This dialectic between living with my parents again and living in Spokane and all it’s rich potentiality is becoming strained, it’s been four days.
First off, Spokane is definitely on the rise, not on the decline as everyone keeps saying. There are good things happening all over town. They are growing organically and doing well. Someday, some of them will need a boost, but even without that boost, in five years Spokane, and the people who live here, will be better off than they are now. The rhetoric about Downtown and the economic fate of Spokane in general seems to be of three kinds: Impatience, Greed, and Social Justice.
Impatience. There are a lot of things happening, and they are taking some time. We aren’t going to get a trolly from Browne’s Edition to SCC in the next five years. We aren’t going to double the per capita income in the county in the next five years. We aren’t going to get a WNBA or MLS team in the next five years. We aren’t going to get a real University district in the next five years. And we aren’t going to score higher in our class on Dr. Florida’s Creativity Index. What we are going to do is face the opportunity to lay the groundwork for all of those things, if that is what we want. We are going to have other opportunities as well. Opportunities to fix our civic bureaucracy and it’s relationship with the labor unions that control it. Opportunities to address the crime in the West Boone neighborhood. Opportunities to rethink what we need roads for, where we need them, and how we build them, so that we can spend our limited money as well as possible to secure a long term investment in roads, not an ever-rising short term commitment to maintenance on something ill-conceived. Opportunities to recognize the difference between preparing our children for standardized tests and educating them to become functional adults in a dynamic world, scoring well on tests along the way. Opportunities to infuse energy, capital, and faith into the neighborhoods and boroughs that make up this City, pushing out crime and decay and replacing it with community. Opportunities to address the crime in the West Boone neighborhood.