Recent comments in /f/providence

Dopey-NipNips t1_jcf4it4 wrote

Reply to comment by final-effort in Anyone know what’s spilling into the Providence river/ where it’s coming from right now? by forestfears

Yeah it is. It's crazy how good they are. They send out a team and pull samples up the river til they find the storm drain it came from, then pull samples from every drain that feeds it, then soil and surface samples til they find the house or business it came from

If it's a homeowner with a leaking tank they'll pay for it and insurance won't cover it. If it's a business they'll likely lose their insurance

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lightningbolt1987 t1_jcevm7h wrote

Reply to comment by revertothemiddle in Yoleni’s in Downtown Providence has closed by lovecraft_401

The answer is no. High rise construction is extremely expensive to build. In theory, the people living there, however, would not be living in low density apartments in the neighborhoods, which in theory helps prevent those units from becoming more expensive (not going down in price, but having more competition so they don’t go up as fast).

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lightningbolt1987 t1_jcevdy7 wrote

Reply to comment by huron9000 in Yoleni’s in Downtown Providence has closed by lovecraft_401

Give me a break—how on earth is providence saying fuck off to drivers? There are many parking lots and parking garages downtown, there’s virtually never traffic downtown. Personally, I’ve never had to pay for parking downtown. The longest I’ve ever had to circulate to find street parking is 20 minutes at the absolute worst and that’s because I refused to pay for a parking lot. It’s right off of multiple highways. There are only a couple bike lanes in the entire downtown on the quiet Empire and Fountain Streets. The whole downtown revolves around drivers.

The key to success in downtown Providence is much more housing. Full stop. You can’t have a successful downtown that completely revolves around people driving in from other places, which is still pretty much the case here—you can’t even get there that easily from the adjacent neighborhoods (west side, smith hill) without driving! There needs to be lots of people there 24/7, using the local shops as their primary liquor store/market/bookstore, having Burnside Park be their primary green space (lots of city parks of homelessness challenges, but they usually they have a lot of non-homeless people to balance it out—there just aren’t enough people living downtown to do this at burnside which is why it feels as it does. Housing at Superman will help). More people living downtown means it feels more vibrant all the time which also makes it more attractive to people who visit from other places.

The best way to draw people from outside of providence is to have downtown providence be awesome and worth coming to. That requires a big 24/7 population to create an around-the-clock pulse to the place. Otherwise, the bones are already great: great architecture, riverfront access, a good foundation of shops and restaurants, train access, etc. We now just need people.

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