We All Know What Progress Is But Spell Out Your Take Anyway

Tue., Sept. 29, 1998

Doug Floyd Interactive Editor

As a three-day conference on planning and historic preservation wound to a close over the weekend, members of one panel warned the audience not to mistake sprawling growth for progress.

No one familiar with the strip development along North Division or East 29th is likely to make that mistake. Nor is anyone who creeps through rush-hour traffic along Indian Trail Road.

But now that we agree on what progress isn’t, what is it? More cars or more pedestrians? More shopping centers or higher-density, mixed-income housing downtown?

What would it look like to you if Spokane were making “progress”?

Core values

In town for the same conference, Richard Moe, a noted preservation authority and the co-author of “Changing Places: Rebuilding Community in the Age of Sprawl,” had a chance to examine the city firsthand.

Strong neighborhoods have to be encouraged and protected, but Spokane’s look pretty good right now, Moe said. Downtown is another story.

At about the same time Moe was encouraging the community to recognize how important a healthy downtown is to the future of the city, property manager Al Payne was announcing the closure this week of the skywalk level of the former Lamonts building.

The area to be closed, empty for more than three years, has been ravaged by vandals and Payne said he can’t justify hiring security guards to patrol an area that’s not producing any rental income.

“If it were occupied, we wouldn’t have the trouble,” he said.

Despite that example, Moe had glowing things to say about the core area’s potential. One key to revitalizing downtown is to restore the old buildings there, he said.

That, he said, would help supply the main missing ingredient - people on foot.

The power of truth

“Error may be safely tolerated where truth is left free to combat it,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister of India, picked up the theme years later: “It is far easier to meet an evil in the open and to defeat it in fair combat in people’s minds, than to drive it underground and have no hold on it or proper approach to it.”

What experiences in Spokane affirm or refute these testimonials to the freedom of expression?

Local journalism is essential.

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