If you read this on the Sunday morning upon which it made its appearance on the internet, I’m about to sit down next to my mom and my grandmother and my great-aunt, with a multitude of family in the midst and praise the Lord in the only way we can in an old country AME church about 30 miles southeast of my apartment.
It is here, at this expression of love, where I want to drop the mic on my love of place, at least for the month of February, as this is the last Sunday in February and the last chance I’ll have to drop an essay on love in this month.
Anyway, back to the country. I used to hate it. It’s a running joke in my family how much I just “had to get back to Greensboro.” The knowledge that the skyline is nearby is so ingrained in my psyche, so meaningful, so centering for me, even now and especially as a young child. Also, in my mind, bugs only existed in our backyard and they were insane in the country. Oh, and no Nickelodeon and Sesame Street came in fuzzy sometimes. Yet, one night, after an impulse decision, I woke up for the first time to CBS This Morning and my grandmother’s southern breakfast, by choice. My dad came and got me not long after breakfast, but I survived and it was a good night.
The irony that presents when the last time I willingly spent the night at my MeMe’s was two days before I would get life changing news. Originally, my dad was going to drive me to the big adventure that awaited me on the other side of RDU Airport and the terminals of LaGuardia. Yet, I decided to drive myself directly from MeMe’s, since the flight was early, we were all gathering for a pre-Memorial Day cookout and her house is just a bit closer to RDU.
I returned home from New York into another cocoon of family and to the bedroom I spent ages 14-18 and 23-26 in. That bedroom, while possessing a Greensboro address, is in a neighborhood laid out like the best of car-dependent suburbia. I needed that, as the next few days would be a blur of funeral arrangements and family members I hadn’t seen and church members I hadn’t seen and just a feeling of wondering what I would do without the person who first taught me the value of place. Yet, I remembered, I still had the parent that gave me the places we had to live in the first place.
Those of us who are professionals or semi-professionals or armchair quarterbacks at this urban and regional planning thing, whether we make million dollar lifestyle centers or we buy new paint for our cookie-cutter house at Home Depot, or we make a park out of a parking space and a few old small shipping crates, can sometimes get self-righteous about what form is the best.
I believe the best place form begins with love. If I’d become completely anti-country or anti-suburbia, I’d miss out on the love of my own family. Yeah, I’d probably found new people who only hang out at the bars and art galleries of the central business district and its blocks, but would they have my roots? Would they always be there to wipe my tears and clean up my scrapes? And are these new people even worthy enough to bring home? Some are, some aren’t.
As I bring this to a close, the only thing I can really say about what makes a place great, is the presence of love. May you find that in whatever shape your primary habitation is.
Wait, yeah, I know there’s a lot of you to go around, but in my head, the sum of your whole is the skyline buildings and the trains and scrubby trees that I see right outside my window. To be honest, it’s always been like that. When I was six years old, I got the chicken pox. The only thing I missed was driving from our home just off of Freeman Mill Road to see your skyline, which for the most part was in its second year of the completion renovation and enhancement. I always loved the symmetry of the points and the flatness of the squares. It’s little wonder that I grew up to start writing this blog and that my current day job has to do with promoting the building of buildings.
But there’s more to you than the outside package, the first impression, the quick glance. There’s a heart and a soul inside of you, that I want the world to know about. And in this time of the year that we take a special day to promote love, I wanted to let you know and the world know, how much I really actually love you.
I also want to make it clear that the love we have is a tough love. You are not just buildings, but you are made up of citizens, real people, some that treat me well and others who sometimes mistreat me. Sometimes I don’t treat them well either and sometimes I am their best friend in the world. Sometimes you don’t have that restaurant or that grocery store or that touring entertainer that I want and that makes me sad. Even worse, sometimes your people say and do such ugly things to each other, that I get really mad at you and i want to give up on you and run away.
But then I remember that you are a city that’s never shied away from its battles and the battles of the greater humanity. You provided the opportunity for four black men to take a sit, not a stand, but a sit, and change the course of history. You lost a lot of your major industry, yet, you have yet to go bankrupt. Your people have come together to build us ballparks and regular parks and provide a decent shelter for those without one, and stand up for public school teachers and its young students.
You’re a work in progress, but so am I. Every good city grows and we are doing that, together. The old saying is that Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither are you Greensboro. I pray that I have the patience to endure your growing pains and that you continue to have the empathy to endure mine.
Love,
Kristen
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Last night I watched American Promise, the documentary created by two parents who believed their son would be destined for greatness, all because of getting into one of the top private schools in the country. They then decided to film their son and a few of their classmates in-depth (although only one student remained in the documentary the whole time) from kindergarten until they both go off to college at 18.
The key here is that they do in fact both go to college. They also stay out of major trouble. Their parents are not super rich, but not poor and undereducated either. Yet, it illustrated all the unknown and unexpected factors that can go into one’s education. It also demonstrated that successful schools and successful people (all four parents went to public schools, yet had professional jobs, nice homes and happy families), come from all walks of life.
It also illustrated how wrong the modern high-stakes education system can be for some kids. Obviously, we could bring race into it, but honestly, it had more to do with the personalities of the two boys featured. First of all, it had to be weird having a camera stuck in your face for all of your school years. Second, who wants to tell their parents about their social life? Third, is success only going to an Ivy League school, getting super high grades and being certain careers? Oh and both boys had valid learning disabilities, which I believe our current system still doesn’t know how to handle in any child.
Back to the ideal of success being in one box, I don’t think this is true, as I look back on my educational experience too. If I frame it like these parents did in the beginning, then yeah, me not attending a private school, getting into an Ivy League school, getting into all the schools I applied for (I did do this, but the students featured did not), and not having super high grades, but pinpointing a career path would be a failure. Yet, these kids(and I) got into colleges, one had a clear career in mind(as did I) and the other is going to a school where our current president attended and started himself on the path to greatness he’s on now( I didn’t, but I still have dreams).
I think every parent, especially those who are working to climb social ladders and those who are already upper class and sort of coast on their money should see this film and realize, that sometimes, all you can do is provide and nurture, then see what comes of it.
The documentary is online until March 5. Click here to watch. And now, your Friday news:
Sometimes, all you can do is make sure you buy enough food at Harris Teeter to get ready for weird weather.
So we’ve had another situation of weather causing bizarre things to happen. Whether it’s snow in Atlanta or a major hurricane in New York, Americans seem to never tire of comparisons to the zombie apocalypse or The Day After Tomorrow. Never mind that in a few weeks we’ll forget this never happened, while those affected may still not have their old house back almost 10 years later.
So this all leads me to what we should and shouldn’t do, at least when it comes to community-building and placemaking and management, when a natural disaster happens.
Take those personal natural disaster plans seriously.
Don’t be the person who giggles when it’s time to stop, drop and roll. You’ll want to roll into a ball if you didn’t remember to pack a blanket, clothes and everything else that goes into a roadside disaster emergency kit. So you’re a bike or subway kid, throw an extra shirt and your meds into your bag. Even planes will let you carry those on. Let your pipes drip. Sprinkle the ice melt. Make sure you can fit in the bathtub. Drink enough water and put on sunscreen. Drive slow, but not too slow. Sometimes we need to admit that there are some effects of natural disasters we can prevent.
Act as a region or have a plan for regional disaster preparedness
As we saw in Atlanta with #snowgridlock, and of course famously with Katrina in New Orleans, the powers-to-be were not even ready for what they saw. Yes, you may salt the roads. Yes, the weatherman on TV may move the eye of the storm further south. But that doesn’t excuse why you don’t have enough money for the right amount of disaster preparedness. It doesn’t allow you to blame the municipality next door that you don’t like and claim as a blight on society. Anyone who wants and needs to go to a shelter should be able to. If people want to guard their homes or stay outside, let them (I just warned them about their safety). However, if you as a municipality have no real plan for the weather, then yes, you deserve the shame that you get. Side note to all the issues involved with no transit in Atlanta. Yes having more MARTA trains could have helped. Still, the night this was all happening, I saw two trains come into the Greensboro station and sit there for 30 minutes to an hour longer than they should have. Remember when half of Manhattan’s tunnels flooded during Hurricane Sandy? Transportation breaks down sometimes. Sometimes.
Don’t laugh at or perpetrate problematic stereotypes of people in trouble.
We love to use weather events that are abnormal to bring up stereotypes, right? The only exception would probably be with earthquakes and tornadoes. I was quite disturbed with the coverage of the Southern #snowgridlock that was making fun of people sleeping and staying wherever they could for upwards of 24-48 hours, which in some cases meant Whole Foods, Home Depot, The Waffle House and at worse their car claiming that this is why we as Southerners were so backwards. So all the folks that get stranded at Logan and JFK during northern storms are funny too? Oh and don’t get me started on the “refugees” of New Orléans from Hurricane Katrina.
Keep the Home Depot or _______________(business/school/church) Open To Make Sure People Are Ok
There’s a reason schools are routinely used as disaster shelters when people know that something big and bad is coming. They have room for tons of cots, they have massive cafeterias, many have locker rooms with lots of showers. Hence why the kids that were stuck at them were better off than the rest of us. What I loved about what happened in the 2014 Atlanta and Birmingham situation is that I was that so many of these non-traditional shelters stayed open and did what they could to keep people entertained and fed and the like. Southern hospitality is the one stereotype I love and I love it because that’s community and placemaking at its highest point.
Don’t Share Information That’s Not True
If you don’t listen to anything I say on this post, please listen to this, be careful what you tweet or share on social networks, especially when it comes to a major storm system or something else that is happening in real time. Hence why I shared multiple views of the Atlanta storm and emphasized the ground coverage being done in Atlanta by news outlets and Instagrams and Twitters from actual residents of the cities that were affected. Also, make sure your information on relief efforts is coming from the right area nonprofit. All Red Crosses are not the same and able to do the same things. Also, tweeting something like the name of someone who died before the family can get the phone call is also insensitive.
Feel Guilty When You Can’t Keep Something Bad from Happening
Some of us chatting about the Atlanta storm response were reminded of 2005 in Raleigh. I thought I was going to take the campus Wolfline bus back to my dorm , but instead all the buses stopped running and Hillsborough Street was gridlocked, along with much of the Triangle. All that kept me from doing is getting a ride home versus walking like I normally do. Other people were stranded at schools and offices too. Yet, this time Raleigh closed school early, preventing any surprises as far as weather from affecting the students and parents throughout the county. Yet, the folks who get hit by freakish tornadoes and 100 year floods can’t always be ready for the worst. That’s ok, just do your best as individuals and as a community to be ready.
So this ends my PSA on disaster preparedness and coping. Hopefully this reminder will help us continue to grow stronger communities, especially when we and the weather are at our worst.
This weekend marks five adult years of residence in my hometown of Greensboro, NC. To say that I moved back here kicking and screaming is an understatement. To say that staying here is what I imagined myself doing at this point in time is also inaccurate.
However, the one thing we all have to learn in our youth is that where we live is what we make of it. We also learn that the big cities can’t shield us from the changes of life. In fact, according to Salon and the Pacific Standard, if you move to one, you may never move again. Not good for a person who loves to travel like myself.
I recently fell upon Justin Alvarez’s account of studying abroad and staying at college in New York to avoid family in Chicago. I used to have similar feelings. Even though I did undergrad just 90 miles away and masters degree while at home, I did all I could at times to not be engaged or active with various family members. I’m not sure Alvarez learned fully the impact of missing family things, even with the revelation that his grandfather held on to life just for him. Thankfully, I was around for my father’s passing, but missed some times with my grandfather and some aunts that passed. My mom is retiring, and I’m thankful that I’m only 10 minutes away and that I’m finally taking up sewing, one of her beloved hobbies. Check out my first garment below(it’s the skirt).
The point of the above is first and foremost, that family does matter. If they are halfway decent people, then make an effort to be a part of their lives. I don’t know what I would do without my mom, my aunts and uncles, and my sibling-cousins. The family village is alive and well here in Greensboro and I cherish being close enough to take advantage of that.
Moving on to the feeling of ambition and the wanderlust that moving to bigger cities creates and feeds, Goodbye to All That , both the original essay and the new compilation of essays, all speak to the need to move on from New York and how it’s not the holy grail. As I begin my 28th year, much like Didon herself when she left New York, I am seeing the merits of a life well lived in a small city. This line is the real kicker:
Of course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different, might have been Paris or Chicago or even San Francisco, but because I am talking about myself I am talking here about New York.
And since I am talking about myself, then, I’m talking about my choice, both active and inactive, to remain in my hometown, the small city, the car-dependent, the less diverse, but still full of fun and surprises and family. I had remind myself of words I wrote in the early days of this space, to check my civicinferiority complex. To appreciate the beauty of all places.
The other link also mentions the need to care for everyone in all cities. For some of us, the best way we can do that is to stay in our hometowns and contribute to the civic environment. To not go into debt to prove something, but to save money and be something.
To make YOUR city and no one else’s. So let’s just call it home.
Prior to my father’s passing, he was in a state that I have come to term “functional homelessness.” He was often a fixture at the local soup kitchens and occasionally popped into the Interactive Resource Center (IRC), our local day center for those who are either homeless or in transition. He still had his home, intermittent work, and a working car.
A similar situation had befallen the young man who was also featured with me in the Sunday News & Record two weeks ago. Once gainfully employed and able to keep himself and his mother under a more stable roof, he’d been forced into a tent city after a stint of unemployment and losing his apartment. His mom eventually found more permanent shelter, but he continues to live in his tent, getting by on a temporary minimum wage job. People have reached out for help as a result of the publicity the article garnered and I hope that will mean that he’s free from living in a tent and intermittent employment.
But there’s no shame if he actually wants to live in a tent. There’s no shame if he wants to participate in an untraditional, but legal, economy such as bartering his skills and services. Why do we create these kinds of spaces and places of shame? Why do we not support simple economies, economies that allow for simple dwellings, bartering, and sharing food, tools, skills and other things in a marketplace as a major economic development strategy? Why must cities chase after luxury apartments, performing arts centers, multinational corporations and “young professionals” to feel successful? Why are we not concerned enough, at least in Greensboro, with the loss of a major health clinic, so much so that we’d pledge money to make sure it stays open, like the sudden pledging of money to ensure we have a major performing arts center and a brand new partially private park?
I do want to commend Greensboro for continuing to support initiatives around providing people with stable homes, jobs, and food such as the IRC, the Urban Ministry and Bicycling in Greensboro. Another shout out to the churches, including my home church, who support the homeless and those on the fringes of the traditional economy and middle and working class. Why can’t we be proud of those measures and make sure we support them as an economic development strategy?
The Corner of Lee and Eugene Streets. A central point for homeless services and a congregation point for those in transition, outside of the IRC, here in Greensboro. Photo Credit: Kristen E. Jeffers
This is especially relevant after this weekend, where in my other hometown of Raleigh, the basic act of feeding the homeless out in the open became illegal. This is on top of Columbia, SC banning their homeless from their downtown and other cities enacting similar restrictions either downtown or in the city limits.
I don’t fault the minister in Raleigh for not wanting a criminal record of his own, since that’s problematic in itself. However, this man was forced to choose between feeding people and giving himself a record that could keep him from employment, therefore, putting himself in the same situation as many he was hoping to help. It makes those who have been arrested at the Moral Mondays even more courageous as many of them are risking respectability on one front to protest injustice on another front. There’s also the other issue of the high cost of obtaining a legal permit to serve food or hold an event in the park in Raleigh. If the park is for the public use, why such high user fees for an official assembly? What constitutes an “official assembly”? I understand helping pay for clean-up and security, but is there not a way to reduce the costs to use our open, completely public in this case, space?
Ultimately, the City of Raleigh has stepped up to apologize and work on a real solution to allow Moore Square to continue to be a place where those on the margins, whether by choice or by necessity, can come together and at least break bread. After all, we encourage those of greater means to eat in the parks during lunch and dinner hours, what’s so different about what this ministry and other ministries are doing for those of lesser means?
There are two major issues here that we need to address if we want to move forward in an inclusive manner. First, we need to continue to find ways to incorporate services and opportunities in centralized areas, namely our traditional main streets, downtowns, uptowns, CBD’s, lifestyle centers or whatever your city chooses to call these areas. Second, the criminalization of those who LOOK undesirable and of those who choose to help those who are “undesirable” has to stop.
The loss of public services like health clinics in centralized areas will push our most vulnerable further and further to the margins. The reason why areas of urban poverty were able to sustain some form of a civil society was due to their proximity to social services. When we shut down or push further out these services, then we create larger and more vast pockets of metro-area poverty. Areas that were built for people of decent to massive means to take care of themselves are now areas where the rent may be cheaper, but the other costs are far higher. If we re-centralize and continue to support centralization of all of our social services, much like we want our entertainment and luxury centralized, it brings up all the members of society, regardless of the level at which they choose to engage the greater economy.
The criminalization of people who LOOK threatening adds to the prison-industrial complex and lowers the morale of those who are on the margins of the city. The greater issue I’ve had with our youth curfew here in Greensboro has not been safety and positive activity of our youth, but of the idea that one bad apple spoils the whole lot. So you may have had one or two panhandlers that harass. What about the others that quietly beg or even better, are singing on the streets? So the singers can stay, as we have made provision for here in Greensboro with our new street busker program, but the person whose need we really can’t determine can’t? I’ve been victimized by people claiming to need help on the streets, but does that mean all people living on the streets are bad? I feel like my own black peers, from my teen years until now, don’t always respect or understand who I am, but does that mean I write them completely off, to the point where they could go to jail just because I THINK they are a threat? Absolutely not.
Cities really need to check their privilege and methods of advancing their cities, if they think criminalization of certain populations or the inhibition of servicing certain populations is going to aid in the continued economic growth or re-start economic growth in their cities.
I know we can all do better. Let’s keep doing better and keep making sure that just like I said in my last post, placemaking remains democratic and not a privilege. And even though there is evidence that homelessness has decreased, it doesn’t mean that it’s over or that a tent is less valuable than a house.
UPDATE 8/27 9:35 a.m.: Some community officials and advocates are speaking out against the closing of the Healthserve clinics here in Greensboro. H/T to the News and Record. Missed this before I went live this morning.
The one thing I can take from reading this article and reading my words back to myself on what it has been like living as a classical new urbanist over the past year. I cannot think of another way to illustrate how I feel vis-a-vis a young man, only two years younger than me, who’s trying to get his life back on his feet, facing challenges. It also brings me to a hard truth that my design-focused friends and followers will not want to hear.
Design, even new urbanist design, is out of reach or a major stretch for far too many people, including myself.
Prior to speaking with the reporter about the issues and frustrations I have with where I live, prior to the noise ordinance and curfew restrictions, I’d been thinking about a change in living situation.
However, I kept beating myself up with a major what-if: if I leave my apartment and go somewhere cheaper, then many of the theories I’ve put forth on this blog and in other forms would go unproven.
Isn’t that what a theory is though, an idea that hasn’t been proven? Is anything on this blog law?
No, it isn’t, and that’s actually a good thing.
One of the greatest new urbanist writers of our time is actually not quite an urbanist, in the sense that he doesn’t live in an apartment, near transit, by himself or with one or two other people. I would like to think his credibility on the subject is far superior to mine and the marketplace agrees (slowly but surely).
Yet, I still believed for the longest time, that the only way anyone would listen to my words and create a marketplace around them is if I lived the most extreme urbanism I knew how to live.
And it’s urbanism, but it’s not placemaking.
Placemaking does require an address, but it’s not necessarily an address in demand. Place can be made from old-line suburbia, where each neighbor can decide to grow a different vegetable and then teach the community how to clean and cook those vegetables, in order to eat healthier. The streets of that old-line suburbia could become woonerfs, places where cars automatically go slow and people take advantage of the sloping hills and winding curves and dead ends to get in workouts, that shed the pounds earned by sitting in cars commuting to ever further away jobs, or from sitting at home doing a job that no longer requires a specific location. They could carpool to stores. I think my reporter friend said it best in this article, “Even for a staunch new urbanist like myself, the logic is inescapable: If you want two or three bedrooms and you can afford a mortgage of about $100,000, you head for the suburbs.”
While I truly don’t want the center city to yield to the gilded class, I don’t want us to give up on making good places because we don’t live or can’t afford to do so. I also don’t want those of us with massive privilege to forget that it doesn’t take much for anyone to fall on hard times and not all dealing with hard times are lazy and uncommitted.
Whatever happens and whatever I decide to do in the coming months, my goal is to commit myself to a new theory, the democracy of placemaking. To create, to invent, to include, to incorporate, to adapt, to save and to grow. Let me not forget again, what it really means to be a placeist.
I’ve had to think long and hard about what my response would be. I could rail and say that this city is forever racist, that the kids will never amount to anything, that there will never be any chain stores or any other negativity that has been thrown at downtown and even our city lately. However, it is just like I told Sarah Goodyear of Atlantic Cities in this article:
Kristen Jeffers, a Greensboro native who lives downtown, founded the blog The Black Urbanist. She says that anxiety about young black people who flock to the entertainment district masks deeper issues facing the city’s development.
While there’s been a lot of investment in high-end rental housing, and the city is talking about putting in a performing arts center, Jeffers says the area still lacks basic services like pharmacies and a full-scale supermarket.
“For a neighborhood to be a true neighborhood, and not just a vertical suburb, you need those services,” she says.
What the also downtown needs, she says, are amenities that attract more people of a variety of ages, like playgrounds for families and a first-run movie theater. And young people should be supported with more structured programming, rather than marginalized. “Our city needs to bring back a full-on youth program,” says Jeffers, the type of effort that includes job training as well as recreational opportunities.
What my solution look like?
What you see in the left oval is an area that consists of a YMCA to the top right of the oval, a magnet performing arts high school flanking the left side of the oval and school administration building between the two surface lots. The right oval shows how close this area is to Elm Street, the new hotspot for everyone that’s become ground zero for the fights, and also new upscale stores and development. My office is also in that oval and my apartment is just southeast of it’s boundary, along with our central bus depot and Amtrak train station.
We are talking about roughly a square (rectangular) mile here. This area is also owned and managed by either the county school system or the Y. The Y already has programs for youth, even though they are fee-based. The school system has a mandate to educate the teenagers that go through their building. Adults already know this area as a place that is family-friendly. Teens know this area has places they can go and not be pushed out.
The only caveat is that this area is adjacent to the county jail. However, this also means law enforcement is quite close by and can deal with people who fight. Otherwise, one of the surface lots along with the brick school administration building can be upfitted into a family entertainment center, with lazer tag, bowling, a skate park and playground, go-karts, and a movie theater. The administrative functions could move to another building that the school system owns just north of the school building. The center could be closed during school hours except during the summer. A deck could be built next to the Y building to accommodate the increased traffic to both the Y and this entertainment center. It could also accommodate jail parking, which has been a need since it opened last year. The playground area would be a public, free facility, or the Y could open their existing playground area to the public. A private company could operate the entertainment center, and employ students of either the high school or nearby colleges. Students could even build the center, as this high school at one time housed one of the construction trades programs in the county.
In addition to beefing up the existing Greensboro Youth Council, these initiatives would go a long way in serving the growing and in many ways already existing youth population who want a place to go downtown, along with the adults.
This also does not excuse the current curfew, nor let other areas off the hook for being accepting of students and youth. As long as youth don’t fight each other, they have every right to play sports on the lawns and sit on the benches of Center City Park like everyone else. Yet, once that park closes, they could go to the Y or the entertainment center and spend the remainder of their evening in a place that is ready and willing to accept them.
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.
