Day: May 6, 2008

Once a year I travel back to ye olde homestead in Florida to see the folks (Mom, Dad, Sis, Bro-n-Law, kids, and other assorted family members). It is also a chance to see the old neighborhood, as Mom lives in the same house we kids grew up in. And this neighborhood is a poor/working class neighborhood with a smattering of lower-middle class households.
So these annual visits I do notice little changes. Such as there was this horrid almost 35-40 degree dip in the center of the road a few blocks up that had been that way for decades and getting worse, got repaved. So I notice where there is new construction or renewal, in my mom’s area of town, none. She told me even her pastor (church is about a mile away) made mention that there isn’t going to be any investment in that area, and in fact there is disinvestment. People are just leaving the houses to rot and fall in under the weight of Nature reclaiming the space.
Now compare that with my own neighborhood in Shaw, I see what’s happening back in Florida as the anti-gentrification model. No investment, no rebuilding, rows and streets of houses completely abandoned, empty, slowly demolished by the elements. People do keep up their yards by mowing them, if there is grass growing, but that’s it. Houses sag, there are rusty tin roofs on others. It isn’t all bad, but there is a lot of bad to notice.
I don’t know about crime, I just know I grew up with a rooming house of ill-repute diagonally across the street we called Pete’s house. And now, in addition to Pete’s house, Mom says, the house next door had dope dealing, prostitution and regular police visits, once the matriarch died. People who have other options to live somewhere else, do. The older folks stay, but the younger ones with means move out. About a 20 minute drive away, kinda out. Like what my half sister, some of my childhood friends, and cousins did. Come to think of it, they left town altogether.