I believe our cities and towns have lost a lot of their uniqueness, making it difficult to distinguish between one place and another. Every town has similar big box retailers, food chains, shopping malls, and the like, which eventually turn into vacant areas once suburban sprawl shifts into another direction. Originally every town had something that set them apart from the next town, but as modern times have developed, and with it the advancement of technology, globalization has kicked in full gear and our towns and cities have suffered, turning into mass-produced places.
There have been efforts through the Main Street Program, and they have been successfully carried out, but not every aspect of a town fits within this program. There are many other aspects of planning that need to be considered. It is already apparent in comparisons from decades before to present day; towns almost shift into one another without much change or consciousness of the transition.
As the Main Street Program focuses solely on the downtown area of a town, the surrounding business and residential community, which supported the downtown originally, is being overlooked as to its importance in the development of that downtown area. Areas that were considered nice residential communities and light commercial zones have been overlooked and essentially forgotten. The economic dynamic that once supported the town has changed; so even though the town is renovated, the economic support is not there to maintain that renovation and this is due in large part to ‘urban sprawl’ (where people have moved out of the downtown areas to be in newer and shinier suburban meccas). There have been a great deal of strip malls and larger stores built into those suburban areas which are now being abandoned because of tax incentives elsewhere and/or a change in the economy.
As much emphasis as has been put on the historic rehabilitations of a few buildings, there should also be consideration for past and present rehabilitation and development. Most developers tend to plow under open areas, trees, older buildings, and anything that might be in their way of projected development. Through the years, this approach has been very prominent and has caused a complete change in the makeup and appearance of the original town.
Examples of this phenomenon can be experienced along interstate corridors linking one metropolitan area to another. An example of this is witnessed in Florida, from West Palm Beach to Fort Lauderdale to Miami. Infrastructure has not historically kept up with the developing areas and consequently retrofitting roadways, traffic patterns, sewage, electric and water, have changed the appearance of ‘quaint’ communities into hyper-developed skeletons. Examples of these ‘skeletons’ can be seen in towns and cities across Florida, such as Tampa, Jacksonville, and Orlando, to name a few. The original flavor of the town has morphed into a conglomerate of mega-roads and multistoried complexes. Towns located along a coastline have often been altered to an unrecognizable state due to the allure of high taxes and high-density complexes. This has greatly changed sleepy tourist destinations into high-priced, glamorous and glitzy tourist marketed meccas devoid of their unique originality.