Norman moving backwards on Urbanism

[king183]

The City Council approved a play to demolish a pretty cool, old building on Gray Street in downtown and replace it with a paved parking lot. It's unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected given the bright minds on the council.

http://normantranscript.com/headline...wntown-parking

[kevinpate]

Which bldg. are they going to take down? The linked article isn't clear.

[Bunty]

Is the downtown area a BID?

[Spartan]

Bunty, BIDs are not the be all end all. In fact they're usually only used when a City Council doesn't want to commit funding to downtown projects. BIDs are the whole "make the downtown pay for itself" idea, which at least is better than having no funding source.

I would also agree with the assessment that Norman is moving backwards on urban issues. It seemed like there was a lot of progress when I was there. From when I was interning with the city, I know there were a lot of people thinking about the right things behind the scenes. That said there haven't been as many new businesses, mixed-use has not evolved much, some plans linking Campus Corner to Downtown never made it very far, the university has slowed down on its masterplan, and Porter Road has very clearly been moved from front burner to back burner.

I would say these things and more constitute moving backwards. Granted, looking back at my time in Norman, I lived in a house my parents owned along NW 24th, didn't really interact a whole lot with the campus, and worked in OKC - so perhaps during that time I was deluding myself about how great Norman was or something. Wouldn't rule that out.

[YO MUDA]

Wondering which biulding their talking about.

[JimTrabersColostomyBag]

Wondering which biulding their talking about.

building on southeast corner....

[Questor]

I'm thinking maybe the brick building at the corner of Peters and Gray?