It's 9AM
I wrote a letter to the Mayor.
“You did what?”
She laughed.
That’s okay, I get laughed at.
A lot.
“Yeah, I told him that Little Rock has lost its curb appeal.”
“That’s stupid.”
I get that a lot too.
Told I’m stupid.
Told it’s crazy.
And I get it.
I know all these things.
It takes an idiot to run a marathon.
Hello, Apex Predator, what’s chasing you?
It takes a special kind of idiot to run an ultra-marathon.
And I’m not even sure there’s a word for the kind of dummy who runs three in one year.
Not normal, maybe.
Deluded? Possibly.
Maybe the kind of delusions that think writing a note to the mayor of a mid-size town will actually make an impact.
Because anybody can bitch about where they live, or how something is being run.
Offering a simple, easy solution with low cost options, well, sometimes, that’s just the kind of idiocy this world needs.
Take Pine Bluff, for instance.
They have spent over two million dollars rehabbing, updating, and beautifying Main Street.
They have spent millions more in a new Art Center, a gorgeous library, and a new Aquatic Center.
There are flowers and streetlamps and new asphalt in front of dilapidated haunted house looking buildings.
And there is hope.
Now they need people to fill the streets, and tourists to bring their dollars to town.
I wrote the mayor and the head of a committee about building a mountain bike trail in a bottomland park.
The head of the committee wrote back, said he brought it up to the Mayor, she remembered the note and they put it on a wish list to be explored with the City Council.
I don’t build Mountain Bike Trails. I ride them, sometimes.
I just thought, it’s a growing industry, and a cool trail next to the River would bring people to town every weekend.
People who would eat at new restaurants or stay at hotels and AirBnB’s.
I don’t know if the idea will be executed, but it’s out there.
It’s shared.
I did the same for the Mayor of Little Rock.
I do not think he’s doing a good job. He has had a tough go of it.
Covid. Police brutality. High crime rate.
After a lot of conventions were cancelled in 2020, Little Rock needs visitors.
Except the DOT turned getting to LR into a nightmare.
And when you do get downtown, the streets are not paved with gold.
Hell, they are hardly paved at all.
It’s like riding a washing board, if that board was pitted with axle busting, back wrenching gullies and blacktop ditches that pound any car into submission.
The news asked him about street repair.
His response was akin to what we’re hearing in the rest of America.
Covid shut down a lot of street work, which was worse this year because of the big, long deep freeze we had back in February.
You remember the one that shut down the Texas electric grid?
It left behind a legacy of need.
Need for alternative power systems and a string of potholes, cracks, humps, bumps and turtle shell roadways.
He also blamed unemployment benefits for street workers who were dismissed in 2020.
But those were shut off in June in AR.
He’s good at blaming.
My suggestion was to up the curb appeal in Little Rock.
One crew working a blacktop truck every day.
And a second crew working landscape detail.
Because that’s worse than the potholes.
Knee high weeds in every patch of dirt on the way in and out of town.
It’s one thing to ignore all the empty and vacant buildings in downtown LR, but they look all the worse for the lack of street and curb appeal.
My question was, how do you expect people to want to come to a place that looks like trash, especially when you make it so difficult to be there?
I didn’t get a response.
But it makes sense, right?
If you live in a home, you try to keep the yard cut, the weeds low, maybe plant some flowers.
Some folks decorate for the season, so that the house looks good.
Why?
So the neighbors will be impressed with the house?
So it looks welcoming and inviting?
Because we get a sense of pride when people like how our homes look?
I hate it.
I hate we live in a world that judges so much on appearance.
And yet, we do.
As much as we might like to point out that it’s what’s on the inside that matters, looks matter too.
We trust a good looking person more than a not so good looking person.
Why?
We trust a good looking place more than a shady looking place.
Why?
There are psychological and evolutionary reasons behind it, I know.
There are also real world examples, where groups have gone in and painted abandoned houses, mowed the yards and edged and generally cleaned up blocks of dilapidated structures.
And all of the sudden, crime goes down in that area.
Other houses start getting spruced up.
People begin to take pride in things.
Like neighborhood. Like community.
Last Friday, we stopped for a few drinks in downtown North Little Rock, just across the river from downtown LR.
They shut off a few blocks of Main street once a month, bring in a band to play music, set up tables under tents and serve from a few restaurants in the area.
I watched a little girl dance in front of the trio playing music while some high school kids practiced twirling fire twirling.
The songs were good, the beer was cold, and it wasn’t as crowded as I would have liked, but it was also the end of a hundred degree day.
Dog days of summer are tough on a festival.
But there was appeal. Flowers in pots hanging from streetlamps.
No weeds in the sidewalks, and even the empty buildings were powerwashed, white washed or just plain clean.
Everything had some curb appeal.
I wrote the mayor and said put down new blacktop and mow.
Two steps to making the place look a little better.
Making it feel like a place people want to be.
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