Quote:
Originally Posted by eschaton
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. |
Well Birmingham was founded after the Civil War, so there was almost no old pre-1900 residential Birmingham to begin with. But what I mean by "bones" are the structural elements, mainly the street grid and preserved historic commercial and institutional buildings (plus UAB and the convention facilities). Not sure if you've been keeping up with what's been going on down there, but there have been a ton of conversions, rehabs, as well as new infill. After Railyard Park got built and the Barons moved back to the city from the suburbs and built a new ballpark, stuff snowballed from there and it's still going strong.