Hartford is updating its Plan of Conservation and Development, looking ahead 15 years instead of the standard ten.
There is not any one thing to prioritize, and I’ll be giving suggestions about a number of them here, but among those at the top of my list is land use.
Even though this area pictured (Forest Street near Capitol Avenue) had been used for parking, I would not advise it be returned to that use. I look at this and see opportunity for both housing and an expansion of green space.
If you look along the I-84 corridor, you will find several such pockets that offer the same potential, but have one major obstacle: the viaduct itself.
This is not a time for highway widening madness. We should be putting all our expressways and major arteries on road diets. What the last century has taught us is that unchecked hubris leads to terrible planning decisions. These decisions led to the emptying of our cities and the subsequent suburban and exurban sprawl. They’ve created visual blight. They’ve done nothing much useful for the cities that they carved up.
These were all human errors. That means we can fix them. Put something in their place that adds to Hartford’s vibrancy. If this requires the City to reclaim its power at the State level when it comes to sprawl, interstate expansion, and decisions that have indisputably negative impacts on Hartford,so be it.
