Dakota Beacon

Coming a year after Grand Forks, under the advice of its City Council and their advisors and bureaucrats, decided to pave over and build a “high-rise” on what was once a beautiful little patch of green – Arbor Park (named for its leafy trees and a remarkable bronze "arbor" gazebo) – comes one more study showing the health benefits of green space in our cities. We shouldn’t be surprised, either by this “news” or by the City of Grand Forks taking money to fill a space left after the flood, which had already been developed as a mini-park with beautiful perennial flowers, art, shade trees and seating – a little green retreat for people shopping, taking a break from work, people visiting downtown, waiting for a bus or who live there.

Relying on misuse of the concept of filling that space to get rid of a “missing tooth” appearance, the City managed to convince enough people that it was going to be “great” for the economy and kept enough dissident others from the polls by locating the single polling place where those who actually do live downtown would find it difficult to reach during limited voting hours.

The result is one more pile of bricks, one more apartment/condo building to fill in a city already upside-down in its owner occupancy to tenant ratio and one less bit of something beautiful where it is most needed.   Grand Forks, if you haven’t been there or haven’t noticed recently, is rife with semi-occupied apartment buildings in its downtown and near-downtown areas. Meanwhile, the only “green” left to see there is a little space next to Urban Stampede called Pillsbury Park and another small area across the alley from that. These are also “missing teeth” and will very soon succumb to the bulldozer, their trees crashing to the ground and holes dug over which to build more such apartments. Grand Forks has gone mad with construction of dense multiple dwellings.

So that is one aspect of our so-called economic development where this city has gone off the rails.

The study, one of the largest ever done on this topic, revealed that green spaces not only add to the quality of life in the city, but also to the length of life of city dwellers. A 10% increase in green spaces within a city increases lifespans by 4%. Trees and meadows also reduce flooding, reduce air temperature and improve air quality. Gee, I wonder if anyone in town cares about any of that. As for the “green space” which flood control projects mandate on the wrong side of diking, that is not really accessible or even visible unless you actually go to the other side of the dike, a fact which makes it less safe for the individual wanting to soak up some sun or sit in the shade outdoors, so we should discount that as anything more than simple flood control, worthwhile, of course, but not a recreational or aesthetic benefit.

One other aspect of this is that while trees and grass and other vegetation cleans the air, soaking up CO2, it provides much needed oxygen for us. It is a cycle. That’s why CO2 is called a “greenhouse gas”. There is nothing sinister about CO2. It is not only not harmful, it is a positive benefit in that makes life itself possible. Our cars, our livestock, our pets, wildlife and we, ourselves, provide CO2 – vital to green-ness. The vegetation provides us with oxygen which we need as well as precipitation which we need, even if can be inconvenient at times! We remember this little circle with the arrows in it from 10^th grade science class.

Perhaps one day our city planners and our environmental “scientists” will catch up. I hope so, I hope that happens before it is too late and they have managed to completely ruin our cities and our quality of life. I’m serious about that. For although it is easy to sell a developer on a tax-free, nominal-cost ($50,000 for a city’s park is pretty cheap for a development supposedly worth millions of dollars), and thus lose that park, it is pretty nearly impossible to get anyone to invest in a park – including the taxpayers. A park does not provide any “income”, so once a park or green space is gone, it’s gone forever. Think about that. Don’t look at every space not filled with concrete and bricks as a “missing tooth”, a totally inappropriate simile, but rather as potential to fill with shade trees, grass, sculpture, flower gardens and benches for people to sit on to seek some peace of mind, some beauty, some oxygen, some health. Shame on those who would sell that for a few dollars.

The problem is that a development involving building, with all that that entails – zoning issues, building codes, extension or upgrading of services to the building, “fixing” of tax rates, etc., all open the floodgates to corporate welfare, crony capitalism (the opposite of real capitalism) and corruption, whereas a park provides little or no such incentives to bureaucrats and city officials and officers.  Therefore it is difficult to encourage green space.

In contrast to Grand Forks, the city of Savannah got it right, designed and built on a grid of “squares”, with green spaces in mind. It remains both livable and a delightful place to visit, as it was nearly 300 years ago.  Ask yourself if you’d rather live with a view of 100-+-year-old live oaks or the pseudo-big-city high-rise being constructed on the former site of Arbor Park. Then think how that would affect the value of any residential unit in that area.

It is unfortunate that a few C-minus students of urban planning from some of our lesser educational institutions have cherry-picked planning expert Jane Jacobs’ “missing tooth” expression for an empty space on a street and misconstrued it to mean anything without a building on it. A park or “parklet” is infill by definition, not a “missing tooth”. (A “missing tooth” would be a neglected vacant lot with rubble and accumulated debris and litter, between two storefronts on a street, not a park with daffodils and tiger lilies, shade trees and art, complete with receptacles for litter.) And these parks should be viewed as an essential feature of a healthy urban environment, not something to sell to a developer.

In fact, the opposite approach might provide a solution to downtowns which lack this vital component. A city could consider buying a lot when it becomes vacant due to demolition or damage due to natural causes – tornado or fire, etc., rather than have the property owner redevelop it or sell it to another developer, and dedicate it as a park.   This might, in fact, be the only way to restore green space to our urban landscape. One possible area to explore in this regard might be some kind of proportioning mandated by city or county codes which require a ratio of green to “development” whenever a building is lost for whatever reason. If the ratio of green is not adequate then the city should first be required to acquire it for a park if this is possible (if the empty lot is for sale, for example).

We don’t know all of the answers to how to provide the optimum living conditions for urban dwellers but we do know this: that nature is an essential part of healthy living and grass and trees are as necessary to a cityscape as high-rises, glass, concrete and bricks. What we must do is impress our city planners and officials with this fact and refuse to be misled by the “expert from two hundred miles away” as Mark Twain would have said.

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