City paper on Kelsey Gardens
The City Paper's cover story this week covers the housing situation over at Kelsey Gardens (1500 block of 7th ST NW).When I picked up the paper I was hoping for a happy story about actually helping people get off Section 8 and moving into homeownership or something better. Nope. It's about a representative trying to use every trick and scare tatic to get people out of their homes so the land upon which Kelsey Gardens sits can get developed into a shiny high tax revenue stream. Yes, I know kicking out the poor people would do a lot to kick start development along 7th Street, but at what cost?
The church that owns the property seems to have no qualms about kicking residents to the curb. It is an investment and not a charitable mission. The only way to reap the goodies of the investment is to get rid of the residents. It would be nice if they made it part of their charitable mission to secure residents equitable housing in the city, or if there are school aged children, housing in Shaw.
The article was very informative in helping figure out what was the deal with 1330 7th St.
posted by Mari @ 10.6.05
2 Comments:
This story was disturbing. There has got to be a way to make this neighborhood arrive w/out scheming people out of their homes. We've got to get creative.
I'm with you on most of what you say here. 99% of us want the same thing from our neighborhood: Good neighbors, access to services, low crime, better schools, better looking surroundings etc. And yes, when we allow it, a tiny group is able to screw us out of all of that.
But too often in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, the easiest solution, from the point of the gentrifiers, is to sit by and wait for lower income folks to be pushed out. This slimeball Crawford was taking it a step further.
Personally, I think that mixed income communities are the most stable.
I know I'm not coming up with any big solutions here, but I wish that the dialogue would start from that baseline (In general I mean, not on this blog, because I think most of us agree).
So how do we get what we want from gentrification without pushing out the responsible long-term residents? Tenant-ownership is an important first step. The rest doesn't change overnight, but in other communities it has been observed to make changes over time.
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