“I am seated in an office surrounded by heads and bodies.”


"In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life – then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already – it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power – you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

What is Redevelopment

"Redevelopment was intended to be a thirty-year process. Starting in the early 60's, it began about the same time President Johnson declared war on poverty. And today, we still have poverty. Nobody would have imagined that blight would have spread to suburban communities. Urban decay was thought to be an inner-city thing. Now, we still have to deal with it in suburbs, in decay infrastructure and rotting streets, and it will take another 30 years to see any significant changes."  - SEDC Project Manager (and my supervisor), Nancy Lytle

I've had a difficult time the past two weeks figuring out the meaning of redevelopment. What is it? Who does it, and how? Why is it done in the first place?

In very brief terms, will attempt to answer these questions. (Assuredly, these definitions will be revised and corrected in subsequent revisions.)

Redevelopment? - The process of undoing urban decay (blight) and strengthening existing neighborhoods.

How? - Redevelopment Agencies, which are essentially smaller organizations derived from municipal government, are given Redevelopmental powers to fix up broken neighborhoods.

One of these powers is an extended clause of Eminent Domain (ED). ED is formidable. Normally, ED can be used by the state to acquire property for the use of the public good. For example, if a new freeway must bisect a neighborhood, the government may force residents to relocate to somewhere outside of the neighborhood. This, of course, is not without immense costs, human conflict, politics (struggle), and time.

Interestingly, redevelopmental agencies may use ED to seize private property, but then immediately offer the taken property to commercial developers. This is very controversial. It is prone to incite people's emotions, as it lends to itself a potential environmental rife with favoritism or under-the-table dealings.

Landlords who habitually disregard their property (also known as slumlords), are universally seen to have a detrimental impact on the quality of neighborhoods* (assessment of quality to be discussed later). To me, so far, it seems that slumlords pose a difficult obstacle for the Redevelopmental Agency, as many landlord stubbornly refuse to change their practices or methodology.

Aside from eminent domain, Redevelopmental Agencies work alongside city planners, developers, and community leaders to promote improvements within the designated neighborhoods, or Area of Influence (see map). Recently, streetlights were install along the Imperial corridor (see old post). This was a long-standing task which may never have received funding, if not for the involved of SEDC.

Lastly, redevelopment focuses a lot on creating affordable housing. A significant fraction of the budget must be allocated to affordable housing. The idea behind this is that you can significantly improve a neighborhood without evicting its residents by making the place hospitable without being outside the price tag.

Why? - From a societal standpoint, not doing redevelopment would be immoral. It would mean accepting the status quo: that certain neighborhoods with lesser political and economic strength will never have the opportunity to revitalize. It means that certain segments of the population will have to live with crime and uncleanliness, with less access to quality produce or commercial goods, and generally to have less opportunities that benefit from modern society. Redevelopment is first and foremost a democratic proposition. It does not fit within the ideals of Libertarianism or Republicanism. This underlies many reasons why redevelopment is favored or disfavored.



*This is not necessarily the consensus among economists. I have read a prominent economist who argued in favor of slumlords. Cheaper rent, no matter how neglected the property is, can make it easier for low-income people to basically have a place to stay. On the contrary, it is argued that slumlords foster an environment of drug dealings, violence, gang warfare, and public indolence. We take this second argument to be the stronger case.

Maps

Here are two maps: the first a standard map of regions the agency operates within, the second, a handwritten map with the names of the different districts.*

Area-of-Influence

Cheat-sheet

Street Scenes

[City Photoshoot]

I drove around the block today. Some of the graffiti from last time had been removed. Let's see how long that will last.

Meanwhile, my coworker Chris just told me someone tagged the Martin Luther King mural. Right over Mr King himself.

Working in Southeast San Diego has been culturally challenging. But one thing that really caught me off guard is the fact that everyone around me is aware of my presence, much more so than in La Jolla, or Carmel Valley, or elsewhere in San Diego. When I drive around holding a camera, people tend to notice from far away. They start talking to their friends. They stare, and keeping staring. I took a picture of a car with huge rims, but the lady in the car behind stared at me as if I had committed some violation of proper social conduct.

It is the severity of eye contact. It's a test. Here I am, sitting in a blue Volvo station wagon, wearing a button-up purple collared shirt, Chinese, and for they know, a near-complete foreigner. And I find them equally distant. A group of teenagers dressed in gangster clothes approaches the back side of my car. They stop walking. We have made contact, but the awareness of each others presence doesn't exactly diminish so quickly.

What can I do to close the gap, or overcome this huge sea of cultural and socioeconomic divide? How can I even make a presumption that it is possible that we can have a friendly conversation? How can I learn about their wants, their needs, their loves or their struggles?

For now, I can't say that I am fully comfortable in this part of town. I do have fears that someone might come up to me and nab my belongings. It doesn't feel safe.

And it's so odd. We do this thing called redevelopment. Yet for me, there remains this divide between myself and the people that I see on the streets, of which maps, in their failure to humanize, fail to describe.

Cyclists

Looking North on Euclid

Family Vehicle

"Discount Food Market" on Imperial

New Streetlights

Last Monday, there was a "ground-breaking" along Imperial Ave. That just means, a bunch of community leaders, including council president Tony Young, were out on the street to announce to opening of 20 new street lights on Imperial Ave, starting on 61 St.

It doesn't mean the lights have been built. It just means, well, everything is in place for the lights to be built. It means that a political agreement has been made. It means that the money has been allocated.

All in all, the cost to install 20 streetlights was about $275,000. That's about 15k per light!

The project was part of a general revitalization thing.  Reduce crime, increase welfare, etc etc... They've wanted to do this for the past twenty years, but there was never enough of a political or financial backing.

I got to act as photographer, but I shared the role with Chris, who did the important PR work.

Council President Tony Young speaking for the media and community

Symbolic Shovels for Politicians

SEDC President Mr. Jerry Groomes speaking

Mr. Vernon Evans, CFO of the San Diego Airport Regional Airport Authority

Mr. Chris Jones (right) carrying poster of architectural vision

Diagnosing Cities

This morning I had some spare time, so I started popping up whatever academic journals I could find. At first, I started searching for urban policy journals. They all had weird titles, and a lot was closely related to economics. Not exactly my cup of tea (yet). However, I soon found myself reading the New England Journal of Medicine.

On the website there is a very interesting link (http://www.nejm.org/image-challenge), a sort of trivia/puzzle game. The editors post a picture of a patient, and you, the reader, can choose one of five possible diagnoses. I thought the idea was awesome! So I started googling the possible diagnoses. First I tried using google images to cross-reference typical symptoms with the given visual data. Soon, I realized that 1. it was hard to see the differences between two possible diagnoses visually, and 2. many images on google were not at all similar to the problem at hand. For example, a picture of someone's hands with tumor-like clumps was not in fact cancerous, but bulimia nervosa--the patient used his/her hands to induce vomitting frequently.

What I realized is that the art of diagnosis in medicine is highly complex, full of surprises, and often misleading. And while readers of the NEJM were most likely doctors or medical students, the statistics of each game showed that there was no clear majority that selected the correct diagnosis. Of course, it's just a game. But I think there is enough complexity in differentiating symptoms that no one person can readily know the finer points of hydropneumothorax versus phrenic nerve palsy- without consultation to an expert or encyclopedic body of knowledge.

That sort of made me wonder something about my job working in a redevelopment agency. In many ways, cities mirror human bodies. They share very basic anatomical structures: the body has arteries and veins, while cities have roads. The similarities are such that transportation engineers have a term for typical 4-lane suburban lanes: Arterial roads. Police forces are simply the immunological T- and B-cell of our cities, which congregate upon intruding bodies: drug dealers, vagrants, etc. SWAT forces can be the macrophages. It's all analogical*.

So, how can we classify blight, or urban decay? A cancer of the city? Will these cancerous regions metastasize across other regions of the city, via blood/capillary action? Perhaps we are stretching the idea too far.

But really, if it is possible to make such detailed diagnoses on individual patients, can it be possible to make equally detailed diagnoses for cities or neighborhoods? Can we treat blight not as simply blight, but a highly complex and precise problem? Can we differentiate between different types of blight? And do we not have smart ways for treating them, not as a whole but as individual and unique problems?

Day 3: Graffiti Run

Last Friday, I got a chance to tour the areas under redevelopment.

My assignment was to photograph the wide-spread graffiti in these areas. Many gangs (S-13, 38th St.) sprayed symbols on fences, public property, and even restaurants. Some fences had many layers of paint, which indicated the owners had routinely repainted their walls due to frequent tagging.

Recently, to crack down on graffiti, the City purchased nearly one million dollar's worth of high-tech equipment. Police officers would document instances of graffiti using sophisticated cameras, which transmitted time and location information real-time via GPS. Handwriting analysis would be performed, and a series of computerized algorithms would identify patterns and track down who did the graffiti. Supposedly, police would be more able to arrest the culprits. Our job was to show that it had not been work very effectively.

Mr. Chris Jones, a project manager, offered to drive around town. When I stepped into his sleek, black Mercedes C-class, he quickly turned down the volume of a Jay-Z song. We immediately started talking about music, which he was passionate about, and our conversation gradually spread to more topics. Mr. Jones grew up in Brooklyn, and his connection to the streets was unfettered. He spoke about his arrival to San Diego, the time he spent studying in Arizona, and his friendships of the past. Growing up, many of his friends were killed, either by being either shot or hit by cars. It was slightly overwhelming for me listening to some of his stories, and they made an incredible impression on me.

As we cruised around town, we tried to avoid street-sweepers, which hurled rocks at nearby cars and bystanders. Mr. Jones loved his AC. It was often kept at full-blast, on the coldest settings, even when the car had its windows or doors open. It had a coolly calming effect, I had to admit, despite its inclination on excess.

I asked Mr. Jones whether prosecuting the taggers would do any good in the long-run. He argued yes, because if we could punish a few of the offenders, the system would ensure that any future offenders would be equally punished, and this would act as a deterrent as a whole. My thought, however, was that graffiti was a form of trouble, and that removing graffiti- as one form of civil disobedience-would lead to an increase in another form of civil disobedience.

Pictures of the graffiti can be seen below:

Office Pics/Maps

Receptionist Area (Desk)

Map Containing the Major Project Areas (bold lines denote freeways 5 and 15)

Office Maps with Names

Maps of Downtown, per San Diego Planning 

Division

Day 1: At Work

Hi Reader-

Today, I start my work/summer blog. I currently intern at the Southeastern Economic Development Corporation (SEDC). The agency focuses on finding ways to remove blight and strengthen communities in older neighborhoods of San Diego. In particular, the program pays close attention to the neighborhoods to the east of Downtown (Freeway 5), south of Martin Luther Highway (94), and north of National City. These are some of the most down-trodden parts of town.

I got a desk today. Not just any desk, but the receptionist desk. Now, I act as a part-time receptionist.

At about 9:30AM, a man walked in wearing an unwashed green t-shirt. He took off his cap, and humbly asked me for a job. I had no idea what to say. I went back and talked to the president, Mr. Jerry Groomes. Jokingly, he told me to tell the visitor that I had just taken the last job at the office.

Mr. Groomes came out and introduced himself to the unemployed visitor. They quickly bonded. I was adamantly surprised, given the difference in status between the two men. Mr. Groomes did not simply tolerate the stranger's presence, but gravitated toward it. Both were African-American. The president told the stranger that SEDC was not employing now, but handed him a list of places to visit where he might find opportunity. Just briefly, I witnessed what kinds of hardship unemployed people face, but I also saw what had driven many people to work here at SEDC in the first place: a firm belief in the importance of community and helping one another.

Later I visited a low-income housing development, the Vista Grande Apartments. This was the last meeting, so the contractor, developer, housing commission people, and banker were all present. They went over the final change-order expenditures. Now that it was completed, we toured the renewed facility. I had a conversation with the contractor, Mr. Holmes. After discussing beams and construction logistics, I asked him what he felt about the project overall. He told me that these kinds of projects significantly help people. He said that previously, vagrants and criminals routinely broke into these homes, knocked out lights and video cameras, and dealt drugs. It created a very unhealthy and often violent atmosphere. The newly remodeled and refurnished apartments gave people much needed sense of civility and hope. It was worth the cost, he said, even while taking in consideration the abuses that occur within our welfare system.

My supervisor Mrs. Nancy Lytle received word about a new recycling facility being planned on Merchant St. We looked at maps, discussed it, and thought that a new metal recycling plant would not be beneficial for the neighborhood. Who wants a scrap-yard in their backyard? I guess things like this pop up all the time.

I am still trying to grasp what exactly SEDC does for the community.

I hope I can share more stories about my experiences on my blog, as well as pictures of places I have been.