Quote:
Originally Posted by hudkina
And really, if you think that the Bellevue and Southfield are a universe apart simply because one had a simple platted grid prior to the post-war boom, you're grasping at straws.
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Maybe this plan will come to fruition. Maybe it will even succeed at its goals--nobody yet knows. What we do know is you're desperately hitching your boosterism to an inapt analogy between two very different places: Bellevue and Southfield are indeed a universe apart, for many reasons.
High employment/housing demand in one of the continent's most vibrant and booming metropolitan areas, combined with physical and legal barriers to horizontal growth, has produced in Bellevue an urban, compact, gridded, walkable
downtown with 5,000 residents and 35,000 jobs around a major regional public transportation hub.
Southfield doesn't have an urban downtown like Bellevue. It doesn't face nearly insatiable demand for new homes and jobs and isn't growing rapidly, low-density sprawl is not legally or physically restricted in the region, and public transit is pathetic even by American standards. There's no compelling reason to believe Southfield will become like Bellevue.