Race and Class

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January 11, 2011 | 10:31 AM | By

No one wants a Bike Lane War

Flickr: Mr. T in DC

Now reading: “People riding bikes aren’t jerks, they’re just like you“, via Greater Greater Washington.

It’s also important to cultivate advocates from every DC community who can talk to their community leaders about why they should support cycling. Shane Farthing cited this as one of his priorities when he took over at WABA.

Keeping DC’s black population involved with cycling is especially important in order to keep bike infrastructure from becoming a wedge issue, as it did during the recent mayoral election.

A negative narrative can lead to opinions about cycling like that of ANC 8C03′s Mary Cuthbert, who told the Washington Post that “we don’t need no bicycle lanes.” A more positive narrative, on the other hand, can build upon the advantages that good cycling infrastructure brings.

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FILED UNDER: Around the City, biking, Race and Class
January 7, 2011 | 2:44 PM | By

Workers in the East, Management in the West?

Flickr: Laura Padgett

Restaurant in D.C.'s West End

From “Why are the East of Cities usually Poorer?”, this is interesting:

Many older cities rapidly expanded during the Industrial Revolution, as workers flocked to the urban centers. As the towns and cities expanded, the residential areas for the workers tended to be in the east, with the middle and upper-classes in the west.

The reason for this is that in much of the northern hemisphere, the prevailing winds are westerlies – blowing from west to east. The massive, unchecked pollution from these early industries would therefore drift eastward, making the air quality much lower in the east end of cities, lowering the desirability (and price) of the housing. Middle classes preferred the cleaner west ends.

The issue was probably even pre-Industrial Revolution, as smoke from personal chimneys would still have caused problems to the east.

FILED UNDER: Around the City, Privilege, Race and Class, West End
January 5, 2011 | 10:40 AM | By

What’s Needed: “a large attitude adjustment on both sides”

Flickr: Rhys

Shaw, D.C.

Yesterday, I wrote about caustic reactions to the news that more affordable housing is coming to Shaw. One of you left a comment in response to my post that deserves to be seen:

I think we are seeing here is the very real balkanization of urban society that stymies us. I commiserate with both sides, there needs to be affordable housing in the city, and yet it comes fraught with so many problems that makes it unpleasant for the neighbors.

I recently saw a project about The Frederick Douglass Dwellings in Anacostia, that was public housing built in the WWII boom. There were many two parent families and a community center in which the ladies who ran it really took an interest in their charges. They didn’t know they were “poor,” and there was a strong sense of community and family.

There are so many problems here: it’s true that many urban blacks that I have encountered blame their problems on the system, “the plan”, without seeking solutions, but I find this mimicked in modern society too, where many people blame “the media” without questioning their role in propagating a media more concerned with the upcoming royal nuptials than the minutae of the tax code. People do need to start taking responsibility for themselves, their knowledge base, their support of leadership, and their desires to meet and understand their neighbors. Start community watches. Volunteer with big brothers. Don’t accept or make excuses. There will need to be a large attitude adjustment on both sides for anything to change.

FILED UNDER: The People, Affordable Housing, Gentrification, Race and Class, Racial Divide
January 4, 2011 | 4:21 PM | By

“Yet another warehouse of concentrated poverty”

Flickr: M. V. Jantzen

Shaw Metro station, at 8th & R Streets, NW

So I was reading this post from the City Paper about new, affordable housing coming to Shaw:

It’s a tentative plan, but a plan nonetheless: Lincoln Westmoreland Housing Inc. is moving forward with a 50-unit apartment complex on 7th and R Street NW, right next to the 10-story behemoth constructed right after the 1968 riots.

The new building, designed by Shalom Baranes architects, could not be more ideally located: It sits directly above the Shaw metro station (part of the land will be purchased from WMATA), and across the street from the new Shaw library. It will replace a decked-over parking lot, have retail on the ground floor, and still leave some green space for a sculpture installation.

“Affordable” is the key word here, because as Lydia DePillis reported, the units would be accessible “for people making 60 percent of the area median income”. Sounds great, right? I love neighborhoods that have a range of people from all backgrounds–it’s my favorite thing about Columbia Heights, where there is everything from affordable housing to $3,000 converted condos. The readers who commented on her piece had a different, more bitter take:

Building looks nice and hopefully they will balance income levels. 60% AMI residents will be a welcome addition to the neighborhood and attract civil servants, firefighters, police, teachers etc. But if they decide to concentrate the extremely low income/AMI residents in this building, well they might as well hand over the building to the local thugs so they can have a nice shiny new HQ from which to terrorize the rest of the neighborhood from. [wcp]

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FILED UNDER: Around the City, Affordable Housing, Gentrification, Race and Class, Shaw
January 4, 2011 | 10:35 AM | By

Regarding Roots– Literally

Flickr: stevendepolo

Since I avoided the internet for the last few days of 2010, I’m catching up on all my favorite blogs. This post, “‘Good Hair’ on C.P. Time.” from PostBourgie, reminds me that though I intended to, I still haven’t seen the notable Chris Rock documentary about hair:

This seemed to be the reaction that Rock was nudging the audience toward, even as he seemed to assiduously avoid taking an explicit stance. We watch as a principal ingredient in hair relaxer eats through a metal can, before cutting to a little girl of about three or four who has already started getting her hair permed — the opening night audience in Brooklyn gasped loudly and tut-tutted at this — before seeing how the hair used to make expensive weaves sold stateside is literally shorn from the heads of poor people in South Asia as part of a religious ritual…

That last bit about South Asian temple hair is something I end up discussing almost weekly with someone. The offering occurs at Tirumala Venkateswara Temple, in southern India.
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FILED UNDER: Media, Race and Class, Race and Ethnicity
January 3, 2011 | 2:27 PM | By

Worksheets instead of Teaching, in D.C.

Flickr: rkeohane

A worksheet.

Now reading: “The McEducation of the Negro: Franchising is an outstanding model for selling Big Macs. But it can be toxic to classrooms” by Natalie Hopkinson:

That’s how it went: rewards and punishments, then worksheets. No instruction, just worksheets. At the end of the class, Bridgers, who works as an exterminator, pulled aside the teacher, a young white male and recent graduate.

“I wanted to know when he was going to do some, you know, teaching,” Bridgers explained to me recently. “You know, like, how we used to have in school? She would stand in front of the class … “…

Of course, today the “reformers” say that that way of teaching is old school. It was fine before the days of social media and the “information revolution” and the global economy. But now, as the argument goes in films like Waiting for Superman, no self-respecting parent would ever send his or her child to a “failing” public school like the one that generations of Bridgers’ family attended in their neighborhood in Northeast Washington.

For Bridgers’ son and a disproportionate number of black students around the country, charter schools have become the preferred choice.

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FILED UNDER: Education, Charter Schools, Michelle Rhee, Race and Class
December 29, 2010 | 3:37 PM | By

“Pay it forward and advance our city”

DCentric

MacBook Air in hyper-privileged Ward 2, where there is almost 100% broadband adoption.

Like Congress Heights on the Rise, Blogger Nicole in DC also has concerns about the digital divide and #DCtweeps, the WaPo social media contest which I posted about earlier today:

…we’re the leaders in this online community whether we choose to be or not. We make a living, feed ourselves and/or our families, and have an offline social network because we’re the best. People listen to what we have to say and are invested in our opinions and our lives. We’re not living up to our responsibilities as leaders through innovation, change, or betterment of our community and our neighbors; instead, we’re participating in meaningless competitions to garner an award from a print publication that does a poor job at covering/reporting the news on social media. Furthermore, we’re squandering the power we do have when we succumb to competitions like this…

Community isn’t about putting ourselves above our friends and neighbors who are left behind.

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FILED UNDER: Media, Digital Divide, Race and Class, Social Media
December 29, 2010 | 10:33 AM | By

D.C.’s Top Tweeps 2010 and the Digital Divide

Flickr: Alykat

Sculpture in Congress Heights by Anne Allardyce

Over at Congress Heights on the Rise, East of the River blogger The Advoc8te takes issue with the “popularity contest” that The Washington Post is hosting for D.C.’s Twitter royalty in “Why I won’t be voted “DC’s Best Blogger” in the DCTweeps Contest “:

How can you expect voters to participate in the election process when they don’t have the basic tools to participate? How can you vote in a contest if you don’t even know it’s going on?

As a blogger, a social media consultant, and as someone who spends about 75% of her waking hours online, I understand the ease and convenience of holding these types of contests using online surveys and Twitter. The technology is here to stay, no doubt about it. However, in communities such as ours where a good portion of the population still doesn’t have access to reliable and/or affordable Internet service and where most homes do not have a computer or access to one, a big part of the population becomes disenfranchised, even in purely entertainment contests such as this one. How do we expect residents who exist within the confines of the digital void to participate outside of it? How do we expect residents from outside of the community to learn about what’s inside the community if there is such a digital divide?

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FILED UNDER: The People, Digital Divide, Privilege, Race and Class, Social Media
December 27, 2010 | 5:01 PM | By

“Did you have a nice Christmas?”

Flickr: Mr. T in DC

Christmas tree in Columbia Heights.

I stood at the customer service counter, wondering if anyone would notice me amid the shopping carts and baskets which surrounded me, each heaped with spurned gifts, returned merchandise that needed to be put-back. The lights were already dim in this part of the store, a testament to how slow my normally chaotic neighborhood had become due to the threat of snow. After several minutes, a tall, striking young employee approached me to ask if I needed help. I said that I needed to make a return.

Wordlessly, he rounded the carts and positioned himself behind the counter. I handed him my receipt and he scanned it, then reached for the tchotchke I was returning. He tossed it in to a giant bin behind him without looking. “$21 will go back on your card. Thank you.”

“Thank you,” I replied.

“Did you have a nice Christmas?”, he mindlessly asked.

And because I have no boundaries, I replied, “I don’t really celebrate it anymore. Some years ago, my dad went in to a coma on the 23rd of December and passed away on the 29th. We buried him on the 31st. So the holidays just haven’t been the same after that.” My cheeks were hot by the time my explanation trailed off awkwardly. I should’ve just said, “Yes, thanks for asking!” and walked out.

My answer had snapped him out of his exhaustion, haze, reverie. “That’s deep.”

“Do you think you’ll ever celebrate it again?”, he asked. I stared at him, and for the first time, I really saw him. He was too pretty for retail. He looked like he should be the supporting actor on a sitcom, the one-liner-spouting son with an easy smile, filling out a fake nuclear family on some set in L.A. I had noticed him before, but only in the most cursory way– he stood out from the other employees. While they shuffled, slouched and grumbled, his posture was flawless. While they layered tee-shirts and sagged their pants, he always wore a designer crewneck sweater and a trim, shiny belt with a giant French logo for a belt buckle. The latter could’ve been a fake, but if it was, it was a great one. No fraying threads or tarnished metal in sight. He took his appearance and his comportment seriously.

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FILED UNDER: The People, Columbia Heights, Gun Violence, Race and Class, Teens
December 20, 2010 | 3:01 PM | By

Gentrifying with “Towers”– and How They Fail in Columbia Heights

Flickr: Mr. T in DC

Apartment building in Columbia Heights, D.C.

This is a few days old, but I felt compelled to post it– Stephen Smith at Market Urbanism blogged a response to Lydia DePillis’ feature in the City Paper on building height restrictions in D.C.

“the part that really stood out to me was this graphic…outlining where Lydia thinks the height restrictions should be lifted…Anyone familiar with DC geography will notice that the area most insulated from change – Northwest DC – is the richest part of town, full of desirable white neighborhoods. The areas where DePillis advocates lifting the height limit – neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River figure prominently in the graphic – are far blacker and poorer than the rest of DC…

But still, the fact that the only incremental steps towards redensification we can take will disproportionately displace black families is something that should be recognized and discussed. If upzoning poor neighborhoods is the only way to get the city to allow dense development, then so be it, but we shouldn’t pretend that these sorts of half-measures won’t have consequences.

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FILED UNDER: Around the City, Columbia Heights, Gentrification, Race and Class