My dad will probably never be a statue or have buildings named after him, but he still managed to leave a legacy in Greensboro.
What does it take to leave a legacy in a city? Is it having your name on a building that you either built or gave a lot of money to make?
Is it knowing your entire block or neighborhood?
Is it leaving behind children and grandchildren who continue on with the family cause or business?
These are questions I’ve been thinking about lately. I’m not going to go into any more details about what brought me to these questions, because there’s a lot I cannot say about why and what happened. However, the root of it all starts here, as I detailed in my About section and in my 2010 Grist article “Does urbanism have to be black or white?”
It all started with a map on the floor. My dad and I would spend Saturday afternoons “driving” around with my toy NASCARs from my friendly neighborhood Hardees. As I got older, I became enamored of the small skyline of my hometown of Greensboro, N.C. So enamored that one day, while I was sick with the chicken pox, my dad went out and bought me a postcard with the skyline on it. It hangs in my room to this day.
When they widened the main road next to our house, I cried. I also was opposed to a hotel project near my current residence that threatened to upstage the downtown area. Mind you, I was only eight. I was an urbanist in the making, although I would have had no way of knowing there was a name for it.
Dad and I biked through our neighborhood on Saturday afternoons. Those bike rides took us through housing projects and 1940s era single-family homes until we made it to the main suburban artery. I loved my bike until I moved to a neighborhood where I was teased for just walking around. It’s taken me about 15 years to consider getting back on a bike. My dad still bikes; he’s always had a string of intermittently non-working cars, so he doesn’t think twice about it.
My dad doesn’t have any buildings named after him. I’ll probably have to sell his house. He struggled to walk down streets with no sidewalks. Then there was the bike. When he got tired of fighting our stroads with both of those, he put money into a car he could barely afford. Yet, he fixed up homes that weren’t built well in the first place. He mowed yards that others couldn’t maintain. He always had a song in his heart and brought music to any space. Finally, he made sure that I knew that people, all people, mattered. All these things are his legacy.
How can you leave a legacy in your city? DO YOU and do what your community needs. My dad did. It does not take money, a building with your name on it, or a stone edifice of your body to be someone who is never forgotten or to create an example.
In fact, if you create an example, that legacy lives on and it lives in the present.
When Allison Guess reached out to me about guest posting, I noticed she was from Pittsburgh and I asked her to tell me about what’s really going on in East Liberty, an area lauded for its new development lifeblood. However, as I expected and even more, she has taken us back to the roots of gentrification (colonialization) and illustrated how the current changes are right in line with previous patterns. Her post raises questions and intensifies my hope that one day, we as Americans can come to terms with land ownership, cultivation, and value in an ethical and honorable manner.
A few years ago, I began doing some preliminary research on land based historical trauma. I was specifically interested in land theft and the effects gentrification on Black communities. In a 21st century effort to expand my bibliography, I did a basic Google search of “land theft.” Although not specific enough, my search request did birth a critical evaluation of the stories of land theft that our country has told.
As grade school children, we as United States citizens learn about how the Pilgrims came to the “New World” on the Mayflower and later had a blissful Thanksgiving meal with the Natives. Educators are not honest when describing this situation of overt land theft, the rapping of communities and extreme injustice those Native American communities experienced and continue to face. History books ignore the past and presently lingering notion of Manifest Destiny that lead to the colonization of the African continent (before and after the Pilgrims came to the “New World”) and the seizure of off-continental U.S. territories. Only as adults and when entering college do a few of us hear or care to learn of this bitter truth.
Ironically, past and present conversations about land theft, more often than none seem to tell a drastically biased tale. In the post-slavery Jim Crow Era, one can clearly evaluate the thoughts and fears of urbanization that took place during in Industrial Revolution. Many whites during the time made their concern of the African American Great Migration, also described as the “Negro invasion” known in large public spheres. In that era it was Blacks that were being accused of taking all the jobs and displacing white Americans, sound familiar? On the other hand, major history sources fail to mention that Blacks participating in this massive move, were responding to the terrorism of the south by fleeing for their lives in hopes of salvaging their communities and living out the promised American Dream.
To speak to today’s biased tale of land theft, we can simply encounter present day conversations about immigration and “Mexicans” “stealing” land, resources and jobs from “Americans.” Paradoxically, most of the inhabited lands that some U.S. citizens see as the biggest “threat” of immigrant occupancy (southern and southwestern states such as Texas, Arizona, California, Alabama etc.) are the lands that were not only once occupied by Native Americans but more resounding the country of Mexico, alike. It is interesting to me that advocates of border control and harsh immigration policies, continue to seek ways to police and keep out the descendants of the original inhabitants of these lands.
My point in creating this past and present parallel is to highlight the deeply imbedded fears, bias, and racism in the white psyche. Understanding (not judging) these feelings while having an open and honest “immigration” conversation can help many of us to understand the “memories” that Black Americans have of land theft and land based historical trauma. They can help community organizers, community planners, and investors understand that all people, regardless of skin color, develop relationships, memories, and some level of fondness to their communities regardless of how blighted these spaces may be or have become. We should be reminded that a simple change in community design that ultimately leads to the attraction of a different demographic group other than the already present residents is in and of itself a model of invasion as well as a type of land theft.
East Liberty redevelopments. Courtesy Allison Guess.
An example of not taking the above into consideration and the possible damaging ramifications of community development includes that of East Liberty. East Liberty was once a predominately African American occupied neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a child, I grew up just minutes away from East Liberty. Like many urban Black neighborhoods in the U.S., there was certainly violence, drugs and crime; I will not negate that. However, there was also a strong community that sought to overcome the effects of systematic poverty and disenfranchisement and thus give back to the community.
East Liberty seemed to change overnight. I went away to college and then returned to a new neighborhood. There were fancy restaurants, Target, $400,000+ homes being built and parking meters lined major streets. Soon these streets would become a nightlife and fine dinning Mecca. Commercial for sale signs were everywhere and one could see the future plans of those particular spaces in their windows and on their lots. A majority Black middle school ended this past school year early so it could be demolished and turned into costly lofts.
One of the more sincere objectives of investors is to create incentive for those dwelling in certain areas coined slums to stay. Adversely, in East Liberty (and some other gentrified neighborhoods in United States) the incentive that was created was one that encouraged former residents to leave. Although beneficial to get the “blight” out of neighborhoods, it is very clear that the “original” residents of East Liberty had no or a very small voice in the changes. The documentary East of Liberty highlights this struggle between original residents, new residents, and developers.
Now I know many on the defense will say that supportive, mixed-income housing was built. One could argue that this was established with the community impute. However, I believe this housing is a monument of negativity: a symbol of the undermining of a people due to an enduring history of racism, disenfranchisement, and historical trauma. While support is needed for the abused and addicted, the best support comes from true policy change, the critique and modification of systems, and the desire to see competitive groups excel and take pride in recreating their own community. This support does not include takeover, theft, capture, poverty, forced socialization, or community defeat.
Thus in in moving forward, I have some normative suggestions to community planners and investors. We should seek to make sure all residents are included when making decisions about neighborhood change and development. We ought to be critical of who is or who is not at the conversation table. This means we do not just include the more vocal or affluent voices in the community that are still deemed different in some ways to us, but we should also seek representation of those community members who barely have a whisper. It is not anybody’s responsibility to make decisions or decide the fates of others. When creating incentive to stay, we should make sure it is just that. The primary intention in development should always be to have people stay and the secondary focus should be to attract others into the community and thus naturally foster a more diverse community over time. In doing all of this, the memories and experiences of land theft, invasion, and immigration should inform our discussion as all racial and regional groups have experienced their own story of settling and seizure from an “outsider” group.
Allison Guess is a resident of Pittsburgh, PA. Allison graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with two Bachelors degrees in Political Science and Hispanic Languages and Literature (Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese). Currently, Allison is a consultant and the Academic Liaison for the Black/Land Project. Allison is interested in land based historical trauma, gentrification, redlining, gerrymandering, policy histories, displacement, ethnography and storytelling, just to name a few. Allison hopes to pursue a PhD in African American/Africana Studies in order to further research Black peoples’ relationships to land and place.
I’m not naive to my role straddling the middle of design and social justice in the Place. What is the Place? I define the Place as the entity that comes up for discussion, dissection, or manipulation by policymakers, planners, residents, and developers. In essence, this concept is summed up in one word: Placemaking.
Place is more than the apartment block, the two-story house, the town center, the farm. If we don’t have people who can use the objects of Place, then we are useless. Even worse are people who can build Place but only for profit.
However, place should be where social justice and design meet.
Witness what’s going on here in Greensboro with public art and creative placemaking. The Greensboro Mural Project has revitalized a parking deck…
…and brought homeless individuals into creating public art.
They chose murals because:
“[They build] bridges by painting walls.” This theory believes that beautiful, shared space helps breaks down social/cultural/political/etc. barriers for people to connect. Murals help beautify surroundings of any city.
Anyone can be involved in the process who wants to be, regardless of talent, skill or experience.
The process engages the community and forms a sense of commitment, creating community ownership.
Murals have proven to assist in raising property values without gentrification.
Quality murals make art available and free for the community.
Murals become landmarks in the community.
Murals define the cultural identity of a neighborhood or an entire city.
Murals attract more artists, visitors and media coverage for the area.
We must take away all the barriers for people to build, yet give barriers that provide for easy access, basic safety, shared prosperity, and easy growth. When our places die, we need to be able to pick up the pieces ASAP and make something new. We need to let whomever wants to come in do so, but it needs to be a WE effort, not a ME or THEY effort. It’s great that some culture has been preserved in some areas, but what about current events and life. Can we make sure people can continue to live in these new “prettified” areas.
Design is not just for the developer. Social justice is not just for the downtrodden. Place needs both to be.
This evening (May 7, 2013) the Greensboro City Council will vote on the future of their stake of ownership of the Bessemer shopping center and in turn, the Renaissance Co-Op. In case I do not get a chance to read this statement at tonight’s meeting. I am publishing it here.
Members of Council and Members of the Greater Greensboro Community, I am here to encourage council to retain this investment in the growth of our city. While some in this room may feel like we don’t need to have the city make these types of investments, I beg to differ.
All of you who sit on the dais are there because your care about your local community. You all want to support job creation, home ownership, and a strong local economy. You all want your individual neighborhoods to be stronger and capable of producing positive growth.
It is in this spirit that I encourage you to maintain your support of the Bessemer Center and your stake in the Renaissance Co-Op. This council would gladly put up funding for a major national corporation or retailer to move into the city. However, have you all stopped to think about how that corporation started? That many of the grocery chains began as corner stores, corner stores that anchored and strengthened communities. Unlike some of these manufacturing operations that have come in in the last few years, there is always a demand for fresh food at affordable prices and manpower needed to staff these stores. There are also plenty of service organizations and community groups who are willing to train workers, which may also provide a cost savings of labor, that will not be detrimental to real wages of these people. That alone would lower our unemployment rate.
Need I remind you that this council has a growing history of supporting community projects and community entrepreneurs. This ownership will allow more citizens of Greater Greensboro to have an ownership stake in something that serves our community. All one has to do is turn on the TV or pull up the news online to see that the local food and local merchant movement is more than a passing fad.
That same Internet allows many products that would never have a shelf-life in the pre internet days to be million and billion selling enterprises. Granted, this co-op could have modest financial returns, but for many, the city’s stake in the process would allow people to get a taste of what it’s like to actually own something or create something.
Currently, there is a a lot of momentum around what Greensboro is doing to better itself, namely downtown. Yet, we cannot forget that the vast majority of our citizenry lives elsewhere. They too deserve the ability to walk or make a short drive to services right around the corner.
Lastly, to the community itself. I know it’s not Harris Teeter or something fancier. Yet, as I just told the council, we have to start somewhere. Food is food, as long as it is fresh, reasonably priced and healthy. With the city’s stake in this co-op, there are many of us who can afford to purchase a stake in something positive for this community, that we can have a hand in saying how workers are paid, food is priced and even how long it is open. As we have seen over the years, the larger retailers appear to have no concern for this at all.
So let’s just see how this goes. What harm is it in trying to run this co-op? After all, for 15 years that space has been vacant. Anything’s better than vacant right?
On Tuesday April 30, I spent a good bit of time thinking about downtown with a bunch of dignitaries and fellow young leaders. Our civic foundations brought back Richard Flierl of Cooper Carry, The Center for Connective Architecture, who helped the city conduct a downtown plan in 2002. At lunchtime, 100 of my fellow young professionals met to learn about the plan, talk about ideas to improve on it, and be encouraged to do more pop-up(tactical) urbanism.
To say that I love downtown Greensboro is a major understatement. When I was six years old and stuck inside with the chicken pox, all I missed was “seeing the tall buildings downtown.” My dad went and got me a postcard of downtown just so I could see my beloved buildings while under quarantine . What I was marveling at the most were the three year old Jefferson-Pilot (Lincoln Financial) and First Union (now Wells Fargo) towers. The towers gave us a distinctive skyline and showed that we were serious about remaining a gateway city and also a prosperous city.
Yet, there was not much in the way of activity under those buildings. In 1993, when this chicken pox story happened, Elm Street laid mostly vacant, save the Miller Furniture Company and the Greensboro Record Center, which my parents went to often for the latest albums. Woolworths was still operating as a store, but it was not long before it, and the entire chain, shut down in Greensboro. The Junior League had started operating their new Bargain Box on the first floor of the original First Union building (Currently the Self-Help building, where my office is located). However, my current apartment, my favorite watering holes and restaurants, and even the room where we held this seminar did not exist. Downtown would lay fallow for at least three to six more years before major urban plans such as Flierl’s were created.
So where are we now?
Richard Flierl addresses a Who’s Who of creative forces in Greensboro on April 30, 2013.
In a decent place according to Flierl. Many of the things he suggest we build are in place, namely Center City Park and the downtown ballpark (albiet not in the place he put them). He noted that good progress had been made on the Downtown Greenway , adding residential properties and increasing cultural events. His primary challenges were for the young professionals to continue doing pop-up activities and to the elders to finish what they started, namely the performing arts center.
(An aside: It was great to see where some of the energy and the nucleus of the performing arts center and other ideas came from. It now gives me more context as to why we are pushing so hard for certain things).
At the end of the day, he just wanted us to “get it done.”
So do I.
On the local news, I got a chance to tell a reporter that I feel like we need to work our hardest at becoming a 24 hour city. I want to be able to walk out my door, come down into that beautiful skyline and be able to pick something to do without having to dig into the Facebook invites and event calendars, or stumble on something awesome that I didn’t know was happening and don’t know when it will happen again.
Also, what about our displaced and left out residents? Community organizer and friend Wesley Morris challenged the young professional crowd to be be mindful of who has been displaced by movements that have already happened. An elderly woman at the evening session reminded us that not all seniors are near death and they’d like to have a senior center in the heart of the city. Several adults who appeared to be parents of teenagers called for a downtown skate park. We need to up the mix of people downtown. Make it accessible to children, teens, seniors and the disabled along with young professionals and wealthy people.
I am reminded of the fish market on the corner of Lee and Friendly, that happened to be surrounded by a dilapidated old bakery, but was bringing business to that corner. Yet, in the redevelopment plan, the market was moved, initially for the ballpark, but later for our yet to be conceived South Elm redevelopment. Why not develop around this market? No this isn’t a sexy businesses, but it’s business none the less. Kaid Benfield said it best in his recent list of smarter smarter growth that we really need to start growing around who’s already here and make sure they get a say and get to stay.
At the end of the day, as I’ve said in other media, downtown is really where I want to be in Greensboro. I walk to work down here, I wake up and can look out upon my beloved skyline (and the trains), and I get to meet regularly with many strong minds willing to do something to make this place a bit better.
I want everybody to be in love with downtown. If we can keep up this energy, I know everyone will be.
Many times, it is very difficult for me to feel like I make a real difference in lives by writing. Are words are what people need the most? Don’t they need action?
Well, action is what they got out of me these past two weekends. On the weekend of April 20-21, 2013, a project that had been sitting under some dust, the Pop-Up Promenade came together in Greensboro. A partnership between Action Greensboro, Downtown Greensboro, Inc.,the City of Greensboro, and several community partners, February One Place will become a place in the truest sense of the word every Friday and Saturday from 6-10 p.m. throughout the months of May and June. Food trucks, musicians and who knows what else will show up and ignite this alleyway right in the heart of downtown Greensboro.
One of the centerpieces of this project is a street mural pattern created by graphic designer Nadia Hassan. Half-homage to the lunch counter seats of the Greensboro Four and half-octagonal M.C. Escher memorial, the street itself gets to put on a nice costume and be more than the place where we put our feet and drive our cars. Due to the complicated nature of the design, the city asked that volunteers come out and paint the street. I picked up a paintbrush on April 21 and helped with the first leg of the project. Yesterday (4/26/2013), other volunteers came out and finished the project. While the paint is semi-permanent, we all hope that this paint will last a very long time. I am also excited that this project has been on major localnews stations and our city manager has filmed a video to encourage people to the painted street. I can only imagine what our weekends will be like this summer, with lots of people engaging the street and not just from the sidewalk.
Personally, it took me back to drawing Escher-esque patterns in grade school, doing volunteer work as a student leader in undergrad, and back to the basic core of why I’m a community advocate and placemaker. It’s fun to make something beautiful of out of a place. Plus,there’s a pride in doing something with your hands that changes the physical space. I’m not a formal planner or even a full-time community developer and getting a chance to do just that, even for just a few hours on the weekend, was priceless.
Painting February One Place in Greensboro. I’m in the pink hoodie. Photo by Cecelia Thompson
The city of Durham is one step ahead of us in Greensboro though. I spent this past Saturday (4/27) afternoon helping put on Durham’s Longest Dinner Table and Block Party, a Build a Better Block initiative put on by the City of Durham Neighborhood Improvement Services and Marry Durham. The goal was to block off the street and create the longest communal dinner table ever in Durham. The table was a good 1/8 to 1/4 a mile long and there was wonderful food and music all up and down the street. According to the event organizers, 669 people showed up, including a man dressed as Jesus. How’s that for divine intervention. The diversity of people was brilliant. And to think, the City of Durham took the lead, then the community organizations followed. Oh, and the neighborhood is in transition, but holding on to it’s mixture of people and income levels ever so slightly.
There were several personal tugs here.Durham was the first city I completely legally resided in, outside of Greensboro (my years in Raleigh were campus years, in which I only registered to vote and did not establish a permanent household of my own). I learned how to drive on my own in Durham. I rented my first apartment there. I worked my first full-time job there as well. However, I never really got a chance to learn and love Durham. The name of it being the cesspool of the Triangle region lingered so heavy, I was not surprised when I was mugged in my own apartment parking lot in August of 2008. My job fell through and so did several subsequent efforts to find employment in the region. I came home to Greensboro, climbed under a proverbial rock and didn’t go out at dark for months. The streets stopped being my friend.
Check me out towards the middle with the red shirt and fro. Great conversations with folks of all ages. Photo by Mary Beth.
Yet, here I was, back on a Durham street, eating a nice lunch and chatting with a variety of positive folks. What really touched me was talking to an 11-year-old. Outside of my younger cousins, talking to children doesn’t come easy to me. Yet, as I was telling another table mate about where I lived in Durham and how much of the city I missed while I was there, the young man and I were able to chat about living in and around the same place. I also told him about this page, so hopefully he’s reading this. I also hope that he gets the chance to know that I really enjoyed talking with him and was honored that this page might have some interest to someone his age, who clearly has an aptitude for learning why the world is the way it is. I have no doubt he will do great things in his life if he keeps up his love for learning.
As I bring this to a close, I look forward to great times at the Pop-Up Promenade and look forward to next year’s Longest Food Table. I also feel better about the action of the pen/keyboard. I wouldn’t have known about either event had I not started writing this blog and had I not had a will to be a public servant in some form.
Sometimes actions and words speak at the same volume.
Schools may not be the urbanist anchors we want, but the community can serve as a school, as well as push for transit that connects other educational needs.
I once read an article in the News and Observer that illustrates the true effect of the modern neighborhood school. In this article, schools in wealthy neighborhoods had established private foundations, some that were able to pay teachers outside of state funding. This is on top of the money raised by their Parent Teacher Associations (PTA). However, schools in poorer neighborhoods were dependent completely on government funding.
Say what you will about who’s to blame for the poor education system, but it often comes down to economics. Equally troubling were the comments on the article. These comments bashed the idea of having a big all-district endowment instead of the per-school endowment. The assumption would be that each school would get equal dollars. I think this makes sense in the public school realm. Yet, this was slammed as socialism by many commentators on the post. One commenter offered to help other schools establish private foundations, but the sad part about him was that he was also anonymous. Still, parents who are buying into public schools, remember that they are public. Your money goes to the public good. If you really are concerned that bad about helping other students that you don’t like or know, consider taking your kids to private school.
A part of good urbanism is having amenities close by. This includes our schools. However, I believe our schools will be the last piece to join a compact, self-sustaining urban neighborhood. There are far too many curriculum choices, learning styles, parenting styles and age groups in fluctuation to allow for a successful neighborhood school network in line with urbanist principles. However, urbanism can embrace equal school access.
For cities like Raleigh that have a large enough urban and suburban base, I propose that we go to zone based schooling. Zones would have several types of schools in one geographic area. No student would be bused out of this area unless demand far exceeded supply. A plan like this was proposed in Wake County. It was passed, but with far too many holes and disagreements and politics to work well.The main concern was that schools would re-segregate by racial and economic lines. They probably will, but that’s only a problem if the teachers and parents make it a problem. Kids bully, cheat, and fail tests all across the school income spectrum. I witnessed at the suburban high school I attended. While these privileged kids from the suburbs were in high end classes and some did quite well, not as many did so well in college and so far there aren’t any who are doing above-average things that their high education would speak to. For the record, we do have aspiring lawyers doctors and young engineers. We’ve launched an Olympic athlete and a governor. Yet, just like any school, no matter the level, there’s not a 100% success rate.
Yet, what is success? People have different definitions. My own success came from a parent making me do well. In college I had professors and mentors that cared enough about my future to push me to the top. People are needed to help all students find resources they need and they don’t always cost money. They could be your neighbors. In a dense urban environment that’s economically stable, these neighbors also have careers and occupations that serve as educational outlets.
Ultimately, if we can’t get schools into the neighborhood fold, at least get mentors and teachers there. Find store and business owners who are willing to train students who aren’t too academic to run tech based businesses or manage stores. Provide an adequate transportation network to and from schools that offer something the neighborhood school doesn’t. The neighborhood school should host other community events either free of charge or at a reasonable rate. Bring mentors in for students who are struggling, as well as for parents who may need help with continuing education and entrepreneurial training. Also, as we hold all parties (parents, teachers, students and the community) accountable for environmental issues, let’s push for educational excellence as well. Lastly, we must remember that success looks different, but we should strive for whatever it is for a particular person.
At this point, we can then start solving the urban schools problem and cross that off our list of urban renewal(the good kind) and suburban retrofit.
Recently, I was chillin’ with some DC artists who were visiting Elsewhere, one of my favorite creative spaces here in Greensboro. Many of the people, who live in a very culturally rich city, had been waiting years for the opportunity to go down and see this art space that is now getting a lot of attention and press from mainstream and trade publications, along with other cultural institutions and organization. The executive director of Elsewhere is also very engaged in the sense of place , creative placemaking and his role in how that works.
I was not officially part of their visit, but I valued so much the cultural and regional exchange inherent in being able to chat with the visitors, as well as staff at the museum, many who are becoming good friends and partners. Our conversations went back and forth to history, culture, cost of living, and what it means to create.
That to me is what makes being in a city great. No matter what size, there are cultural connections to be had when there are a good number of cultural institutions, bars and restaurants, and homes in a central location. This exchange happened on a First Friday, the gallery walk/festival which has reignited many a downtown, small town or neighborhood.
Sadly, we still have the development community who still just doesn’t get it. I’m praying, crossing my fingers and knocking on wood that when two new buildings are built in my apartment complex, the rent doesn’t go up. While the DCers were happy to hear what I pay a month in rent, I explained that it was our equivalent of the condos-at-any-cost strategy. (However, the beer is really that cheap guys and so are the southern-style hot dogs I didn’t get to feed you because the joint shuts down early even on Fridays). Anyway, this particular evening was a nice grass-is-greener type exchange.
It also highlights what I think is the worst problem with the name “Creative Class.” These people were creative, but not necessarily rich. Most were White Americans, who appeared to have some middle-class upbringing. Yet, I too consider myself an artist. I’m middle-class and so are my parents. But I’m still black. The original theory failed to take into account cultural and even gender diversity. Jamal Green does a great job laying out those shortcomings of the theory. The orginial theory seems to only reward development, increase of salaries,increase of property values, and gay diversity, things that are heavily evident among educated or high-income people.
The development and salary piece is why I think Florida should have named his people and his theory, the Knowledge-Class. While there are artists and creative types in that class, attorneys, doctors and others that have a lot of knowledge and command high salaries aren’t necessarily creative. More information has come out on how the artist is not the real gentrifier. Also, the arts community is openly and enthusiastically embracing its women and non-white members. These folks are driving traffic and dollars to arts institutions, along with allowing people of all income levels to engage in their creations.
I’ll end with the next logical question. How can we reconcile artists, hard laborers, cubicle dwellers and people who lucked out on millions, retirees, disabled and even children without demonization over who causes ills such as homelessness, gentrification or globalization? Can we talk about knowledge workers and creative workers separately, so that we get a better view of where our economy truly stands?
Image: Young man and woman taking pictures of each other, by Flickr user ralphbijker, under a Creative Commons license.
I wanted to drop a quick note here on the blog about city and tragedy. Really, it’s about community and tragedy, but it’s a city that was most recently hit, so that’s where I’ll start from.
First of all, tragedy is an every day, every moment thing. Sometimes we get something so horrific, something that is incomprehensible and that activity tends to happen where there’s some form of density or concentration. This is the Newtown, the 9/11, now the Boston. Yet, we also have the slow burning tragedies, where over time, people are dying slow deaths, or quick, but sudden deaths. Here you have your Chicago, some say New Orleans, and really any place abandoned and left high and dry. There are so many of those, the ghettos, barrios, trailer parks, and deserted farms and factories of the world.
Dreams deferred and dying on a regular basis.
Yet, this is the time when community and place come to the forefront. When people offer their homes, their money, their blood, their tears, their hugs, and their social media platforms.
Some have already used this time or series of events to tell people to run from the cities, run from each other, to retreat and go away and blame.
Yet, I’m inspired by the runners whose first instinct was to run straight to the hospital and give their tired blood. To the well-known first responders, the people our municipal taxes go to so they can be there when trouble comes suddenly. And in lesser known, slow-burning tragedies, the daily foot soldiers, the community activists and the dreamers, all those who see a better future.
When the city and the greater whole of the place, no longer see tragedy.
During a conversation at the recent Streetsblog training in Kansas City, I was asked about the name of this site. I stated that often in the media, the word urban has been equated with the word black. Likewise, but not as much, other ethnicities have been tied to areas where they are very populous. With development types as a “safe” proxy for labeling something as an ethnic object or activity, the practice of using development types is now ubiquitous. Yet, I wanted to confront that issue head on, by naming my site in an oxymoronic matter. Still why is my site name an oxymoron? It shouldn’t be.
First of all, people of all races have lived in the three commonly recognized types of development: urban, suburban, and rural. A glance at the U.S. Census backs up my claim. Only in New York, Philadelphia and , until recently, DC and Chicago did bad equations such as white=suburban and black-urban work perfectly. Segregation was and is more of a neighborhood by neighborhood phenomenon. Maybe that neighborhood was a neighborhood of farms and a church versus three-flats and a corner store, but the notion is the same. No one racial group can be tied to one city, unless that city was once an over-sized, segregated government housing project, a segregated suburb with cul-de-sacs and no city hall, or a segregated mill town. The key word here is segregated.
Secondly, the issue primarily comes from the mainstream media. Urban development is one thing, but naming something or someone as urban, when they are really just black is a problem. The terms used to describe development are very different than race. It is flat-out lazy for media outlets to continue the conflation of terms, when all it takes is one more pica to state the word development, with a hyphen, next to whatever type it is. Or even better, let’s use the word black (or African-American) or Latino or whatever culture. Political correctness is many times a shot in the foot. It’s great to see the AP back off of using illegal or schizophrenic to describe people, or many other news outlets stop using the full name of the Washington NFL team. Yet, can we get a stronger entry in the Stylebook for development types, that bans their use for people much like illegal?
What re-jogged my issue initially with words was several things, notably a performance of Clybourne Park . Set both a few days before the move of the Younger family in A Raisin in the Sun‘s move into their new home and 50 years later when a white family wants to come back and tear down the home that was such a prize 50 years ago, I was compelled by what was and wasn’t said. How it wasn’t so much of a thing of race and gentrification as much as it was an issue of trusting one’s neighbors and feeling a shared affinity. How when all the ugly slurs and jokes were stated instead of implied, there appeared to be some sort of quiet resolution. No one leaves either scene happy, but there’s no hiding from any labels, not just racial or development-styles, but feminism, disabilities and even religion (or the practice thereof).
At this point, I want to point out what the dictionary actually lists as definitions for urban, suburban, and rural. Urban, according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary means “of, relating to, characteristic of, or constituting a city.” Sadly, the dictionary is now including online Faebook comments on entries. Even sadder was a woman who noted she’d taken an online quiz that stated she was an urban princess. She went on to state she thought urban meant black. (She appears to be African-American).
Moving on to suburb[an], Merriam-Webster notes three definitions:
an outlying part of a city or town
a smaller community adjacent to or within commuting distance of a city
plural : the residential area on the outskirts of a city or large town
It’s the first definition I want to highlight, that even a suburb has to be defined by a city. As I’ve stated before, some places think they are suburbs when they aren’t. There is a broader provision for these under this definition, but so many are becoming their own cities and many were self-sufficient towns. Some still are. Nothing here says they equal white. What of Asian Chinatowns, Koreatowns and the like? Just because there’s been some Asian suburbanization does not mean we are losing the entire community to the suburbs. Still, thanks to marketing, as examined by the new book Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America, much of what we think of as the “suburban” experience was racialized into a white American experience.
Now I come to rural, which Merriam-Webster defines as “of or relating to the country, country people or life, or agriculture.” Once again, no race in the definition. A heavy Latino rural connection could be traced to the bracero program that brought the first government-sancioned wave of Mexican migrants beginning in 1942 to work on farms. As time went on, as chronicled in Hannah Gill’s bookThe Latino Migration Experience in North Carolina: New Roots in the Old North State, migrant farmworkers began to settle in rural areas, some which resembled the rural states in Mexico that these later day migrants came from. She also talks about the growth of Siler City, an outpost I remember being about 20 minutes too long from my grandparents and having a good seafood restaurant. This area is now one of the most rapidly growing Latino communities in the state. None of this explains the “irony” of the large communities of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York City or Mexicans in Chicago, many who descended from the braceros who stayed behind after their visa expired. Of course, we forget that much of the Southwest, home to the majority of our remaining Native American population that is on reservation was part of Mexico. Many Mexicans claim a dual native/Spanish identity that has coalesced into the modern Hispanic/Latino.
As I come to a close, I want to make it clear we have no room for racialized descriptions of development and development as euphemism for race. Currently, all ethnicities (and class levels) are experiencing some form of loss or pain, whether it’s home value, medical problems, rising tuition, job loss, or a combination of all these and more. People are losing ground in their own neighborhoods no matter where they are located. The mixed-use entertainment and novelty district, suburban experiment , thinking that sustainability is only for one race, and the complete write-off of rural areas is not working. Sustainability is for all races, anyone who takes breaths of oxygen. If we can just focus on development, redevelopment, or maintenance, kindly nudging change in our communities, then we can finally jump over the hurdle of conflating race with a development type.
