No pastel islands of casual insight…just blue lines of underlying boundaries. Attempting to cleanse the essay and provide purity and comfort of thought. I didn’t use a highlighter, yet my blue lines which served the same purpose may be foreshadowing the challenges our society faces in addressing the issues presented within this essay. In my defense, the margins were denoted and marked with multiple colors of ink (representing multiple readings) where appropriate.
My work at RDG Planning & Design has recently revolved around the design of retirement “Life Care” communities. Early in Bickford’s essay, Blakely and Snyder’s survey suggests three types of gated communities, “Lifestyle”, “Elite” and “Security Zone”. The primary example of the “Lifestyle” community being retirement communities. It occurred to me that some of the communities in which I have been involved involve all three types of gated communities. One of the most Elite being in the Buckhead area of Atlanta where one of their biggest issues was security. Buckhead is a very affluent area located in relatively close proximity to downtown, thus experiencing an elevated level of crime. The facility went so far as to install razor wire around the sides and back of their property along with cameras around the facility. The gates keeping the undesirables from permeating their safety zone from Peachtree Street. The close proximity of the “haves” with an element of the “have nots” undoubtedly had a huge impact in how these elders shaped their environment. I heard someone suggest that the elevated crime was because of the close proximity to mass transportation which allowed undesirables to infiltrate their community.
My first house was located in a CID. This was not an issue of choice but economics. My wife and I both desired the more central neighborhood but at the time in our lives, the economics forced one the CID. We formed a bond with our neighbors that we still nurture today (10 years later). We had a grocery store within walking distance but the stroller could only hold so many bags and we ended up stopping on our way home from work with the car.
Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (1993) suggest “while African Americans would prefer to live in racially mixed areas, whites continue to have a very low tolerance for the residential presence of African Americans.” This is not the case in my experience. We have had an African American presence in all of our neighborhoods (we are on our third). We have also had Muslim and Asian neighbors. I see the issue revolving more around home values. The neighbor down the street that hasn’t mowed his lawn has a car which hasn’t moved and just set the latest life size figurine from the home center in their garden (perhaps a giant pink flamingo). I would be curious to hear what others have experienced.
I agree with a lot of this essay and had a hard time putting it down. Theorizing Change appears to be a daunting task because of the pervasive thoughts, beliefs and boundaries entrenched into the populace. ”Aristotle not withstanding, there is no one way to judge when it is appropriate to feel fear.” I agree with this statement. Everyone decides this for themselves
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The question of property values is one that hits close to home for me. Prior to coming to the BAC, I taught for four years at Duke University in Durham NC. It's one of the most racially divided cities I've ever experienced, with most neighborhoods being either all Black or all White. When I moved to Boston, it took me a full year to sell my house in Durham. My realtor said he'd never seen anything like it -- we had 65 showings and no offers. And what was interesting was the comments of the potential buyers. They mostly liked the house and the yard and the garden. They were nervous about the neighborhood. Empirically, there was no reason to be nervous -- there was not a single police call in the neighborhood for the three years I lived there, and the city's crime data showed it to be a very safe place. But my neighbor to the north was white, and my neighbor to the south was Black, and the family renting across the street was large and Latino and with older cars and of questionable immigration status. And I think that was more than folks raised in or around Durham could take.
I finally sold it this year in April, for about 94% of its independently appraised price. (And learned that my house price was roughly 15% of an equivalent-sized condo in Boston -- welcome to the metropolis!)
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