Yer humble host is some kind of wierdo as he is not as freaked out by vacant buildings. Not scared, more melancholy about it all.

This seems to be a minority opinion. From the UpDayton website, some comments on the city:

“There’s just a lot of vacancy…I’d almost feel safer if there wasn’t an empty, vacant warehouse, or empty, vacant building, or empty, vacant house – if there was nothing, I would feel safer.”

..and this one:

“It’s hard to get people to walk two blocks if they have to walk by two boarded-up buildings.”

..couple this with the statement from the DB-J op-ed:

“Beg and borrow as much money as possible to relieve urban blight. Plant grass on demolished building sites. It looks better than a derelict building and presents opportunities for future growth”

…so one can see how Daytons’ vacany problem is seriously turning people off on the city. Essentially this is a call for aggressive Detroitification: the removal of the abandoned and vacant urban fabric.

But the big catch 22 of Detroitifcation is that Dayton will lose the one thing that seperates it from the suburbs and differentiates it from other citys, which is the patina of place. The character imparted by the legacy urban fabric. The architectural patrinomy of 19th and early 20th century that was subject to cultural weathering ; the use and reuse, and ongoing building subsitution giving the “old city” its variety and character.

So after all the demolitions are done and the city is a patchwork (and maybe even more than that) of vacant grassy lots and surviving buildings, what then? Not so scary? Or just even more vacant, but one tinged with a deeper sense of loss of the physical structures of the past, now memory, or even less than that.

Realistically this is inevitable. Not just the economics of the situation since people want it to happen. Perhaps one can get into this as something very avant. To paraphrase a line from The Big Lebowski:

“We are (urban) nihilsts. We believe in vacant lots.”

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