The Scots poet Robert Burns famously said (I’m using the version in English) “Oh, would some power gift us / To see ourselves as others see us!” For me, that power turned out to be YouTube. I am a latecomer to the video blog posts of transportation planning and engineering consultant Ray Delahanty, known professionally as CityNerd. Delahanty’s channel explores cities that work or don’t work in terms of livability, walkability and affordability. Crank and snark figure conspicuously in his judgments, so fellow city nerds like me find them as irresistible as salted peanuts.
Hungry for more, I looked at his previous posts and spotted one from two years ago titled, “Let’s Shame the Awful Land Use of America’s Ten Worst State Capitals.” To borrow from a commenter, “I saw the title and was like, “Oh boy! A video about Springfield, Illinois!”
No one who knows this city will have been surprised that Springfield ended up No. 2 on Delahanty’s list. (Only one capital city was judged to be worse, and that was Pheonix, Arizona.) He blamed the “low-rise low-density” state campus that “absolutely devastates the downtown of what may otherwise be a perfectly fine small Midwest city.” Accurate enough but he could have been more specific. The reason the state campus is low-density is that it was built for cars, and you can’t get any more low-rise than a parking lot.
You can’t really take in the scale of this wasteland by looking at it on a map or from the sidewalk or a passing car. Delahanty offered viewers an aerial video tour of greater downtown Springfield from the southern boundary of the Capitol complex at Edwards north to the SIU Med/St. John’s/Memorial medical district. (It starts at 12:31.) While these images must make a paving contractor swoon, the rest of us find them (in Delahanty’s words) “pretty horrifying.” And it could have been even worse; Delahanty’s tour spared viewers the flattened city south and east of downtown. If you must look, you can take your own tour via Google Earth. It reminded me of news footage from a hundred floods with only a building here and there poking bravely above the gray, still water.
It must be pointed out that Delahanty is a better polemicist than journalist. The unbuilding of Springfield was not wrought by the State of Illinois alone. The town’s merchants and insurance companies have tar-stained hands too, as does county government and those hospitals and clinics who plainly believe that the mission to heal the sick does not extend to their neighborhoods. The result is that about a third of the land in the city center sits empty for three hours out of every four during the week and much of it has only one parking space in four or five occupied when it is being used. The expansion of its display lot now underway by Isringhausen Imports is not a sign that downtown is thriving but the opposite; it used to be that new car dealers were pushed out of downtown because the land there was too valuable to park cars on.
I know – old news. This paper has been berating the paving over of the graves of houses, apartments building, warehouses and shops of all kinds since Lincoln was still warm in his casket. (I published my first rant on the topic here in 1976.) But we were judging Springfield by good-city standards and that is to commit a category error. The paving of Springfield is not merely something badly done. It is a bad thing done so badly as to approach greatness. I mean, the Grand Canyon is a ruined landscape made magnificent by its scale. The same can be said about Springfield’s cityscape. Oddly, Springfield boosters are not trumpeting the news that the old hometown was named No. 2 on a list of notable U.S. cities. If the horseshoe sandwich is reason to visit Springfield, how many more might come to see (with apologies to Cincinnati) America’s Parkopolis?
While the tourism hucksters try to figure out how to exploit Springfield’s notoriety, the rest of us can explore the how and why. The same social and economic dynamic is at work in other state capitals, yet only a handful of host cities have done as badly in adapting to the automobile as Springfield. Finding the answers to why this has happened in, and to, Springfield is a first step to fixing it.
We might talk about policies (such as tax laws) with unintended consequences, geographic happenstance, about political, indeed philosophical notions about private property and the public good, about sovereignty or the decline of old Springfield’s propertied clans. We might also talk about how the things that are being done better – and some are – can become common practice. These are big ideas and this is a small column, however, so the talk will have to wait. For the moment, our lots will be our lot for a while.
In his long career, Mr. Krohe authored some three dozen articles on urban issues in Illinois Times and was a regular contributor to Planning, the American Planning Association’s monthly, from 1978 until 2014.
This article appears in February 5-11, 2026.
