Redeveloping neighborhoods is a tricky business. In effect, you are saying that the existing neighborhood – where people live and work and shop – is not good enough.
But redevelopment is a necessity, because only through change can cities remain vital. And only by reworking the already developed cores can communities avoid giving in to creeping exurbism.
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Enter Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse, with the largest proposed investment in Providence since the development of Providence Place mall. The $333 million plan for 22.5 acres in Olneyville is ambitious, and it requires relocating businesses and residents to create 600 apartments, condominiums and townhouses, parking garages, 100,000 square feet of retail space and 350,000 square feet of office space.
It is also an audacious plan, with the potential to extend the powerful effects of downtown’s renaissance into some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. And therein lies the rub.
Some residents and businesses in the neighborhood are pushing back, oftentimes with sharp, personal – and sometimes uncivil – attacks.
Struever Bros., to its credit, seems to be sensitive to the issues raised. It is helping tenants find new living space within the city and has set aside $150,000 to help with moving expenses. The company has also committed to set aside 20 percent of the housing stock at lower prices to accommodate the current work force.
For the good of the city, and before the atmosphere is irredeemably poisoned to the detriment not only of this but other developments, all the stakeholders need to sit down directly and talk through their remaining differences.
Station fire sentence serves justice
Cries of outrage and murmurs of approval greeted Superior Court Judge Francis J Darigan Jr. when he sentenced Daniel M. Biechele to four years in prison for his role in The Station fire of Feb. 20, 2003, earlier this month.
Biechele’s jail time, along with an 11-year suspended sentence, can never bring back the victims of the fire. But it was an appropriate punishment for the former Great White tour manager for setting off fireworks inside the nightclub. And it shows that justice can triumph even in the face of overwhelming emotion.
Family members testified before the court, calling the maximum sentence allowed – 15 years. But in our view, that would have amounted to surrendering the power of the state to vengeance. Biechele’s crime was against us all, not only against the families who lost loved ones that day. And as such, his sentence needed to avoid succumbing to grieving family members searching for retribution.
The judge did right by tempering his punishment, and he was correct in saying that Biechele’s real punishment will be having to live every day of his life knowing that he cost 100 people their lives.
