"Opportunity Corridor" has the same level of candor as the phrase "destroy to protect" did during the Vietnam War. "Opportunity Corridor" is the latest hypocritical corporate spin on the resuscitation of the extension of the Clark Freeway – put to bed at E55th in the 60’s. The BIG question is: for whom will the proposed new highway be an “opportunity”? The Cleveland Clinic and the University Circle Inc. constituents? or the people who have held their own for years along the proposed route and who stand threatened with eminent domain and removal?
Tell me one community anywhere in an established urban area that has been improved – or gained “opportunity” - by a new freeway cutting through it. Go on….make my day…and don’t forget to address sustainability.
And tell me what the proponents (Clinic and UCI)’s track record is with offering infrastructure improvements and independent business opportunities to their neighborhoods. The area around these institutions has become very sterile after years of successful land purchase and demolition strategy. The black guard houses on fenced blocks of parking lots set a fair and accurate tone for their urban achievements.
It could have been done differently and everyone would have been better off it if had been. Consider Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Mass who pursued similar land acquisition around their campuses during the last same 40 years, but due to effective involvement by the citizenry, and maybe some insight of their own, Cambridge today still has neighborhood stores and housing, pedestrians and bikeways. Are the neighborhoods in Cleveland strongly enough enfranchised and financed to stand up to the highway promoters? Only with strong pushback from a effectively vocal and knowledgeable neighborhood can the best development plans be made.
What happened to the "boulevard" that Herb Crowther was lobbying for a year and a bit ago that was going to go along the railroad right of way? Now it’s an “Opportunity Corridor”. Why don’t the proponents show us what they mean by softening their battered (military engineering term for those sloped walls seen in University Circle), buttressed and barricaded buildings, getting more pedestrians outside (like CSU on Euclid does) and producing a beta model of their “opportunity” plan along Carnegie, Woodland, and along the un-crowded and easily traveled existing roads (pointed out on the sign above) which conveniently lead to downtown, the west side, I 71, I 77, and I 90?