Category: Uncategorized

3 months of unpaid rent $1,500
20 some odd phone calls to Canada charged to your phone, $90
Fee to change your phone number to evade creditors, $30
“Loan” to cover U-haul rental, $500
Gas to get out of DC metro area, $50
Sending your deadbeat roommate off to Wisconsin to mooch off of someone else and getting your house/life back, priceless

Not about me, or any of my former Shaw roommates, but a good friend who has finally got her chronically unemployed roommate out of the house. Read this story and take heed all ye who have roommates or will get roommates or boarders.
So lets call my friend Liz, Liz and her now ex-roommie, Kay. Liz and Kay meet through a common geeky interest group and because the common geeky interest group throws parties that run late, Kay and other geeks would wind up on Liz’s couch often. One day, Kay asked to stay on Liz’s couch for a ‘couple of weeks’ until she could get a job so she could pay for the last semester of college at [expensive private NW DC university]. Long story short Kay was a financial disaster, her parents were bankrupt, she couldn’t pay most of her bills and was hounded by creditors, she was sick and health care expensive, and despite nearly finishing at a top flight school lacked any sort of financial common sense. It didn’t help that she had several girlfriends out of state (read: long long-distance phone calls), one being unemployed and unable to support her end of the relationship financially. Kay had a thing for women who were also financially incompetent.
What did this have to do with Liz, who had a thing for locals with decent savings accounts?
When Kay couldn’t pay for those long distance calls and the phone bill had to get paid, Liz paid for it.
When Kay wanted to visit out of state/ country lovers, who did she ‘borrow’ money from? Liz.
When Kay couldn’t pay her credit card bills and they started hounding her for money, who had to talk to the creditors ’cause she was silly enough to answer her own phone? Liz.
When Kay needed medication for her depression, who got it for her? Liz.
Why? Cause you live in the same unit with a person it is hard to not be impacted by their life, their depression and girlfriends. And they KNOW how much money you have and when you are the only responsible adult in the room, apparently you are expected to pay the tab for everything.

Liz is now swearing she will screen future roommates.

Parking.
Gotta think about parking.
Right now you have it.
But think of a future, of greater economic development attracting people with cars, and by golly, they’ll want to park them, in front of your house.
I’m not poo-pooing economic development, just thinking about the type of development I’d like to see. What I’d like to see is something that serves the people who already live here and can walk or bike to a business.
What got me thinking about parking, which doesn’t happen often as I don’t have a car, was trying to suggest a place to eat to friends with car. I know of a dozen places in Dupont and the western end of U Street that I’d like to go. But the problem is, where do you park the darned car. Is searching for a parking space for 20 minutes a sign that a neighborhood has made it? And once you’ve made it, is not being able to find a parking spot near your house worth it? Yes, some houses have parking in the back, but many don’t.
I’m just thinking out loud here, anyone have other thoughts?

I highly suspect the crackheads did it.
Anyway, for about a week a foreign blue recycle bin has been sitting on our block near the house of the crackhead, or the cheese woman, as B. has called her. Anyway I noticed the address on the bin and this Sunday wandered over to the Eckington… Yes, Eckington, crackheads done stole a recycle bin from Eckington and rolled it over to Truxton. Anyway, I wander over to Eckington and leave a note for the owners of the bin to come over to my block and pick it up. Well, after church the blue bin was gone. Today I need to find out who you report wayward grocery carts to at Giant, ’cause the damned crackheads left that on the sidewalk near their house too.

I emailed the local Flexcar rep about why our cars keep going bye-bye here in eastern Shaw/Truxton/LeDroit this is the response I got:

Hi,
I’m sorry that we’ve taken all of your cars. We are working now to
get more cars in that area. You can have everyone that wants the cars back
there to keep flooding my e-mail box with requests. I forward all of them
to my General Manager as well as the CEO. If I receive a huge amount of
feedback from that area they are more likely to put one there quicker.
Thank you for your continued patronage and thank you for the feedback. It’s
appreciated!

Heath Dean
Member Care
heath.dean @ flexcar.com
202-296-1359
Washington, DC

From Logan Circle’s listserv
DPW To Hold Two E-Cycling Events This Spring

Residents may bring computers and other items for environmentally safe
recycling on either April 23rd or May 14

As part of the District’s celebration of Earth Day, the DC Department
of Public Works and the Clean City Office are partnering with federal
agencies, George Washington University and the Dell Corporation to
sponsor a special electronics-recycling event on Saturday, April 23
from 9 am – 3 pm at Carter Barron Amphitheatre on 16th and Kennedy
Streets,
NW.

A second e-cycling event will be held in conjunction with DPW’s
regular
Household Hazardous Waste Drop-Off on Saturday, May 14th from 9 am –
3
pm, also at Carter Barron.

Old computers and accessories, office equipment, TVs and other
electronics comprise a rapidly growing segment of America’s waste
stream.
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, more than 3.2
million tons of electronic waste is laid to rest in landfills each
year.

Many types of electronics contain significant amounts of potentially
hazardous materials such as arsenic, lead and mercury. In the U.S. it
is estimated that approximately 70% of the toxic metals in landfills
comes
from discarded electronics. Pollution and the potential for adverse
health
affects from improper disposal of electronics are becoming serious
concerns.

Additionally, almost all of the materials in electronics -from
plastics
and glass to precious metals can be extracted and reused.

E-cycling your end-of-life electronics keeps their harmful components
out of landfills and supports the recovery and reuse of valuable
materials.

Residents may bring televisions and audio-video equipment, cell
phones,
home office equipment, computers, computer parts and computer
components for
end-of-life disposal or recycling. All computer monitors and TV
screens must be intact – not cracked, punctured or shattered.

Peace and Blessings
Shireen Mitchell

In Print
This Old House made my day.
From the cover I see just another remodel your bathroom, blah, but several articles in there was something that made my heart go pitter patter. Green roofs. There were pictures of a beautiful Cap Cod with a sod covered roof.
I’ve been thinking of a green roof for the house. But I need to pay off the second mortgage before I can do anything with the house, and one of my hopes, is to have a rooftop garden with a green roof.

In The Backyard
You know I have the gardening bug when I rush home to strip out of my work clothes and into something more ratty, just to fool around with dirt. Yesterday was mix more dirt for containers day. I spent the whole evening mixing peat moss with manure and garden soil, tracking dirt through the house, and planting seed, and that was the best part of my day. I was hungry when I came home but my desire to go in the back and work on the garden trumped the hunger. I’d nibble at the pea shoot I trimmed back. I also took bites of the arugula and Bibb lettuce, and then took the trimmings and made a very tiny salad of them. Olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and freshly ground pepper, yummy.

So I’m coming home after a meeting on the Green line, sitting on the train, just listening to my music. For most of the ride my eyes do not focus on anything, and then I notice a familiar face. It’s W., a friend and ex-boss of one of my former roommates, who lives on the other side of New Jersey in Shaw. I disconnect my earphones and she comes over to sit and chat. We exit out the same station and we just talk and catch up all the way to her door. After I wave goodbye to her I start to think, if I drove alone to and from work, instead of taking public transit, I would have missed such a wonderful opportunity to connect with one of my neighbors.

About a week ago I got an email from a Paul Bakalite who lives in Brixton, a London neighborhood. He sent me an article he’d written about the gentrification going around him and possibly it will get published somewhere soon. Although it doesn’t reflect my point of view regarding gentrification, because I have certain ideas about property and other things, it is good to calmly hear other points of view…. or at least that’s what they taught me in grad school.
Brixton and Shaw have a lot in common. Both are neighborhoods in capitol cities. Both have a large population of people of African decent. Both experienced riots that caused significant property damage and now both are dealing with gentrification.
My Brixton, particularly Brixton circa 1993, which was in between the 1991 riot and the 1995 riot, was an escape from the Central London areas I worked in for a Summer. I would go there for the small open air food/veggie market, to get my hair done, and to wander over to the Tesco’s (think Giant). And I believe at the time there was talk about parts of Brixton getting posh, gentrified. In Paul’s Brixton, the gentrification is not just displacing people but an atmosphere, an openness, a spirit of the neighborhood that attracts people to it in the first place.
So I present part of Paul’s article:

How Brixton is now facing different division…
Paul Bakalite urges newer residents of Brixton to show some humility and Lambeth council to take more notice of the real needs of local people.

March 2005

While I’d acknowledge I was a more naive person when I washed up in Brixton the best part of twenty years ago, I was never like the upscale types who arrive here now. I didn’t tell the weed dealers, on my doorstep back then, to “get off my property”. I got to know them. They were there first. It was their street, and my neighbours’ – not mine.

I first came to live in Brixton in the late 1980s. Part of me craved excitement and freedom. It’s an interesting area, Brixton. But looking back I see now that what I really craved, and what I have found here, is acceptance and somewhere to belong. I am an articulate man (although not for obvious reasons: I didn’t go to a posh school or to university) and I am white. Even so, principally because I am gay, I know how prejudice can gnaw at a person’s sense of self-worth. Especially if they start on you early! Alot of people rejected by elsewhere have gravitated to Brixton over the years. Damaged people somehow drawn to find spiritual kinship amongst oppressed people perhaps? A place where you didn’t have to be either wealthy or conventional to live… to count…

Do you now?

There’s always been something special here, an atmosphere of acceptance and understanding that Brixton has because of it’s history, it’s peoples… and its troubles. There is cohesion across communities, of black, white and others. Cohesion across race and to a lesser extent, across class. And a rightful defiance of anyone who’d dare push Brixton people around. In Brixton the marginal and the outsiders could be insiders.

But this is under threat, from people who don’t even know that their own security and sense of entitlement gives them power – because they’ve always had it. And from systems biased in their favour. The cohesion I mention is delicate. It relies on mutual respect. Some of the newer residents just don’t get it.

Brixton’s current fashionability was largely built on the backs of black people and on the backs of poorer people. And arty, radical types helped glue it together. Many are left out of this fashionability now or have been forced out. (Not everyone is a home-owner or a career high-flyer). Brixton is being re-packaged and resold by and for a more conservative consumer. Poorer people can’t move to the neighbourhood anymore as they can’t afford to rent here. Dissident minds struggle to find brotherhood here. Residents who don’t fit in with recent conformity (and Brixton’s current fashionability is a form of conformism) can sometimes feel crushed by the demands of professionals who’ve read in a magazine that Brixton is hip, moved in recently and within months want everything their way. Brixton is an area these people would previously have never considered as a home. They may have no real affinity for it. They attempt (and will fail) to control it. They don’t engage with it.

Trendy bars and gated-developments do not a happy community make. Lots of existing locals find the new prosperity and venues excluding, expensive and irrelevant. And just boring too. Rapacious “market forces”, allowed precedence over pretty much anything of real worth today, ensure that the needs of the well-to-do, floating from style-bar to luxury apartment, are met. Those with the deepest pockets are first in the queue, while schools and sports facilities for everyone are often left to rot.

Paul Bakalite is environment champion for Coldharbour/Angel Working Group, Brixton

There is more to it, but as it hasn’t been published in print I would like Mr. Bakalite to have the opportunity to have it fully published in a newspaper or other such thing.

For a moment the alley was as busy as the front of the street. I was out in the backyard puttering over my plants, ’cause I like puttering. Mxn and her gang of family and friends were out moving things into the house, and yelling, ’cause she wouldn’t be herself if she didn’t yell at somebody. After the Mxn gang moved on into the house, a large truck came easing down the alley, and may have hit a fence as our alley is kinda skinny. I watched the truck for a while because in the past trucks would come through and dump things in the alley. Now that there are few backyards left open, that rarely happens now.
The guys in the truck kept peering over the fences and I asked them if they needed any help. Apparently they were looking for a particular house number, and well we no longer have house numbers on the alley side. So they asked people in Mxn’s house, nope. Then they brought out the people in the monstrosity of a house, they had just moved in and were not really sure what their house number was.
I lost interest in the search for the right house number when IT appeared. He popped out around about the same time as the neighbors on his other side came out. He greeted his neighbors, then me and we got to talking. So for about 5 minutes there was all this chatter over the fences, the truckers, the new people, the neighbors and of course, Mxn yelling.
Can’t get this in the ‘burbs.

From the TC Dispatcher:
Friday’s TC Happy Hour was fantastic. Over 30 people attended. It was great to
meet so many of you. If you couldn’t make it…don’t fret. Several locations
were discussed for another HH some time mid-May.

**

Donna B. suggested we re-attempt gathering pet owners in the park at First and
Florida, NW. With nice weather and daylight on our side…I say let’s do it!

Bring your dog, cat, ferret… whatever and let’s meet between 6 and 6:30ish.
Don’t have a pet? No worries. I got a couple to spare.

Truxton/Florida Park is centrally located to Bloomingdale, Eckington and Truxton
Circle…so PLEASE pass this on to your neighbors.

See you tonight.

Scott