renewal forum

For those of you who may not be following the news too closely down here, the plans of the Mississippi Renewal Forum were presented to the public today.
The Forum is basically a commission set up by Gov. Barbour with a bunch of big-wigs from Mississippi to make recommendations and create plans of all kinds and sizes to rebuild this part of the Gulf Coast. For the last week, 100s of architects and urban planners from across the country have been giving presentations on how to make the Coast better.
Some of the more interesting ideas involve getting rid of the CSX railroad tracks that run east-west just four blocks from the beach (and which probably saved the SunHerald building and yours truly from certain doom) in all three southern counties and making the whole area more walkable and bikeable.
Because I cover the town of Long Beach, I can only really comment on specific stuff that’s proposed there. As can be seen in the photos above, the slate has been wiped clean.
Anyways, that’s the boiled down summation of what’s going on.
It’s fascinating and a grand plan. The problem is, most obviously, the money. Everybody wants all this nice stuff: broad avenues, more trees, parks, central commercial districts. Basically, it’s everything that the coast was not before the storm. Problem is, it’s expensive as all hell. And, with no tax base to work from, it’ll all have to be done on a borrowed dime.
Another thing that concerns me is that here haven’t been too many minorities involved in these discussions about how to redo things. Actually, the general socio-economic makeup of these meetings on redoing the whole thing has generally been the same few brackets too. (I’ll let you guess what brackets those are.)
Anyways, if you get more time and want to look through the various proposals of the various towns, check out http://www.mississippirenewal.com/.