Derby, CT is a small, working-class, post-industrial town with a population which has been stagnant at about 12,000 for more than six decades.
The geniuses over at the Connecticut DOT decided that this obviously meant that the town’s Main Street needed to be widened, by twice the size, destroying a number of historic buildings and uprooting numerous small community businesses in the process. That red stripe on the far left of the “After” pic is the new edge of the street.
Old buildings like that can have massive maintenance, repair, and sustained costs while also being undesirable for businesses for a lack of modern infrastructure. Given the field behind them, these weren’t central to the town and likely a good call to tear down.
How the space was used after that’s a different discussion.
If Europe can keep their historic towns looking nice for literally thousands of years, we can keep a building for longer than 70.
The vast majority of buildings built 1000 years ago, have fallen apart already.
The ones still around were built extremely well. Much better, than our 70 year old buildings.
Survivorship Bias
You also have a vastly different culture. With that said, I’m pretty sure the US is in the top 20 in the world for number of UNESCO sites. I guess it’s not number one, but I’ll sleep with that.
The space will be used for a parking lot (originally was supposed to have a cycletrack, but that was deleted as well).
The project cost is $25 million. There will be long-term pavement maintenance costs that comes with the wider highway, not to mention the giant parking lot that is going in. There will be lost property tax revenue, and more death/injury. So it is highly doubtful the refurb costs of the buildings on that block would have been remotely close to all that.
A town that has been stagnant at 12000 people for 60 years doesn’t spend, hell, doesnt have $25M to spend, for a project like this. There has got to be more to this story because this just doesn’t make sense
Knock down buildings and widen a road, spending a lot of money and ruining infrastructure, to put in a parking lot in a town that sees no growth?
It would been wonderful if they could’ve at least used the parking lot to host a farmers market.
You’d be amazed on the cost to refurbish even moderately older buildings. The last time I was looking at one it was $3 million for the plumbing alone in one building from the 1940’s to be able to support CRAC units without risking soil in the lines.
City or state would have had to pay to buy the properties anyway, though. Then the money spent on the widening could easily have been spent to modernize and update (or otherwise improve) the buildings.
They’re also building an apartment building about 1/2 a block from there that is walkable to the commuter rail and bus station. The road was widend but it also razed some derelict building for the Greenway park. Just over the hill from these pics they re-did the bridge across the river with wide a walkable/rideable sidewalk.
Tldr: Yes, wider road, but lots of good stuff added too.
Even completely blind guessing, over even a 5 year gap, I’ll bet the price of tearing them down was less than half the costs to the local community as keeping them and adding enough incentives to make businesses actually move in.
They could’ve totally used the space differently after, but tearing down was very likely the smart call.
If the road is a state route, the construction costs may even have been moved to the state tax budget and significantly save the local community money. The year on year costs wouldn’t even be a fair fight at that point. They may have even made the road expansion as an intentional call to leverage the state tax burden to alleviate local tax burdens. Not knowing the area, I’m not gonna judge the call.
Tearing down the properties has reduced their local property tax base and also no doubt reduced the values of the properties across the streets as well. It’s creating a downward spiral of local tax revenue while no doubt increasing state maintenance obligations.
Decisions like this are why small towns like this are going broke. They make themselves easier to drive through and tear down the properties that constitute their tax base.
