There’s always a silver lining
Down in my neck of the woods, there's been a long-running argument about what to do with the fairly ancient and really narrow Sellwood Bridge, which is very heavily used and in a steadily decreasing state of repair, but which has about 3 different constituencies warring over what to do with it.
There's the trucking industry (and the DOT), which really REALLY wants to see a new four-lane bridge so they can run their tractors back and forth without blocking traffic and collapsing the bridge; there's the local community, which also doesn't want to have the bridge collapsing, but really doesn't want to have a 4 lane bridge running headlong into the (formerly 4-lane, now two-lane) Tacoma Street; and lastly there's the people who live in the condominium complex that was built up around the east-side base of the bridge [when the bridge was built, the state didn't claim any extra air rights or condemn the ground under the footprint of the bridge), who don't give a tinker's damn about Sellwood and would be perfectly happy if it collapsed into being an industrial slum just as long as it doesn't infringe on their river view.
The bridge has been gently persuading the county to work on a repair or replacement strategy by the simple expedient of starting to fall apart (the main truss of this Lindenthal-designed bridge is apparently in good shape, but the approaches are not, but the DOT does not want to simply replace the approaches and leave the bridge as is) and the project has crept forward to the point where the county engineers are holding public meetings to figure out where to put a hypothetical replacement.
The simple solution (replace or rebuild the bridge in place) is, of course, the cheapest and least obtrusive, but the "obtrusive" part of the plan involves buying out and removing a few condominium units, so the condominium owners had a shrieking hissy fit and got the county to add a bridge option that would involve a new bridge located about a thousand feet north. This one would be much more expensive than the rebuild-in-place plans (by "much more expensive", I'm talking in the ballpark of US$80 million dollars, or enough money to physically dig up and shift the stupid condominium complex 20 feet north] and it would involve hacking a huge swath through the non-condominium part of Sellwood, demolishing more structures, and destroying the south end of Sellwood Riverfront Park.
In a sane world, the county would smile thinly, say "that's nice", then immediately shred this crackpot option. But, alas, river frontage == expensive == money == influence, so the option stayed on the table, even though it is loudly loathed by everyone in Sellwood who doesn't live in these condos.
Two days ago the I35W bridge over the Mississipi River in Minneapolis suffered a catastrophic fault and collapsed into the gorge. This was not a very old bridge (it was finished a few months before the Silver Bridge took a dive into the Ohio River) but it was built with approximately 0% redundancy and was not aging well even before it fell apart. This collapse focussed a lot of attention on the fairly terrible state of repair of many of the nation's bridges , even though the I35W bridge was not considered to be any more of a risk than the Silver Bridge was in the early morning of 15-Dec-1967.
One of the "terrible state of repair" bridges is the Sellwood bridge. So, almost as soon as the rubble stopped bouncing, some bright spark in the condominium "to hell with Sellwood" bridge committee was on the phone to the Portland Tribune, whining that the Sellwood bridge is unsaaaaaaaafe and that to protect the chiiiiiildren the county has to build a bridge across Sellwood Riverfront Park immediately. And they've got a website and and they've invited everyone to go to it so they can vote in favor of "yes! we want to have our parklands destroyed so that some wealthy propertyowners don't have to pack their bags and move to another waterfront condominium."
It's the American way, doncha know. Take a spectacular disaster and warp it into an excuse for your own political goals. It's helpful that the Portland Tribune is a fairly conservative paper that's been reliably sympathetic to the travails of the rich (this does not appear to be because of editorial interference from the owner; EVERY newspaper in Portland, including the alt-weeklies, is pretty conservative) and will print the latest episode in the story of Richie Rich and friends vs. the unwashed masses.
I don't own a riverfront property, but I *do* take advantage of Sellwood Riverfront Park. It might suck to have to cash a US$1 million cheque from the county and then move from one cheaply constructed riverfront apartment to another, but it sucks less than losing a nice public parkland and not getting a single thing in return.