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

Flint Has Always Been a Poor Town, Even When Tens of GM Factories were around. Poverty is Lack of Choices and that Abounds in Flint.

Flint is per excellence the definition of poverty

You have heard about the terrible things that happen in Flint when no hope, anger, ignorance and humiliation get combusted in the mind of young men? They kill themselves for pennies or phrases or honor…And now that summer has started Flint, and is hot and no money for anything…well you get the picture.

But please, do not get nostalgic thinking that Flint was before in the past because the truth is that has never being. Flint has always been a poor city and that make everybody very very angry.

Poverty is always equated with money because money gives you option, is the currency of choice. But also poverty is the lack of and in town the lack of voice and choices is monumental. People here are still treated like less than or in other words like poor.

When I came here from Atlanta several moons ago, I was amazed at how much Flint had in terms of services like two library systems, a cultural center, universities like Kettering University, University of Michigan, Mott Community College, Baker College, etc. parks, the Flint River in the center of the town, etc.

So why Flint feels and looks like a poor town?  Why Flint looks like things are patched with tape and ready to break into pieces at any moment?

I know, I know people will get offended by this but Flint has two things that makes it a poor town. It has a mono industry that is controlled by few hands. And it has not diversification. It is the same that happen in towns that have gold or copper and a group extracting the material and people with very few options that to work in the mines or nothing.

In Flint, even in the boom times, Flint was like a mine town, and worse because it has all the pretensions of a great city. Flint has a car to build disposable hands to work. Yes, it pays good, but it treat people like disposable and that is why in Flint  you have so many factories and next to the factories bars and bars and bars like the wild west.

So, although people had worked they knew and the managers of the factories knew and the managers of banks knew that people did not have choices. They were poor. Or you work in the factories for a good pay or you languish in the streets because nobody will hire a person that does not know how to read or write or know only to put tires in cars because that is what has done all his life….So, people like all poor people are trapped and that is why in Flint that sense that there is no escape is something it enters in your breathing like the humidity of a basement. That is why you see the comments of people in the Flint Live that feel more like old lions in a circus- they could do is make noise.

Poverty is the lack of choices and Flintonians have very few choices available, and being a democratic demagogic town, in the name of public good, Flintonians have less options than other places.  Schools are bad and waste children’s time. School designed in the industrial revolution to keep children out of the streets, pass them and graduated them to work in the factories, when reading or math was not a necessity. Schools tracked few children and that that is why Mr. Walling was selected to receive all the goods, he was going to college while the other kids NO.

So now, with an industry that is not a mono industry that controls all the sources, and a populations that is passive aggressive and that has learned to be caged in a corner, and a few businesses that want to continue making all the decisions and treating people like discarded items, we have a long way to go.

It seems very difficult for the few business to understand the we are all in this together and when the poverty of Flitnt get to them, they want to build gates like is happening at Kettering University and Hurley Hospital

What is so degrading about poverty is that carries a sense of a plague and nobody wants to be close to poverty just in case the hole eat them too.

But poverty and the lack of choices in Flint is eating all of us because like I say poverty is the lack of and in Flint we have lack of so many thing it “produces more “lack of.”

So I hope that makes you think, for to change Flint we need a new definition of poverty and a new acceptance that to change this town we need more than tracked bright kids (who are completely disconnected of poverty….they were the lucky one that scape the fate of the town), and charity and the good intentions of people that want to help the poor by making sure the poor continue being poor and not become an economic force…

Until them think in all they ways you also are poor, just because you were born in Flint.

Marta

The sky is falling, the sky is falling because a teenager was killed in Mott Park last weekend!!!!

 

…What I feared the most has happened, a chilled barely 14-year old teenager was killed in the park, in Mott Park, in my neighborhood.

And now, it is personal, this child has changed my life in ways I can not explain. Murder and sorrow is not far. It is not coming from the North, it is here is in front of my conscience…is it in my life.

The sorrow is making me things I never thought I will do like write to whomever, and say what I need to say because things need to change.

I do not know how and when, but I will do “whatever it takes” to move this mountain of inertia because no one more child need to die in my neighborhood to have a wake-up call.

Yes, I am writing to Kettering University president, and the board of trustees, and I care less about their egos what people will say because this child who I have never meet is making me to do this.

I have a child that is thirteen and the same day that the crime happened we were going to celebrate the opening of a play that he was acting…one was celebrated the other was alone and without protection …and that is why violence touched him and took his life…what an irony…his name means PRICELESS, inestimable worth…can he become my partner to change things in Flint? It seems so,

Until next time, please care for the children in Flint…and please help me.

If Antonio was alive, he would have told us what is necessary to bring love back in Flint.

Marta

There is plenty of information about the crime in http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2012/06/14-year-old_boy_shot_and_kille.html, and now that he is gone, we will continue reflecting on what does mean for me, my children, my neighborhood, and Flint.

Thanks

The Mott Park Changing Neighborhood is Affecting not Only African American Families. It is Ruining the College Experience for Kettering University Students Too.

As you know, I have been in the quest to educate, to open a dialogue, to inspire good change in a “changing neighborhood –words that by themselves are charged negative connotations.”

And yet, the only thing I have been able to obtain is frustration from part of my neighbors (Mott park Facebook) and cold silence from the part of leadership in Flint, or insulting bogus solutions by arrogant ignorant leaders.

And so, in this blog I would present to you the evidence of how the process of disinvestment in a neighborhood- Mott Park affect children, seniors and Kettering University students that live in our neighborhood.

There is nothing more convincing than images. Imagine for a moment you are a new comer-the kid that come to Kettering University from the most affluent families in Michigan (tuition around 30.000 a year-) and live in the FIJI fraternity. You have two options: walk two blocks between trash and danger to Kettering Buildings  (hoping that Kettering Security is doing their job), OR USE YOUR CAR…

Do you like it? Will you send your son here? The pictures you have seen cover the intersection of Flushing and Dupont Avenue which is the unspoken racial boundary between blacks and whites and if you are white and come to work or study at Kettering somebody will tell you at some point not to go beyond Flushing. On one side of that intersection, it is a beautiful park- Ballenger park which is used only by blacks young men, on the other side is the FIJI fraternities where most of the white rich kids play behind a fenced lawn.

To come to Kettering, the students from FIJI have to walk thru Dupont Avenue that is in total disrepair. Dupont Avenue is experiencing the last stages of a changing neighborhood. It has gone already thru African American families moving in (crossing the Flushing boundary) white families moving out, flippers moving in to make a killer.., rental owners renting to poor people without caring for the homes-yes they rent to poor people who cares, Kettering university students rentals and, finally when the houses can not take more abuse, they are foreclosed or abandoned.

As you could see, some of the houses have been stripped of their dignity and are ignored by the leadership in the city, Kettering University, and the Foundations (who are a parallel government in itself in Flint).

On both ends of the boulevard, rest two beautiful ideas gone sour because the issues-of-race-and-class was excluded from the equation when designing it. Now the bushes are wind catchers of litters and plea from being taken care. Yet, nobody does it because in a changing neighborhood they are also in the process of disinvestment- nobody care for them ( a subject we will cover in the future  blogs of the habit of foundations to never evaluate the effectiveness of their projects pass the pictures of the inaugural day).

As the neighborhood has been progressively deteriorating, and the letters to officials have not bear results, I moved to the next step in re-building the connections in the neighborhood. I go around every Sunday afternoon, clean the streets, take care of medians, maintain foreclosure homes, question teenagers.

As the families that used to live on Dupont Avenue have moved out because the area has deteriorated,  in its place an economy of crime and drug dealing has flourished. The reasons are: The rental properties are owned by people who care only about the money it receives monthly and have little regard who they are renting. Some of the rentals owners do not live in Flint either, and so have contract companies that take care…of their properties.

When the cat’s away, the mice will play

(although the play of this teenagers because they are part of gang groups they play with guns and kill each other destroying neighborhoods)

For drug dealers, that is a perfect location: There is a dark park around the block at night- Ballenger Park, there are abandoned houses few people will be checking on their transactions, they have rich clients next to – the Hurley Hospital, and the  highway, they have Flint Police officers and Kettering security officers that do not go to that area much, they have two liquor stores in the vicinity to conduct business too, and allies around Dupont and Flushing to do the same.

Why this things continue happening if it is obvious that the intervention or measures of control are not working?

Because when things become taboo, it is difficult to break their power and they stay breathing sickness in a neighborhood for a long time. Nobody want to say…well we have an issue of race and class..What are we planning to do?

1)   Kettering  University management strategy has been to pretend we do not have problems trying to move the students out of the corner of Flushing and Dupont Avenue

2)   The city has been demolishing houses on Flushing (at a very expensive cost to tax payers),

3)    Police like ER has been working on after the fact crime and not prevention. In Flint we do not like community policing because police need to walk not drive in their monster cars…they need to relate to people…and that is difficult to do.

Can we do something? Yes, off course. The most important thing is that we sit around a table and discuss the possible solutions to our challenges of race and poverty and class. The silence and the taboo is reinforcing the walls of segregations and fueling the mistrust of students (rich) toward the locals (poor) while keeping in place the prejudge that black are bad and white are goods.

Around 3 pm on Sunday afternoon- yesterday while the white young adults- Kettering University students were playing on their side  and the blacks and poor were playing on Ballenger park (a big group of young adults black men were playing basketball), there was a Flint Police Patrol car parked on the side walk of the lecture building in aisle state position.

Kettering University in respond of the pressure of worried parents of rich children that attend the university is paying for the salaries of five Flint Police officer. Those five police officers are supposedly to monitor the area, and yet it does not happen.

Why is so obvious to me that the police cars should have been around the park or the intersection of Flushing and Ballenger and not University Boulevard on a Sunday afternoon around 3pm where nothing happen in campus- the buildings are closed?

It is because looking at something does not equal that we are seeing the same thing.  I see the neighborhood as a web of relationships and that relationships affect everything. I see prevention and education on how to live in a neighborhood as part of what police should do.

Police, and leaders in this community do not respect community policing as a viable solution to solve the problem of violence in Flint not matter how much data I have shared with leaders via letters and Mott Park Facebook.

I know it works, as I walk around Mott Park cleaning places,  talking to students, putting order, maintaining foreclosed homes, taking signs from posts, and engaging teenagers, I am doing community policing. I already know where the prostitute live and which house has problems, but that for another blog.

If we know that the majority of basketball hoops have been taken from the city of Flint because they are magnets of drug dealing and violent confrontation of gang groups. If we know that poor African American young men solve their disagreements with shootings and fighting, and we know that close to Ballenger park there are two liquor stores that sell hard liquor (the bottles I continue collecting) which are fuels for violence, and If we know that in front of that park there are the rich kids of Kettering university, wouldn’t be more effective to keep an eye on that situation instead of pretending that we do not have violence bubbling in our town?

Who cares if a black poor kid dies? That is Flint

For us, in Flint crime is about prosecuting the young men, not preventing and for rich kids is pretending that we do not have problems…after all, in few years the rich kids from Kettering University will fly away from Flint,

the place where the world Change has a terrible negative connotations…

….As I break into conversation with young people in Mott Park, I ask them…do you like Flint?  So, I ask you too..do you like Flint the way it is?

Until next time follow me in this adventure to change this little part of Flint- Mott Park

for the benefit of all children and rich and poor kids.

With all the challenges, enjoy Flint as we do…

The same day, few hours later, and few blocks from Ballenger and Flushing Rd., I was at the Kettering University pool with my children and a neighbor friend of my son. And there were three Chinese students playing in the water too. I was wondering about them and Flint…and violence and if they will be victims or not….