Resilience for All by Barbara Wilson

Author:Barbara Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press/Center for Resource Economics, Washington, DC

And second, the postwar redevelopment agenda, which supported suburban homeownership, highway development, and “blight” removal in the urban core, lobotomized many of the thriving economic centers in Detroit. Like many other cities, Detroit formally adopted segregationist policies for public housing development, which concentrated people of color in poverty-stricken areas where the projects became “warehouses of despair.”5 As psychiatrist and urbanist Mindy Fullilove describes in Urban Alchemy, the racial segregation or “sorting out” of a city is a slow and pernicious process: “The sorting process is not a once-and-for-all process, but rather a repetitive process that continually relocates people, making finer and finer distinctions among them.” As a medical professional, Fullilove is concerned with the disastrous health impacts of the sorting process. She adds, “when the American nation wrote inequality into the US Constitution and then intensified that division with a time series of segregation, urban renewal, highway construction, planned shrinkage, and other practices that fractured our cities, it both warped the mind of the polity and shattered its body.”6 Detroit encapsulates that history all too well.

Impact leader James Ribbron both works as the director for Zoning Appeals with the City of Detroit and serves on this committee as a private citizen. He described how this issue manifests and perpetuates itself in Detroit by using his own neighborhood: I stay Far East in Detroit on the border of Grosse Point and Harper Woods. Grosse Point is probably one of the richest zip codes in this area or the nation, and Harper Woods is middle class. On the Detroit side, there is no decent grocery store, but there are 26 marijuana clinics within walking distance of my house, five liquor stores, and a bunch of car repair shops. I have resources to spend, but I cannot spend them in my own community. I can go on Amazon and I can spend money all day. That does not do anything for my community. So, it is demoralizing to have to walk through my community and see this everyday. It’s no wonder why I cannot convince my daughter to stay here. She keeps saying “Well, why don’t you move?” In her head, you can move from this stuff. I’m still here. That’s a challenge. I can’t get her to see the hope, because what she sees everyday is devastation.7

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.