Posted on Mon, Jun. 18, 2007

We asked you to tell us what was wrong with downtown Miami's central business district, and did you ever: Dirty streets. Poor lighting. Inadequate parking -- and parks. Police nowhere in sight. Merchants who don't maintain their property, or provide good service. Not enough city inspectors to enforce the code.

But along with the frustration pouring out of your responses, we heard something else: A passionate belief that greatness is more possible than it ever has been, and hope that the politicians, professionals and property owners can actually make change happen if only they would just commit.

The process has begun: A team of workers is cleaning the streets, paid for by the Miami Downtown Development Authority. The DDA also plans to hire a cadre of ''ambassadors'' to patrol the area with walkie-talkies, providing information and security, starting this fall.

There have been such plans for Flagler Street before, but whether from lack of resources or lack of follow-through -- from the city and from merchants -- progress has been slow.

Consider history, says Neisen Kasdin, the former Miami Beach politician who served during South Beach's transformation from trash heap to epicenter of hip. Flagler Street was downtown Miami, back in the early 1920s. But over the decades, like central business districts across the country, the area deteriorated with the spread of suburbia.

More than any other time before, says Kasdin -- now a DDA board member and chairman of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce's committee on downtown -- investing today in fixing that downtown core will pay benefits. The gleaming condos rising along Brickell, the Miami River and Biscayne Boulevard will bring thousands of new residents -- even if they don't all sell. New restaurants and shops already are invigorating other parts of downtown.

''The hipness quotient is there in downtown Miami,'' Kasdin said. ''There's nothing hip about me, but I know hip when I see it. Hip seeks out interesting, undiscovered places. There has to be some grit.''

Still, without clean and safe streets, Flagler will miss out on all this revitalization. Here, in the words of the workers, the consumers, the merchants and the leaders, is where we are and what needs to be done.