MannyIsGod
02-27-2005, 05:56 PM
Mike Greenberg: Common good should be priority
Web Posted: 02/27/2005 12:00 AM CST
San Antonio Express-News
I remember talking to an actual scientist once, about the time the Texas Research Park was established in the early 1980s.
He told me researchers sometimes have to do more than just stand around in lab coats and rattle their test tubes.
They need access to a major research library. They need to pick the brains of colleagues in many different disciplines. They need intellectual and cultural stimulation. They need to eat lunch. Don't tell anyone, but sometimes they even like to step inside a juke joint and hoist a beer.
That's why businesses oriented to research and technology tend to concentrate near major urban universities and medical centers.
You can't just slap the words "research park" on brush country far from the nearest juke joint and expect thousands of jobs to materialize — not overnight, not in a decade, not in a generation.
Thus, it came as no surprise to read last weekend that, after 23 years, the 1,255-acre Texas Research Park is occupied by just 10 companies with a grand total of 400 employees. One of those companies, the Cancer Therapy & Research Center, plans to leave its 12-year-old complex in the research park and consolidate in the South Texas Medical Center.
The business and political leaders who promoted the Texas Research Park thought it would put San Antonio on the high-tech map and be a magnet for jobs.
In fact, the Texas Research Park is a flop.
Moral: It is folly to hatch economic development plans in isolation from community building.
Similarly, it is folly to conceive an educational program separately from community building, as the Alamo Community College District board should have learned from the recent defeat of its bond proposal.
The package failed because the board insisted on locating a proposed health careers campus at the South Texas Medical Center.
In some ways, the medical center would be the best place for such a facility. But a downtown location also would have advantages.
The bigger difference is that a downtown location would advance community building in ways that a medical center location could not.
Downtown is closer to the populations that stand to benefit most from such a facility. Moreover, a health careers campus is more likely to yield secondary economic benefits downtown than in the medical center.
A reader sent me a third example of blindered thinking. An article in the February issue of Liberty magazine argued in favor of one-way streets and implicitly endorsed the whole control-freak agenda of traffic engineers, circa 1955 — an odd stance for a Libertarian publication. The villains of the piece were comprehensive urban planners.
That position almost makes sense if the sole function of the public right-of-way is to allow motorized vehicles to move as fast, as far and as continuously as possible.
But a single-minded focus on that goal obscures the ultimate purpose of the public right-of-way — as a framework for community building.
A complex society requires specialized knowledge and institutional missions. But a complex society also needs its specialists to consider how their missions fit into the whole.
Whatever your specialized role might be, you have another role that you share with everyone else.
We all have to think of ourselves as community builders first, and as specialists second.
Web Posted: 02/27/2005 12:00 AM CST
San Antonio Express-News
I remember talking to an actual scientist once, about the time the Texas Research Park was established in the early 1980s.
He told me researchers sometimes have to do more than just stand around in lab coats and rattle their test tubes.
They need access to a major research library. They need to pick the brains of colleagues in many different disciplines. They need intellectual and cultural stimulation. They need to eat lunch. Don't tell anyone, but sometimes they even like to step inside a juke joint and hoist a beer.
That's why businesses oriented to research and technology tend to concentrate near major urban universities and medical centers.
You can't just slap the words "research park" on brush country far from the nearest juke joint and expect thousands of jobs to materialize — not overnight, not in a decade, not in a generation.
Thus, it came as no surprise to read last weekend that, after 23 years, the 1,255-acre Texas Research Park is occupied by just 10 companies with a grand total of 400 employees. One of those companies, the Cancer Therapy & Research Center, plans to leave its 12-year-old complex in the research park and consolidate in the South Texas Medical Center.
The business and political leaders who promoted the Texas Research Park thought it would put San Antonio on the high-tech map and be a magnet for jobs.
In fact, the Texas Research Park is a flop.
Moral: It is folly to hatch economic development plans in isolation from community building.
Similarly, it is folly to conceive an educational program separately from community building, as the Alamo Community College District board should have learned from the recent defeat of its bond proposal.
The package failed because the board insisted on locating a proposed health careers campus at the South Texas Medical Center.
In some ways, the medical center would be the best place for such a facility. But a downtown location also would have advantages.
The bigger difference is that a downtown location would advance community building in ways that a medical center location could not.
Downtown is closer to the populations that stand to benefit most from such a facility. Moreover, a health careers campus is more likely to yield secondary economic benefits downtown than in the medical center.
A reader sent me a third example of blindered thinking. An article in the February issue of Liberty magazine argued in favor of one-way streets and implicitly endorsed the whole control-freak agenda of traffic engineers, circa 1955 — an odd stance for a Libertarian publication. The villains of the piece were comprehensive urban planners.
That position almost makes sense if the sole function of the public right-of-way is to allow motorized vehicles to move as fast, as far and as continuously as possible.
But a single-minded focus on that goal obscures the ultimate purpose of the public right-of-way — as a framework for community building.
A complex society requires specialized knowledge and institutional missions. But a complex society also needs its specialists to consider how their missions fit into the whole.
Whatever your specialized role might be, you have another role that you share with everyone else.
We all have to think of ourselves as community builders first, and as specialists second.