Quote:
Originally Posted by KB0679
I think that's somewhat unfair and certainly outdated perception. Birmingham was a somewhat sizable and fairly industrial city in the early 20th century and has a downtown similar to the older parts of Atlanta's downtown like the Fairlie-Poplar district. Furthermore downtown Birmingham has seen a TON of investment in recent years with a lot of its historic buildings being adaptively reused along with new construction. I do agree with your overall point about the lack of older walkable areas in the South but Birmingham does have solid urban bones with a pretty solid grid system and a fair amount of preserved historic stock downtown.
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Birmingham has good bones
for a southern city. However, it still still sucks from an urban perspective.
I mean, here, lemme link to this shot on Justice Map. I like using that site because they have 2010 census information down to the block level, meaning you can actually see where people live and where they do not.
Look at all that nothing in the core of Birmingham - almost totally depopulated. This is bad even for a southern city core. There are some scattered blocks with population, many of the inhabited blocks only have 1-3 people.
I guess you can argue the upside is you don't need to worry about NIMBYs. But there's basically no vestige of the old, pre-1900 residential Birmingham left. The "greater downtown" is almost entirely institutional, industrial, parking lots, etc. Any commercial vitality must be entirely driven by people driving in from the suburban parts of the city.