Sunday, June 03, 2007

Fayetteville, The Divinity Project

I guess I must have missed something here. It would appear that the Northwest Arkansas Times believes that the sole function of Fayetteville should be to entice a really big business (RBB) to build in the city so they can collect a bunch of taxes. As if the city will die if RBB doesn't get built here. Tadaaa! The RBB is here to save the day! Come on, there is more to a city tax base than just the RBBs. A city is really poorly managed if it has to solely rely on RBBs for it tax base.
While the Times is blaming the citizens of Fayetteville for wanting to save the character of a neighborhood, I'm thinking that the Barber Group should have realized from the beginning that their project was not appropriate for Dickson Street. I think they thought they could just ram it through and the citizenship be damned. People weren't against the project. Many people like the hotel, just not on that particular street corner. Dickson Street just wouldn't be able to handle the extra traffic and parking problems. I hope that the Barber Group doesn't scrap Divinity, they just need to move it to another area, the whole 15 floors. They can also built a hotel/condo, retail shop mix in that spot, just on a smaller scale.

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