``...One would think, reading Chuck's posts, that the capitalists are shooting themselves in the foot by letting everything fall apart, but as Marilyn Waring observed ("Who Counts?") Capital makes money out of destruction and waste...'' Joanna
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I should clarify this. What I was thinking over the years I watched this stripping down of a neighborhood was that capital had already exploited and consumed all it could out this place and people, and now it was coming back with a `new' plan of exploitation--maybe diminished returns...
By the way the school yard which seemed such a sad excuse for a playground was turned into a construction dump yard where the heavy equipment operators stacked up the torn out rails, ties, and miscellaneous sewer mains and stripped out gas lines. Temporary storage.
It seems the Emeryville public works department decided to `beautify' the street, so they had the rails torn out, a couple of feet of the toxic soil under the asphalt removed and re-did the street with planters down the middle, cutting down the width of the street down by half so that no big rigs couldn't use it.
The only beautification I could think of was to put up a `green zone' between the urban blight on one side of the street and the new trendy commercial district on the other side.
CG