My Redacted Life: Chapter 31

As my marriage date of August 17, 1972 approached, I concentrated on work as best I could. I was learning a lot more about urban planning than I was about women, but what the heck? Our firm had gotten an engineering contract for a street project in Pine Bluff. What seemed simple was to get complicated.

The engineer and his staff, in close communication with the city engineer in Pine Bluff, began laying out plans to construct the street according to the standards outlined in the existing master street plan of the city. It had been adopted years earlier and, of course, our firm had nothing to do with the standards it proposed. To ignore or violate those standards would have invited censure.

The editor of the local newspaper, Paul Greenberg saw a chance to make print, using an out-of-town firm as an invading army, hovering over the city and drooling with monstrous intent. Instead of a needed project, he constructed it, journalistically, as the intrusion of a white power structure into a minority community that was simply minding its own business. He phrased it as a classic case of pleasing the rich at the expense of the poor.

Day after day, he pounded upon the unjustness of improving a street serving this peaceful neighborhood. He found an audience with a local business owner who would have profited from the improvements but who had political hopes that outweighed advantages to his business. The contrived controversy eventually placed him on the city council.

The city agreed to reduce the scope of improvements. Then the project became one designed to destroy the existing neighborhood by encouraging suburban sprawl. It got real ugly.

The odd thing was that the city had received money for street improvements that could have been used for any number of projects in any number of neighborhoods. The mayor and council had chosen this street specifically because it would have benefited a minority community, at least the elected officials saw it that way.

It didn’t concern me much, this affair. The engineering staff suffered by not being paid for all the redesign and receiving much personal vilification. I used it as a learning experience, to wit:

No good deed ever goes unpunished.

Keep an eye on journalists. I found, over the years, that most were decent folks. They weren’t your friend, simply fellow professionals out to do their job. You didn’t lie to them and you didn’t try to use them for your own purposes. They live on information, whether it benefits you or not. Learn to live with it. Failure to do so will make you look silly and guilty. Finally, most journalists are ethical. Greenberg was an exception.

Projects must be vetted through the neighborhood in which the project is to exist. Many neighborhoods in our country have suffered and died, and will continue to do so, because of projects designed not for the people who live there but for people who are just passing through.

Plans aren’t always perfect and life is not always fair.

And, as the Vietnamese say, a bad strategy and good tactics means defeat. It just may take longer than will a combination of bad strategy and bad tactics.

I tried telling my bride-to-be about these things and more. She feigned interest, but I could tell her mind was in August.

"That which does not kill us makes
 us stronger." - Friedrich Nietzsche