Here’s the thing that’s so annoying about the Ninja Turtles manhole covers: spending $20,000 to create them when there are so many pressing needs in the city. It’s just another example of the city focusing exclusively on downtown, spending vast amounts of money on ideas and schemes in hopes of attracting more visitors, rather than spending money to improve and support neighborhoods (already) filled with people who care about the city and make it what it is.

I’m writing from the Montview neighborhood, one block in from Pleasant Street on the south side of the city. The entrance to the neighborhood, whether you turn in on Holyoke Street or Hockanum Road, is through a dark, graffiti-covered railroad trestle and underpass.

We have been, historically and literally, “the other side of the tracks.” Williams Street, the border of the neighborhood, is a bypass for drivers who want to avoid downtown. Traffic is heavy, with more than 1,000 vehicles per day — and on Holyoke Street, more than 2,000 vehicles per day — according to statistics from 2007-08. Some 85% of those cars are speeding.

Montview was awarded $15,000 for traffic calming in 2006 because City View Apartments — eight units built along the railroad tracks — was bringing more people and traffic into an already densely populated area.

A neighborhood committee worked with city officials for more than two years to gather necessary information and to generate ideas about how to put the money to the best use. Our goal was to bring the neighborhood more acutely “into view” of drivers, using visual cues to signal they were in a densely populated neighborhood and encouraging them to drive more slowly and carefully.

The plan, and proposed budget submitted in November 2009, looked like this: two outdoor community bulletin boards, $4, 000; one removable traffic circle, $1,200; street surface mural $2,000; 10-year upkeep of mural, $2,000; railroad trestle paintings (2), $5,000; street plantings, $800.

Our proposal was denied over and over again. Officials were unenthusiastic about our ideas, despite research that showed strategies like this were effective for calming traffic and for building a sense of community. What we ultimately got was a few very ineffective speed bumps; I think they cost about $3,000. Unspent money was used, we were told, somewhere on Pleasant Street. 

Oddly, neighborhood traffic calming awards aren’t guaranteed for use in the neighborhood that suffers from increased traffic; the money goes into a general fund.

It was only a year or maybe two after this that the city decided to paint the rainbow crosswalk on Main Street. Yes! Paint the street, something they told us was impractical, and would not qualify for our traffic calming money. After the initial crosswalk came the murals on the walls. Yes! Painting walls and alleyways downtown, each one a reminder that downtown trumps the neighborhoods.

The Ninja Turtles are only the latest example of top-down, lots-of-money-needed, downtown-focused decision-making in Northampton. Somehow, the powers that be haven’t noticed the shifting paradigm in urban planning, as researchers suggest planning boards and offices put “the community” not just at the table, but at the wheel in decision making.

Even the conservative Brookings Institution is promoting a place-based approach to planning, one that seeks to build community power, shift relational dynamics, and bridge policy silos, all while working toward equity-focused neighborhood-level change.

They’ve found that investments in economic development at the city and regional level rarely “trickle down” to disinvested neighborhoods and suggest money is better spent on neighborhoods, where economic development will “trickle up,” strengthening the city and region at large. 

Northampton is struggling right now. We need, and the city needs, to support more trickle-up ideas. There are plenty of them bubbling up from every corner of the town.

Claudia Lefko lives in Northampton. 

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