The fine art of giving a damn

One way AND another, blight and vacancy are YOUR problem.

Riding the streetcar toward Canal Street in New Orleans Friday afternoon, I met a young African-American boy who was on his way to basketball practice. The basketball in his lap was so battered that I wondered whether it still had bounce. I watched the boy from the corner of my eye while I was talking with two guys who were heading to Bourbon Street, where they work as wait staff. When a seat came open next to the boy, I sat beside him. He looked toward me and and answered a question I had posed to the guys about folks and life in New Orleans. And, there was my opening to show him that a total stranger can give a damn about him and his city. It was also my opening to show others on that crowded car how to have an old-fashioned chat in the digital age, and listen, they did.


I was in New Orleans for The Reclaming Vacant Properties Conference. The old journalist in me knows that if you want to know something about a place you are visiting, you avoid the packaged tours and head into the neighborhoods where the locals live, work and play. I learned as much via shoe leather express into several distinct neighborhoods that are off the beaten path as I did at the conference.

Neighborhood in the French Quarter

Vacancy and blight are everywhere

Vacant property - whether in Philadelphia or the Ninth Ward of New Orleans or the borough of Shenandoah in Schuylkill County or the heart of Kansas - is a problem caused by a complex web of cultural, economic, political, and sociological issues that our society has handled poorly and in old, hierarchical ways that don't lend themselves to contemporary problem solving.

Only when we sit down as Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Catholics, Jews, Protestants, college grads, housewives, retirees - in other words - without the boxes that bind our thinking - will we begin to recover from the catastrophes we have caused. When we begin to think and work in ways that innovation has enabled, we will begin to resolve blight and its related socioeconomic problems.

WE have caused - all of us, everywhere - due to our lack of attention to the many things money cannot buy and to our early industrial age ways of thinking wherein if you made Widget A for white, male Republicans or owned the Widget A factory you DID NOT have discourse with the multi-cultural liberal-minded owners of Widget B factories and the lower classes who made Widget B. 

Those days are gone, thankfully!

We are consumeristic and voyeuristic. We view old buildings as liabilities instead of the assets they can be. We are selfish and shortsighted and we are paying for it. We're throwing taxpayer money at problems we don't solve because the solutions requires new ways of action, new ways of thinking that require a blend of good, old-fashioned discourse and work ethic with innovation. Change is uncomfortable, sure, but, really, how much more discomfort do we need with the way we are doing things now?

Vacant and blighted

As I ponder the theoretical and practical work I got done in New Orleans, I wish I had had cash on me to buy that boy a basketball. Perhaps, though, the friendly exchange of dialogue with him and with the two guys on their way to work was an investment whose dividends will provide riches beyond what money will buy. I know the smile I got from that kid was one of the best things I experienced while in New Orleans.



(Note: In the interest of disclosure, I am a Republican who was born to Democrats. My personal and professional lives  are married in that I research and write urban policy for a state legislature and I am a visual artist/author/small business owner. I was raised Catholic, but gave it up for open-minded spirituality. I was born into a comfortable family, but that did not last long as I was a product of divorce -- when divorce was taboo. For decades,  I had nothing but a stubborn will to survive and to grow. All odds, every stinking one of them, were against me succeeding. For anyone who plays the victim, I say "Pick yourself up and pursue your dreams." For anyone who advocates lifelong victim status through action or inaction, I say "Lead by example. True help is a hand up not a hand out."


 (Invitation to YOU: I have a lot more to say on the issue of community re-development, but I would also like to use this post and posts yet-to-come as a place to talk about ideas, strategies, etc ... I very much would like to know how you feel about your place and why you feel that way. Please feel free to join in the discussion through comments or by sending me an email.)