It's a beautiful thing.

I was recently driving down Broadway Blvd. approaching downtown and I noticed that there seemed to be an inordinate number of vacancies in some of the strip mall type things along the road. And, of course, many of them looked downright run down.

The City of Tucson came up with a conceptual plan they called Rio Nuevo a couple of years back that was intended to address this very problem. They were going to revamp and revitalize the Broadway corridor leading into downtown. After spending large sums of money on studies, ideas, plans and consultants, they are stalled with no noticeable improvements.

In fact, the whole Rio Nuevo idea may have had the opposite effect. Not wanting to do improvements that might soon be destroyed to make way for Rio Nuevo, or waiting and hoping to get in on some of the soon to come funding, the owners of the facilities seem to have let many of these places slide into disrepair.

I know Rio Nuevo has been highly criticized already, but it seems another good example of why this is true:

"Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying, 'This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.'
Luke 14: 28-30