Tax inefficiency...

Meanwhile...The first district suffers

Fantastic video ... anyone know of someone in Peoria that is able to produce this type of modeling for Peoria?

@PIFox : New urbanist high density development?.... It happened... the Heart of Peoria plan... which the city council ultimately abandoned.www.peoriagov.org/25 8/Planning-Initiativ es

A great irony of this... was that the same people who initiated the new urbanist outlook in Peoria, IL also initiated it in Normal IL about the same time. If you have been to Uptown Normal or even downtown Bloomington, you can see how both communities embraced it and carried it through. I grew up in Blo-No... downtown Bloomington was dead as dead could be... it has been revitalized. The Bloomington city council looked at Normal and said we want some of that too... and embraced the idea. 'Uptown' Normal is far different than it was when I last went to school there. Main and Center streets have been transformed remarkably.The refocus towards dense, walkable communities has played an important role in ISU continuing to grow as a university as other state university enrollments sag.If only Peoria had taken hold of the ideas and carried through with them.... downtown, the warehouse district, the 1st District, Main st, the Sheridan Triangle could have been much different than they are today.

@Mahkno : That's funny because in the early 90s, Bloomington's downtown way outweighed Normal then, but they've since been playing catch every since Normal's investment in "Uptown" initially with the Children's Museum in the early 00s. Bloomington is now majorly struggling, maybe even worse than Peoria. Their current downtown streetscape is a day late and many dollars short. They only have funding for the Phase 1 of 10 regardless of what they've been telling the media.

Bloomington has a lot of the political dynamics Peoria has... East side politicians... where the sprawl is, don't want to be paying for downtown or west side improvements... what is really going on is what the video highlights.... State Farm has cut head count in Blo-No by a great number... its putting pressure on tax revenues ... the inefficient ones. They have politician who got elected who poo poo'd the downtown stuff. Its still a lot better than what it was in the 1980s.