Brockton: Planned or Accidental?

Driving west from Plymouth on route 14/27 on New Year’s Day, searching for the Fall River Expressway, we are compelled through the rotting downtown around the T station, bus depot, and juvenile court house.  In Brockton the trains are elevated on a stone viaduct that guarantees that you will never get run over.  As a result there are no lines of sight in the center of town, plenty of places to wait for passerbyes for muggings, throwing trash at passing cars, and defecating in public.  And the traffic cannot see around the stops, corners, and imposing blackened stone viaducts...imagine the Newcastle of Get Carter, the original with Michael Caine.

The MBTA and Commonwealth DOT have grand plans for Brockton and the roadways near Taunton, US 44, that they and other proponent of public works projects as a salve for unemployment like vertical housing structures cure social problems.  If you build it, put the shovel in the ground, you cannot be stopped.  This Robert Moses mentality has its inherent truth in the nature of such projects.  To say that it will stimulate the economy and keep the people from becoming restless is a misunderstanding of the work policies of Franklin Roosevelt.  Try stacking a court with judges, forcing millions into cheap labor, and making hillbillies brush their teeth, Obama.  If Michael Caine were President things would get done, the bloody door would get blown off.

Is Brockton in managed decline or managed growth?  Regional and Urban planners are often under the impression that growth can exists anywhere despite the economic and geographical realities.  Brockton was an accident, the industrial town that the city fathers envisioned and named after a canadian industrialist(an oxymoron), did not survive.  Brockton has been in decline for a century, although plateau may be more accurate in a technical definition.  Let Michael Caine, in a Charles Bronson way, bring Brockton back from the meta-ghetto to a new foxborough or newcastle instead of waiting for the half-assed throw money at it stimilus transportation/employment plan.