"We may have gained a couple of extra high rises and a few more public buildings...but the cost was too great. We sucked the soul and culture out of old downtown San Jose and replaced it with a comparatively sterile and empty metropolitan center that constantly has to dangle expensive bait to lure in young people and wealthy suburbanites.
"It will take at least another generation to bring back the random juxtapositions of shops and businesses, the welcome and well-worn seediness and the population of hungry young urbanites that make up a healthy city center - and that were so thoughtlessly torn down or driven away back in the '80s and '90s...
"Where was all of that Redevelopment money coming from?
"The typical answer I got at the time was either a shrug or that it was a kind of magical 'free' money that would have absolutely no effect upon the overall finances of the city.
"Well, we now know that was utter bullshit. A city is an ecosystem. You can't segment off one corner of it, rewrite its financial underpinnings and expect it to operate in a vacuum. No matter how you try to firewall it off, inevitably everyone is affected. And now we can see what that means - a shiny and empty downtown, the loss of numerous small downtown businesses (many of them a century old) that gave San Jose its character and culture - an aging infrastructure in the other, outlying districts, public buildings that have become financial sinkholes, a city budget too strained to pursue major new initiatives, a rising crime rate and a declining quality of life...
"[I]f you are going to build a prosperous future, a city that will come roaring out of this recession into a new era of prosperity, then you don't try to pick winners - especially [in some] industry like clean tech - and you don't help mature, and likely doomed, tech companies build nice high-rise headquarters, and you don't burden struggling start-ups with endless regulations, taxes and fees, and the latest social engineering boondoggle.
"And most of all, you don't leave it up to a committee of bureaucrats to guess which companies will succeed and which won't.
"Instead, you give the start-ups cheap office space, tax breaks and the fastest broadband you can deliver. Then you get the hell out of way and trust them to do the rest. Ninety percent of them will fail, but the last 10 percent will change the world - and the fortunes of the city of San Jose...."
- Malone, Michael S. "Dreams of Instant City/The Blue Sky Days." *Metro Silicon Valley* [San Jose] 5 September 2012: 16+ (http://issuu.com/metrosiliconvalley/docs/1236_mt).
