Look What I Did to My Head!

Look what I did! I went from curly-haired scrub to chemo-patient-look-alike in 20 minutes. Sweet.

Apparently something happened and now I'm typing in a different font and I'm too lazy to figure out how to fix it.

On to a more serious note...

I've been having a few conversations with some friends of mine about, gentrification and the projects. It's sort of a relevant issue for me, despite the fact that I'm not actually from the projects, I didn't live in NYC when they were in terrible shape and my background didn't exactly expose me to any projects, dangerous or otherwise (the city I grew up in did have them, as well as several low income neighborhoods, but nothing on the scale of a major city). Where I live now is within close proximity (one block) from housing projects. And while they are not dangerous (I've gone grocery shopping at night in my somewhat fancy work clothes), it's still a new experience (four people got mugged in front of my apartment, one of them received a serious beat down for not cooperating). Of course, there's no way to prove the perpetrators were from the housing projects. For all I know, they could live in the really nice area a few streets up. The point I'm getting at is that for the most part, projects aren't inherently bad in any way, there's just usually a couple rotten apples that cause problems, at least around here. I know that NYC's projects really don't compare to those of D.C., Chicago, Miami, LA and others of notoriety, but there are still some unfriendly neighborhoods. Where I'm going with this is as follows:

Cities like DC are instituting new programs, and from what I understand, NYC has already been doing it for a while, are starting programs where they tear down dilapidated projects, rebuild them into nice low and middle income apartments, and give people vouchers to return. All of those residents with known criminal offenses are given vouchers to move elsewhere, and those who were just living there are invited back. All of this is done to try to mix up the neighborhood, bring in working class people into lower class neighborhoods, and break up perpetual troublemakers, so to speak. In principal, it seems like a good idea, but it doesn't even come close to addressing any of the problems that led to unsavory neighborhoods in the first place. It's just a band-aid to cover up the symptoms.

What's worse, and NYC has a fairly well-known history of doing, it tearing down projects and low-income housing and replacing the buildings with expensive, high-rise apartments. This is great for cleaning up neighborhoods, bringing high-earning and thus high-tax paying residents to the area, as well as raising property values and breaking up criminally active neighborhoods. The problem is, it doesn't solve any problems. It just moves the symptoms of the problem to another area. An example:

A good friend of mine used to live on 112th and Adam Clayton Powell in Harlem. He had a beautiful, large apartment that puts mine to shame. He and his roommates, however, didn't have a TV, so when they ate meals or wanted to kill time, they would sit at the windows and watch the hookers in the neighborhood work the streets, watch dudes smoking roc on the stoops and the like. It wasn't necessarily a dangerous neighborhood (save for the crazy homeless dude that went around trying to cut people's arms off with saws at my friend's subway station...totally coincidental, I hope). I went up there a couple times without incident. However, returning to the neighborhood two years later, one doesn't see pimps, hookers and crackheads (obviously a good thing). One sees nifty shops and high rise apartment buildings (not a bad thing). The problem is, no one came around to do anything about the pimps, hookers and crackheads. They just got forced out and moved into another neighborhood. 

It took hearing Mos Def discuss this at a concert I attended Sunday to make me see how gentrification, while on the surface seems like a good thing to those of us that just want a place to live where there are no worries of being mugged or otherwise accosted by someone, it isn't really a great solution. It brings in tax dollars and obvious revenues for the city. It probably even brings culture and other worldly things. The issue is, it doesn't solve any problems. It just moves the problem. It's even less of a band-aid than rebuilding the projects. But it is a lot more profitable and easier than getting to the root of the problem, which will no doubt be exacerbated by the most recent economic downturn. 

Will we ever end poverty? No, but we can reduce it (in ways that can't really be explained, partially because I just don't know enough about public policy and partially because I don't have the time or space to talk about my ideas...maybe another time). Can we fix the prison system so that people who go in don't come out worse? Yes, we can (see aforementioned reasons why I don't elaborate). It won't be perfect, but it will be better. 

These aren't the only contributing factors, but they are two of the biggest. But again, fixing these problems costs far more money in the immediate future (will probably save more in long run) and is unbelievably difficult to work out and find the right people to run the projects so that they are effective, so it probably won't happen, even if it will save money, lives and improve the quality of life in the entire country. But then again, there's money to be made in misery.