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How do you go about re-envisioning a neighborhood? That’s a big question on our minds these days, due to the fact that we now control more land in the Washington Neighborhood of West Sacramento than any other landowner. For us, this level of control translates directly into the degree of influence we can have in creating an eco-urban community and the degree of contribution we can have there.
We’ve had a few internal meetings and brainstorming sessions about the neighborhood’s new identity. Last week, we met with some planning consultants. From these conversations, its abundantly clear that, if this neighborhood is going to step away from its past reputation and take on a unified, revitalized identity, we will need to provide leadership and facilitation to define a new vision for the future of this neighborhood. Without this unified vision, the neighborhood will simply become a hodge-podge of unrelated projects with little thought as to what will best serve the community.
Where Do We Start?
For us, the visioning process starts with a dialogue with the people who live there. Yes, we’ll also need to get into discussions with other developers and with the city (both of which have already been initiated), but first priority should go to the community. So we will be hosting a workshop for the neighbors on May 8th at the Warehouseman’s Association Hall.
Collaboration = Creativity
Honestly, this workshop is the first chance we’ve had to act on the full intent of the value LJUrban places on collaboration and inclusivity. We believe that the communities we work in have knowledge and ideas that we don’t, and, if we work together, we will have a better end product – a better neighborhood. As we’ve already learned, collaboration isn’t always fast and easy or without conflict, but we also have learned that conflict is often a catalyst for creativity, if channeled correctly.
Our first projects were significantly defined before we had a clear sense of this value, so, while we did engage in community outreach with both projects—enough to know that what we were doing was welcome and beneficial–the degree of engagement was less than what we now see is possible.
So, this is a start.
At this particular workshop, we are hoping to accomplish several things:
Meet the People Who Live There
First, we want to meet the members of the existing neighborhood. A personal relationship is much more productive, and we believe we can address issues and concerns much better at this point where our plans are still tentative for each project. Plus, some of us will be moving into the neighborhood and these will be our new neighbors!
Discover Likes and Dislikes
Second, we want to find out what the likes and dislikes of the neighbors are. We are planning a community image survey that allows participants to rate different street scenes and creates a visual reference for many urban design concepts. Since we have not designed exteriors, we may be able to incorporate their tastes and any important neighborhood themes into the appearance of our projects. We’ll be looking for strong themes to emerge, knowing that individual preferences run along a wide continuum–it will be interesting to see what emerges from this activity.
A Developer Creating A Neighborhood Association?
Yes, that does seem a bit oxymoronic, knowing the often-tumultuous relationships between developers and neighborhood associations. However, we strongly believe that a healthy community has a strong sense of ownership and that members should be empowered to have a voice in what happens in their community. So, while there is no existing neighborhood association for this neighborhood, we would like to see one formed. The people that come out to this meeting may be the ones interested enough in community action to take on this task and organize the neighborhood.
Steve
2 responses so far ↓
1 Brian Fischer // May 19, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Hey Guys,
Longtime no talk.
My community side, 100minds, which exists in Oak Park and Midtown with antecedents in Downtown’s Alkali Flats, and our business, midtowngrid.com, would be proud to help in very different ways to develop a neighborhood association in the Washington area.
Having been on the Board of Directors of the Oak Park Neighborhood Association since its inception 3 years ago as a formal entity, I believe my personal experience and the lessons from it and my compadres’ insights could provide innumerable opportunities for another association from a similarly situated neighborhood.
Oak Park as you know is in a battle for identity. It is two or three universes colliding, sometimes thoughtfully, sometimes randomly. I interpret your earlier statement about conflict to indicate that “healthy conflict” can produce some of the most meaningful results in our society or in our personal relationships.
So the great question is “What is healthy conflict?” How do we teach it? Or even stimulate it? How do we practice it?
Problems of development are often born from the disconnection among builders, a city, and the neighbors who will actually live there. Identifying this is the easy part. Stimulating participation in a long term, inspired fashion is the more esoteric, challenging aspect of community definition. People who feel their voices really won’t mean much to the perceived power structures around them, political, economic, social, and educational, do not feel in great numbers that their voices are relevant or that their big dreams are possible in any tangible timeline. Therefore, many people, especially young people, stop dreaming.
Ultimately, I believe what you will find as one missing ingredient is that very little development in this city is ready to share part of the pie with the neighbors themselves. Eco-urban development should be couched in the context of a larger ethical capitalism, or perhaps ethical capitalism should be an express component of eco-urban development. Either way ownership is the key to igniting possibility, even when it is a small piece. Obviously, I’m not talking about the middle class or upper class urban families who will logically descend upon our urban ownership opportunities, lofts and condos, Midtown, East Sac, Tahoe Park, Curtis Park, and Land Park homes when they come up for sale. I’m talking about the disenfranchised working poor who rent their own neighborhood and then get pushed out through the traditional macroeconomic forces of re-gentrification as opposed to revitalization from within, among the people themselves.
In my personal definition of eco-urban revitalization, a critical mass of stakeholders must take part in the neighborhood economy around them in order to revitalize legitimately (ie home/loft ownership, small business development, and commercial or commercial-residential co-ownership). It is a democratic capitalism in which we share our skills, insights, and assets by identifying win-win situations, mutually profitable scenarios that stimulate the context for participation through imagination or Imagine Nation, a book I’ll be working on for a lifetime.
To what degree will the Washington Neighborhood include ownership and business ownership/stimulus packages for long-time residents to awaken the entrepreneurial giant within them? Who will develop the amenities in the neighborhood? Will it be a neighbor or at least someone local like a Temple or Old Soul, or will it be a Starbucks or other large, non-locally owned chain? To be clear, being a chain does not automatically impugn its ability to participate positively in an economically vibrant and diverse neighborhood but there should be guidelines to how they grow within a non-home city because they can accidentally or purposefully impede the organic small business development opportunities among locals.
One thing I have confirmed in my time in Oak Park…There is no such thing as civil rights off the paper without economic opportunity that offers a reasonable likelihood of parity within a defined period of time. Parity does not mean equal dollars in a bank account, it means equal access to borrowing for relative opportunities: microloans and larger loans for larger visions to people who have not participated in the economic system as concretely in the past.
The forces that shaped whether or not the working poor owned any part of their neighborhood did not happen by accident. Much of what decayed the urban fabric was by definition political. What is political was voted on at a city and county level at some point in recent history to no positive effect for the larger community that the policies affected.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard is a great example of this kind of mediocrity. Each city re-assassinates Dr. King in its own way, haphazardly naming a boulevard in order to quell the charges of institutional racism that led to an Oak Park Four, a false battle between Black Panthers and city police, led by the lieutenant on the scene, former policeman and longtime City Councilman Robbie Waters, and to the Oak Park Library becoming the McGeorge Law School Library. These are uncomfortable topics even 30-plus years later. A city or county bequeaths the street name amidst controversy and then abandons the street to desolation until the people awaken to their war zone and ask how such a street of youth violence, economic emptiness, no pubic art, and no vision, could possibly reflect honoring the values of Dr. King or bringing a positive metaphor to life.
Hence, 100minds Oak Park founded MLK & Honey, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard Street Revitalization Project, intended to heal Oak Park’s MLK Boulevard from top to bottom by reflecting the intrinsic assets of the neighborhood on the boulevard, 5 major schools (American Legion, Father Keith B. Kenney, Oakridge Elementary, Christian Brothers, and PS7 plus its baby sister, the new Triumph Early Education Learning Center), as an educational corridor.
Among all of my developer friends, all of whom know about this project and the fact that 100minds captured $1 million to do a street revitalization plan through SHRA, part of which went to Mogavero-Notestine to develop the bones of the plan, none have offered their expertise in any meaningful context to end this metaphorical re-assassination that maintains the worst part of our urban history and chains our neighborhood’s spine to a crippling status. So one must ask, where are the eco-urban developers of Oak Park? No invitations should be necessary.
There is an interesting group at play in the combined efforts for the Greenfair Project, but that’s not the spine of Oak Park, it’s the periphery, an important edge nonetheless.
If we wish to practice a true eco-urbanism, then we must contemplate the human ecology, which so intimately includes economic opportunity, less we forget that upon Dr. King’s real assassination, he was rising up over the mountaintop of poverty, which crossed all racial boundaries, as it does in Oak Park and similarly in the Washington neighborhood.
With great interest in healing a neighborhood for the long term,
Brian Fischer
2 Kempster // May 24, 2007 at 7:49 pm
Brian,
Incredibly well said. I am encouraged.
Cheers,
Steven Kempster
One-time Oak Park resident
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