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Around The -Ists This Week
Rich vs. Poor, Renters vs. Homeowners, developers vs. locals, Kenny G. vs. Afropop: this blog from High Point has got every one of Seattle's little conflicts all crammed into one tiny teacup. High Point in West Seattle was redeveloped recently to include some moderately priced homes along with a bunch of rent-control-type lower-income housing. We all get along when we live on the same street, right? Well, not quite, of course. Danny Westneat gave it a go in this weekend's paper, but nobody's going to lay it out for you like the blog itself does. Click through to the source for this one.
Since our readership by and large consists of white collar, educated, home-owning High Pointers, we will direct our discourse towards the issues that concern our interests, without taking into account the sentiments of the Other High Point, or the Old High Point.What HPB would personally like nothing more, is to see the Seattle Housing Authority sell the low income homes at market value with special financing programs in place for the median-income-earning Seattleite. That would help create affordable housing in a city which is in desperate need of it. We could go off on a tangent about how low-income housing subsidizes the poor and creates little motivation for the poor, subsequently known as “povs” to improve their economic status, but we’d be preaching to the choir here. And it’s not likely to happen.
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"Povs"? Everybody knows that the respectful term for low-income citizens is "the poors."
Meh, what does Gawker know about the povs? I'm going with this guy.
Oh jeez. The promise of local/place/neighborhood blogging is counterbalanced by how easy it is for the whole thing to turn into a hell of hall monitor types, virtual homeowners associations and self-appointed neighborhood improvement clubs. Only hope is that reasonable voices emerge, gain attention, survive.
I will attest to the conflict in attitudementioned on that blog and in the associated comments.
We just moved in at the beginning of September, just above the pond in HP. I am a daily bicycle commuter and get a different exposure to the neighborhood than the average office ->car ->garage->couch commuter.
There is plenty of underlying tension, from new residents not accustomed to sharing space and time with other ethnic populations & tax brackets. The teenage children of the "povs" seem to have the least regard for condo set, but for the most part everyone seems to get along.
The rasta icecream delivery woman this summer was awesome.
The post on HPB really creeped me out.. it was.. I don't know, I'd never say it was racist, but there was a lot of keyword-phrases and not-so-subtle phrasing, in the NuSpeak language of the 00's, that seemed to me to be dancing around having to say "I'm afraid of the black people"
I'll give HPB the benefit of the doubt, naturally.. but the entire thing made me feel squicky :P
Oh, let's call an entrenching tool a shovel: it was racist. But beyond race, it was stinkingly classist and filled with all manner of ugly, class-based pronouncements of entitlement ("now see here, my good man, we paid five-hundred eighty krillion dollars for this domicile; I fully expect there to be neither crime nor loitering! These Povs are simply insufferable! You leave me no other choice but to commence a block watch; though I absolutely loathe being forced into taking such initiative!"). Also, I like how the poll is stacked with leading options.
On the other hand, the point that isn't articulated here that is being danced around is that you cannot really plan a mixed-income community and expect it to "just work" overnight. Rather, it somewhat happens. That takes time as neighbors, richer and poorer, negotiate amongst themselves. The petulant pioneers end up moving out and the troublemakers are either persuaded to behave or kicked out by a combination of sane upper and lower income folk who actually give a damn about the neighborhood and not just what goes within their property lines.
I suspect the problem doesn't come down to a classist "Povs" versus Respectable Land Owning Gentry stand-off as much as it stems from selfish versus unselfish motivations. Selfishness occurs both in the wealthier's false sense of entitlement as well as the poorer's disregard for the law and anger misdirected toward the homeowners. Naturally, the sane voices are drowned out.
Finally, what neighborhood (worth living in) in Seattle doesn't have crime issues? People living just off Aurora have their houses broken into; I've had tools stolen from my U-District garage. Boo-flippin'-hoo, whiny HPB-ers.
(My word count here is higher than the original post. I should stop.)