Everybody is Leaving My Neighborhood but I Can’t

 

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

With a sorrowed face our next door neighbor has shared to my husband that they are planning to move to Flushing-a most middle class white suburb in Genesee County.

My husband has brought the “bad news while I was cooking, and asked me for the thousand times why we are staying in Mott Park.”

I answered with the same voice and clarity that I try to show to everybody that is looking at me- this crazy person that I am for staying in Flint when my family could buy a wonderful house in the suburbs and be “like everybody else” happy ever after. Truly?

I answered all the reasonable answers to my husband the engineer, the professor, the one that is supporting me even though he is not very convinced why I am doing this.

Yes, it is nice to live in a place where the house is paid and all the extra income is used for the tens of classes that my family takes at the marvelous Flint Cultural Center (the Flint Institute of Music, the Sloan and the Planetarium, the Flint Youth Theater and the Flint Institute of Arts). And it is nice to live in front of a wonderful park and a river and a university –Kettering University. It is nice to live close to the revitalized downtown Flint and the Flint Farmer’s Market and the Flint Public Library and the University of Michigan- Flint.

But there is something deeper that connects me with Flint and Mott Park and is violence and death and the desperate need to change things. A child that I have never met has been killed in the park in front of my house and that has changed all the equations.

http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2012/06/14-year-old_antonio_bell_jr_is.html

http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2012/06/family_friends_call_death_of_1.html

When my children were born (and I have to tell the truth, I desperately wanted my first child to be born in Ann Arbor), things changed forever. I did not want them to carry the horrible shame that people in Flint have for being “this abandoned child from rich parents who have let them rejected and pauper.

I wanted them to be happy to be from Flint because I believe we at birth are given a package with easy, and hard things to work our spiritual path.

Life is this complicated maddening ride that’s takes you places you never expected. I never expected to have the sorrow for the child who die in my park the last Friday before summer school started. Nor I expected him to be the driving force for me to try to do something, for something desperately needs to changed in Flint .

And yet, I am connected to this killed child like I have never been to anybody in Flint because his death is a chilling reminder that somebody somewhere needs to listen to this children. Yes, children that have crossed the threshold of humanity and kill themselves for nothing; children that only understand violence to clean shame, and on and on and on.

I am not poor, nor African American; yet, I know deep in my bones what violence does to a family, to a generation, to a country. I am a child of the sixties and I lived in Argentina during the “Dirty War.” I went to an intellectual university lab-school where numerous teenagers disappeared or where killed by the military-http://desaparecidos.org/arg/. I know what jail and shame does to a family because my uncle Donisio Rafael Fagalde was a lawyer-http://www.geni.com/people/Rafael-Fagalde-Lopez/6000000011605861295 and was sequestered, tortured and  killed by the military July 1^st 1975 when I was 16 years old .

And I know what is to be a teenager and be surrounded by secrets, and death and cold violence that is the way you feel when somebody you know disappears, or get killed. I know what is to have your family picture in the newspapers one day, and understand that nobody wants to talk about “that the event,” ever after the second day.

I know what is to go to church, the important church in the city Sunday morning with all the “preppy people and they look at you at this contaminated person …full of mess and blood and death.”

I know how the media and everybody wants to portray crime and violence like two separate groups- one good, the other bad .When in reality things are more complex.

And so, maybe Antonio Jr. Bell is my new voice, teaching me to talk about violence and anger and teenagers.

I know he that in a very crazy, messy inexplicable way, he is helping me to turn Mott Park, on NO at the time.

Marta

Changing Mott Park, One NO at the Time

Flint MI, August 18, 2012

….

Dear Ms:

In response to our phone conversation, I want to educate you in one of the reasons why Flint is in the state of decay that it is.

Yes, there are mountains of challenges, but one of them and maybe one of the most important is that leaders like you always say no. They do not lead, they demoralize us.

No, poor children can not learn (this is what public school educators expect from kids from poor families in Flint).

No, poor families can not live in peace (this is what social worker expect from kids and families from chaotic backgrounds in Flint).

No, poor children can not evade violence and crime (this is what police expect from poor teenagers in the poor areas of the city of Flint).

No, neighborhoods can not improve (this is what City Hall expect from changing neighborhood in Flints, like our Mott Park).

Why is that No is the most preeminent word in Flint? It is a long story, but because in our particular case I am caring about my chaining neighborhood, I will tell you few things.

 

In our conversation you dismissed me completely without knowing at thing about me…why because in Flint we have very low expectations for people, and things are in a certain way even if we are sinking.

In reality, probably I have more experience in things related to my neighborhood than you, and surely, more education and ideas how to improve Mott Park than you. Why? because I have high expectations about Mott Park than you.

See, what you do not know is that

1)  I come from Tucuman, a city in Argentina, so I know to languages.

2)  I travel around the world, so I visit cities and always learn what work and does not.

3)  I have a Master’s in Architecture from the University of Tucuman.

4)  I have a Master’s in Education from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

5)   I worked with “Architecto Sacriste,” who was a very well regarded architect in Argentina.

6)  I was the student assistant for the class History of Architecture in the University of Tucuman, so probably I know more about old cities than you.

7)  I worked in Atlanta in different architectural offices.

8)  But the most telling, is when living in Atlanta, my best friend from Peru was an urban planner and was working at City Hall. I learned thru our multiple conversations what good leaders do. In a few years, with a great number of leaders Atlanta moved from the sleepy Southern town that nobody expected much to a great town that everybody wants move and live there. Why? Because they dare to say YES…

 

But that is not all, in reference of Mott Park, I was the president of the neighborhood for three years, and now, I buy houses and try to find good neighbors. I also clean the streets and take the weeds, and care for the park, and try to convince neighbors to stay and now I am working in stabilizing the neighborhood, so when somebody like you in a simple phone conversation reply: “ Don’t even think about it..”

I want to say to you and to all the leaders in Flint that I will change my neighborhood and the children in my neighborhood “one NO at the time.”

 

Until next time, reflect on how your negativity and lack of imagination to solve problems and you attitudes that are more negative than positive are hurting Flint.

 

Sincerely,

 

Marta

I Still Believe We are Good People at Heart…Mott Park

 

 The way to win the battle sometimes is to do

the unthinkable….

M W T

I get up every morning thinking who I will call and what person I sell my neighborhood because I believe a “neighborhood changed for bad could also go into the other direction and change for good.”

After all, it is change, and like energy, it can move in both directions.

• Noise and fight can become silent or laugh
• Walls can become bridges
• Despair can become possibilities

And so, I know that if we do exactly the opposite of what we are doing now things, as crazy as may seen, will give us the opposite results, the results we want.

Instead of alienation- that is what we have now; it could turn into belonging and participation.

This is an example of what can be done in Mott Park:

More rentals have given the neighborhood a tint of abandonment, not because we do not have people living in the house because we have, but because rentals have a way of behaving like they are not here. Is that subtle way in which they do not read the neighborhood magazine that languishes on their mailbox flags, or the branches of trees that stays forever on their sidewalks, or their garden unattended, etc.

The feeling of disinvestment is more palpable in the streets that are at the border of the neighborhood. The old owners have left the houses, the new owners care about squeezing the maximum profit by putting as little as possible back into those old houses. The renters who enter in contact with such group are desperate souls, and it shows. They have trash on their lawns and the sense of hopeless abound.

What do I do?

 I could blame A, or B, or C

For ruining my neighborhood; Yet,

I deliberative practice the opposite

I try two things:

1) I try to have great expectations for everyone, for I know they are blind to the beauty I see.

2) I try to engage then in respectful ways by make them feel that somebody sees them as part of Mott Park.

…

There was this little house that had accumulated trash for days in front of their home which became putrid. I was tired of seeing the trash on the same spot for days and decided to act. I decided to collect the trash.

The process of collecting the trash or correcting a particular behavior involves a little of acting and a little of exercising the spirit of collaboration:

To collect the trash-

1)   I dress beautifully like I am going to the mall because after all, I am doing something that will make my neighborhood beautiful.

2)   I go to the property and start collecting the trash and while doing it, I enter into a zen kind of attitude concentrating in the action of cleaning and nothing else (which will be criticizing the rentals and blaming everybody else)

3)   I put the trash in bags and take it to my home or a big dumpster.

4)   If I can, I also include cutting the weeds and cleaning the place.

5)   And when necessary, I buy a big trash can and bring it to them.

6)   I try to go in and out of the neighborhood thru that sad street and keep and eye on that house.

The next day, as I was leaving to do an errand, I passed by the house and a man was sitting on the steps of the door. I stopped and asked where the person who lives in the house was. In the conversation this is what I learned:

• The woman who lives there used to be a nurse
• She is on disability
• She is probably depress
• She probably has a substance abuse issue.

So now, that trash has an history, it is attached to a woman with limitations and issues, a woman that has few resources and is in trouble, a woman that is surrounded by people with more problems than her.

As you get poor, there is less resources, the scarcity makes everybody less welcoming and there is more stress. Things escalate from there: Poor people get robbed more often, poor people get treated like incapable most of the time. Poor people get abused in high numbers. Poor people get less support system when it comes to family, neighbors and the city. Poor people get treated with paternalistic attitudes, etc.

In an act of complete reverse psychology, I gave the man a trash can and put the new trash on the trash can while talking to him. I tell him that I will come often to see how things are going..the plan is make them feel that they are, even if it is a little, connected to Mott Park.

What I did is to repair the web of connections of the neighborhood- a little bit because a neighborhood is more than houses and alleys. It is a group of people living in proximity where the actions of one, like the paint on a canvas affects the rest.

Yes, I feel like a “herding dog,” moving the rich and the poor, the pretentious and the shameful, Kettering University and Saint John Vianney, the slumlord owner and City Hall to go to the same place that is a welcoming place where everybody can live in harmony.

Does it take a lot of time? Yes, Is it discouraging some times? Yes. But I refuse to enter in the drama of the No city that tends to be Flint. Why? because I know that Flint can be the YES city if we CARE.

Until next time, remember that is not money what will change this city but the unshakeable belief that we are good at heart, and that we can, one neighbor at the time.

Thanks

Marta