A Fun Time Was Had By All
Tonight’s ‘The Walk’ in The Ville neighborhood was a fun time. I only made it to the first two places before having to return home. Us newcomers were very welcomed by the usual patrons. The bar owners were very happy to have new customers. I enjoyed spending time hanging out away from my usual places.
Leading the walk was stlsyndicate “kingpin” Brian Marston. Brian’s wife Amanda Doyle managed to beat me at a game of darts but on the next game I did better than her but I was beat by 6 points by a guy named Tony. So close… Brian & Amanda publish The Commonspace website and blog. Other bloggers included Rick Bonasch of STL Rising and Antonio French of PubDef Weekly.
The second stop, the Harlem Tap Room, was established in 1946! That is history folks! The place was also packed. I nice place to stop and have a drink. Despite the devastation in much of this area along Martin Luther King Drive a strong community does exist. The time is now to build upon what remains — not displace — just add to.
Our region can no longer ignore half the city.
– Steve
The time is now to build upon what remains — not displace — just add to.
….*how do you do this?!*
This is one of the most vexing urban questions I’ve ever pondered. How do you fight the natural(?) inclination of property values to rise as a group?
I have Libertarian friends who’re all like, Oh, that’s just the way the free market works; if the original inhabitants are being priced out of their homes, they can sell for a good price and make a lot of money and everyone wins. I have leftist-leaning friends who’re all like, Oh, those evil yuppies, how dare they move into an old urban neighborhood, where were they thirty years ago (answer: not born yet), why don’t they just go back to the suburbs where they came from, blah blah blah.
But I don’t know anybody who’s all like, Well, if you wanna bring in additional folks and the resultant tax base and stabilizing community influences, without massively disrupting the existing community, here’s how ya do it.
I think you have to disperse concentrations of poverty to get a neighborhood that works. That may mean some people get priced out, or maybe it means some of the empoverished become better off as more money in their neighborhood translates into more opportunities, or maybe both.
But as long as there’s concentrated poverty, there’s going to be concentrated crime (or a perception of it, which is almost as difficult to dispell), and hence many monied folks aren’t going to be willing to live there.
Without locak good-paying adult jobs — sorry, Starbucks and Marriott! — an urban neighborhood stands little chance of being anything but a concentrated poverty zone. Creating these jobs in a neighborhood rarely seems to be part of renewal plans, even by the most urbanist of city planners; that is why renewal almost always means displacement. Good jobs should be the biggest goal for neighborhood renewal, but I think planners assume that new retail provides the jobs and vitality a neighborhood needs. Wrong! By not drawing good jobs to an area, planners are only perpetuating reverse communting and negating some of the benefits of the urban form.