I’ve often seen gentrification as a difficult problem to tackle. For many of my friends—young, working people trying to live in diverse areas and support themselves on small, non-profit or public service salaries—it is a struggle to find housing without becoming an agent of gentrification. But a New York Times piece today about Mount Morris Park, a traditionally-black Harlem neighborhood, explores one of the uglier examples of that phenomenon.

Timothy Williams chronicles the recent dispute over the neighborhood’s Marcus Garvey Park where, since 1969, drummers from Africa and the Caribbean have played an important role in shaping the social fabric and dynamic of the place. “The musicians,” he explains, “who play until 10 p.m. every summer Saturday, are widely credited with helping to make the park safer over the years.”

Across the street from the park however, at 2002 Fifth Avenue, is “a new seven-story cream and red brick luxury co-op with a doorman, $1 million apartments and a lobby with a fireplace.” Predictably, there have been some disputes about the character of the neighborhood.

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New York Times, I hardly knew ye! It seems that pot-growers are moving into McMansions a la Weeds, and that this somehow qualifies as a worthy Item for the NYT mag’s year in ideas.

According to Lt. Greg Garland of the sheriff’s department in San Bernardino County, where more than 50 pot houses have been raided this year, the growers favor newer communities in outlying suburbs because they get more space for the money, and residents pay scant attention to their neighbors. “In these communities, both the husband and wife work; they’re busy coming and going,” Garland says. “One man we spoke to lived next to a grower for a year and wasn’t even sure what color the guy’s car was.”

Umm, it was green, duh. Do you think this stuff is happening in East Greenwich, too?

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is planning to spend $762 million to demolish 4600 apartments in New Orleans’ public housing projects. HUD, which seized control of the local housing authority years ago, intends to replace these housing units with 1000 units at market rate–each costing over $400,000.

Demonstrators gathered outside the New Orleans City Hall today to protest. Leslie Eaton reports for the Times:

Though local and federal housing officials say the storm-damaged projects were inhuman places to live and should not be rebuilt, some protesters accused the government of a darker motive behind the demolition plan. They contended that the government’s real aim was to keep the poor, mostly female, almost entirely black residents of public housing from returning to their city, to their homes.

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In honor of my brief stint at home in DC, my parents took me out to dinner at a new restaurant, Logan at the Heights. In addition to this trendy Columbia Heights eatery, its proprietors own three other restaurants–two in Logan Circle, one on New Hampshire Avenue–in newly-gentrified neighborhoods. As I walked out of the restaurant at 14th and Kenyon to the sight of the CH Metro Station surrounded by new shops–Target, Best Buy, Starbucks, Giant foods, and 7-11–I got to thinking about the history of the ‘hood. (more…)

The infamous Olneyville garbage cans are now on display at the Dirt Palace.

The Steelyard has a page up explaining their take on the situation, and a place to leave comments about the way they’ve handled the controversy.

In late 2006, the Steel Yard’s Urban Furniture program (one of a kind, custom- produced street amenities designed and built by RI artists) was contracted by the Olneyville Housing Corporation to produce a series of tree guards and garbage cans for Olneyville. We hired independent artists to produce these amenities, including Lu Heintz. As artists for hire, individuals who work on these projects are contracted to create and sell work to the Steel Yard and we, in turn, re-sell this work to a public client. In this case, the client was OHC, acting as fiscal agent for the Olneyville Merchants Association.

After the cans were produced, the client took issue with the content of Lu’s set of four garbage cans, feeling that they were not the product they had contracted for and that certain elements of the design content were not fully representative of their community. The Steel Yard felt obligated to uphold the client’s right to reject the product but also felt a strong responsibility to the artist we hired. The artist saw this as a rejection of her work and as a form of censorship.

In reflecting on our process, the Steel Yard realized that the cans’ inclusion of text demanded a higher form of approval than we typically undertook. While we could not undo this mistake, we were committed to resolving the issue and facilitated multiple conversations and negotiations that included the Steel Yard, the client and the artist and her spokesperson.

RIFuture has this post on Dan Yorke’s apparent desire to repeal the 19th amendment, following in Anne Coulter’s steps in suggesting that women shouldn’t be able to vote. I’d love to be able to ignore or laugh at all the Rhode Island talk radio loonies, but they’ve sadly actually got some influence.

The Phoenix has Megan Hall’s update on the infamous Shaw’s at Eagle Square - once a major selling point of the Feldco development that got a lot of tax breaks to knock down a number of buildings, destroy Fort Thunder, and put up some strip-mall style shopping and “artists’ lofts” nobody wanted to rent.

And we’re all famous! What with the AP having picked up the Mike Townsend-and-crew living-in-the-mall story. I don’t think Providence has made news this big since, well, that Providence-built terrorist submarine story from August. Feels about right.

There’s been a really interesting/divisive debate raging in Olneyville and online over the last several weeks, regarding, well, garbage cans.

Matt covers it here. A local artist fabricated 4 garbage cans, as part of a broader order from the nonprofit Olneyville Housing Corporation. The cans were text-heavy, respectively describing the artist’s conceptions of “Colonization,” “Exploitation,” “Disintegration,” and “Gentrification” — touchy but crucial subjects in Olneyville these days. OHC rejected the work upon its completion, saying that it was not in line with the conceptual designs they’d seen. They’ve remained at the Steelyard, while other cans that were ordered with them have been installed.

I’m not knowledgeable enough about the inter-organizational dynamics to weigh in in a meaningful way, except to say that it appears that the cans will end up getting placed somewhere in Olneyville, which is undoubtedly a good thing.

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You might think a bike path started in 2004 would be easy navigate and safe to ride in 2007. Well, woh hoh my friend you’d be wrong. There have long been plans to build a bike path connecting Providence to the East Bay Bike path, which starts in East Providence and goes to Bristol, but completion it appears is not on horizon. (more…)

  The (much costlier than expected) rehab of the Dunkin Donuts center presses on. I’m quite skeptical of the notion that this particular endeavor, or much of the supposed “economic development” of recent years will actually serve to improve the lives of the average resident of Providence. Though it’s certainly positive for the city that the state has taken ownership of the Dunkin Donuts center, relieving the city of the burden of maintaining it, and recognizing that those benefits that follow from its presence accrue primarily to the state, to whom sales and income taxes and such are paid.

Either which way, the RI Convention Center Authority has posted some pretty cool photos of the rehab project. There’s little doubt, no matter the cost overruns and the rest, that in its new form the Dunk will be much less of an aesthetic blight than it’s been.