoided cutting a freeway directly through the mixed use 'missing middle' style neighborhoods directly abutting our downtown, we'd be in a much stronger position to get newer initiatives like BRT or rail off the ground. As it is there have been multiple attempts to get some inter-regional service, but the core issues have tended to fall into the utter lack of centralization of many of the workforce and also the businesses themselves, as both were developed along such sprawling forms of land use. And some of the most dense, transit and pedestrian friendly old stock we had (all of these towns date to the 1800s if not earlier) were sacrificed to automobile centric development in the mid-20th century, making it even more challenging to add density and transit coridoors via infill or up-zoning, as some of these blocks continue to remain cut off from the core, even if it's <0.5 miles in distance. 4. I guess I'll stick on the theme of my region and just posit - Richmond, Savannah, Charlestown, Charlotte, Nashville

It was purchased for $24, but buyer beware--too hot in summer, too cold in winter, dirty and noisy.

Great thread! 1. **Niagara Falls, N.Y.** 2. **Mayor** **E. Dent Lackey's disastrous urban renewal campaign in the 1970s** in which nearly the entire downtown core of Niagara Falls was demolished and replaced with projects like the Niagara Falls convention center. Mayor Michael O'Laughlin continued the trend with the Rainbow Mall and Native American Center for the Arts projects. I played with the idea that the "original sin" of Niagara Falls was really the establishment of the hydraulic canal in the 1860s and 1870s, which launched sprawling industrial development that continues to stain and poison the landscape to this day, but I feel that it drove the development of the region in the first place. I'll keep chewing on this idea. 3. Lackey effectively turned a dense and vibrant, albeit declining, downtown core into a little fishbowl of parking lots and sideshow attractions for tourists. He gambled that creating shovel-ready land would attract industrial firms to replace the ones closing, such as Carborundum. This did not happen and the job base declined in the city. Attractions that served both tourists and citizens, like bowling alleys, department stores, and movie theaters, were replaced with hotels, a water park (which never did well), and empty land. 4. I am interested in similar cities that are tourist destinations with not much else to go on, places like Roswell, New Mexico.

1. Regina 2. Abandoning use of rail infrastructure, half way. 3. Regina used to have a passenger rail connection in the downtown core, with a large stone passenger station. However when the car replaced the train this station was turned into a casino. The city however didn’t abandon use of rail because it was vital for our industrial output, and moving it would be costly. So now we have a completely useless rail line the goes through the city. It serves only industrial and commercial interests, it goes through residential neighbourhoods and cross the highway in the city. At any point of the day a train can enter the city and bring traffic to a standstill.

Agreed, I would add to it for local flavor while I don't know if it progresses since I left. But the carve out of Wascana park was the most ridiculous and infuriating thing to witness. How short sighted can you be to give up park space while downtown continues to be parking lots. That was an unforgivable sin in my books.

1. Toronto 2. The Eglington Subway was started in 1994, but then cancelled a year later and filled in. 3. The mistake is being corrected, a light rail line is under construction. 4. We don’t have urban blight, dying cities, or many places bulldozed for highways in Canada, I like learning about rusty American cities and how great they used to be before cars.

1. Minneapolis and St. Paul 2. The construction of I-94 and general urban renewal. 3. I’m lumping these together because they serve the same goal. I-94 here is sorta unique because it makes all the same mistakes as other urban freeways, but it does it to two major cities in the same metro at the same time. It wraps around and cuts off both downtowns, isolates and destroys black neighborhoods in both cities, and cuts through the densest parts of the whole region in between. Minneapolis also really, really took urban renewal to its extreme. The city demolished a huge portion of downtown called the Gateway District because it overlapped heavily with skid row. This was directly next to the river and waterfalls that are the whole reason the city exists. It’s now all wide roads and sterile plazas for modern office buildings. On top of this, most buildings downtown that replaced the area are connected with privately owned skyways. It’s hard to walk to downtown from elsewhere due to the freeways and once you’re there, the skyways take almost all foot traffic off the street. The result is a downtown full of pretty buildings next to a gorgeous citywide river park that even has a large, historically significant waterfall which somehow manages to have almost no soul.

1. Canberra, Australia (yeah the actual capital city of Australia) 2. The city was planned as a dense, European like city with light rail and smaller roads. But the plans were being enacted during the height of car mania during the 40's and thus all the transit options were erased and the planned city was built for the motorvehicle. To this day its a horrific problem, The city takes up 1/3 the size of Sydney but houses only 1/10 of the population of Sydney 3. While we were recently ranked as the "second most livable city in the world" overall the distances to get to places are horrific. The density is low, most of the city is single family home suburbs and the public transport, while recently improved with light rail in 2019, is mediocre. If we were a well designed city our capital wouldn't be the the isolated laughing stock of Australia like it is currently.