Moving From a “Problem-solving” to an “Asset-connecting” Mindset, Part II: Seniors

As measured by the 2012 census, 8.1% of neighbors in Dayton’s Bluff are persons over 65 years of age. When you add 55-65, that percentage climbs to 16.2%. That’s a lot of knowledge, wisdom, and experience among us. Are we harnessing those assets?

You may know a senior neighbors. You may have helped support our block nurse program that helps seniors stay independent in their homes.* You may have been curious about  what our Community Organizer Karin DuPaul cites as the three senior housing facilities in Dayton’s Bluff: Cerenity near Mounds Park; Parkway Gardens senior apartments on Old Hudson; and the highrise at 1300 Wilson. Also in the works: A revamped assisted living and Alzheimer’s care facility on 7th Street.

While I know where many seniors live, I’ve gotten a sense of disconnection from my senior neighbors. My son doesn’t have grandparents close by, and I’ve often brought him to the East YMCA to interact with seniors, even if only for a few moments. Every time we pass Parkway Gardens senior apartments, he begs to go visit the residents. But there’s this sense in me–however accurate or misguided–that I’m just not welcome there…that I’d somehow be a burden or an interloper.

As I look around and notice the general isolation that’s so endemic to our culture, I’m most haunted by the opportunities we all miss when we don’t interact daily with our senior neighbors. How might Dayton’s Bluff draw in and mobilize seniors’ gifts and dreams? How might we make more connections among us all?

Drawing again from the ABCD Institute’s Building Communities from the Inside Out, here’s a list of what some Chicagoland communities have been up to:

• A group of seniors worked with their neighborhood association to secure a loan from a local community development credit union in order to open a consignment shop administrated and staffed entirely by seniors.
• A nonprofit organization connects retired senior business executives with a wide variety of nonprofit groups in the city as part of an Executive Service Corps.
• A group of 10 to 12 trained seniors make telephone calls to get people involved in community activities at the Pilsen Neighborhood Community Council.
• A group of seniors that forms the Eastside Historical Society works for the local high school in space provided by the park system in developing a museum which documents the history of four Chicago neighborhoods.
• At the Lincoln Park Senior Center, a group of seniors presents skits, songs, historical presentations, and cooks southern-style food at local churches, synagogues, and other senior centers during Black History Month.
• The Kelly Library works together with the president of the local historical society to collect oral histories from senior citizens with the purpose of compiling a book that will chronicle the history of the neighborhood.
• Through the Illinois Intergenerational Project at Stateway Gardens Library, seniors from the Chicago Housing Authority senior building meet with fourth-graders from a local school once a week to conduct interviews with each other and as a result developed oral histories and act out skits based on the seniors’ lives.
• A local drugstore chain offers discounted prescriptions to seniors and works with medical school doctors and the seniors group in the community in order to provide educational programs at local churches on medications and their proper usage.

Could we do any of that here? What would it take? What might the community gain? I invite comment!

*If you want to support the Living at Home Block Nurse Program, they’ve got a fundraiser coming up on Saturday, April 21 at First Lutheran Church. Cost is $12-15 per person, and there’ll be music and prizes.

Why do you love the neighborhood? Part I, Housing

I was asked the other day why I love Dayton’s Bluff so much…and I didn’t know what to say.

I do love this neighborhood–deep in my gut. I have the kind of love for it like I do for my family and the landscape of my youth. I try to get my friends and colleagues to move here all the time. I know it as well as anyone who’s lived here nine years can. I know it better on paper than most statisticians. I get jealous every time another neighborhood gets yet another perk or service.

…So why can’t I explain why?

I used to say this kind of “cookie-cutter” phrase: “Well, we’ve got the best housing stock in the city, and it’s so diverse,” or more occasionally, “Our elementary school has won awards; it’s a hidden jewel.”

But the more I live here, the more I realize the flaws in my earlier naivete’.

When it comes to housing, I now know that Dayton’s Bluff may well be in the midst of a quiet but serious housing and land-ownership war. We’ve got the challenges other neighborhoods do: an increasing number of renter-occupied households with few gathering spaces to build community; absentee landlords; abandoned and vacant properties; and absentee landowners who lost their shirts in the real estate crisis, but refuse to sell their properties at a reasonable price for redevelopment. But here in our neighborhood, there’s more fuel for that fire. All of St. Paul has the classic problem of gentrification versus affordability, but here, it’s all complicated by an historic district designation across a large swath of the neighborhood. We’ve got a system that not only pits neighbor against neighbor on code enforcement, but also on historic accuracy of their exterior projects.

So post-housing crisis, here’s what you might experience in a small area of Dayton’s Bluff:

• One neighbor puts up his house on a short sale for $40k on what, even in this market, should be a $100k home.
• Across the street, another neighbor spends nearly $20k on a required redesign and rebuild of their unsafe and dilapidated historic porch
• Nearby, an absentee landlord from Chicago does a quick weekend tear-off of an unsafe and dilapidated historic porch, incurring modest fines
• Down a block, renters looking for quality affordable housing can’t find a ready-to-occupy, well-kept, and reasonably priced property worth raising their kids in–despite over 8 units sitting empty.
• The remaining homeowners with conventional loans grow angrier and angrier at their inability to refinance on their underwater mortgages, unable and unwilling to improve their properties.
• On the corner sits the abandoned shell of a once-beautiful historic home for which no one will take responsibility.

Is that a pretty good summation? Anything I missed?

So whom can we expect to help us? Nonprofits fight quietly over the dwindling funds that shift focus with what’s hot every year. State and federal governments can’t seem to get anything done. The city–in desperate need of funding after horrible disinvestment by the state–is desperate for fines and fees, and is unable to make the purchases they once did to buy and rehab properties. Banks are hoarding their monies waiting for the other shoe to drop, biding their time and doing as little as legally possible to upkeep their reclaimed properties.

Who’s left?

Us.

After nine years in this neighborhood, I think I finally know what I love: the type of person who chooses to live here. In general, they want a low-crime lifestyle without the expense of an upscale strip mall nearby. They’re rugged. They think on their feet. They generally come from working-class, immigrant, or union roots–or are at least attached deeply to them. They love at least the idea of diversity (more on that later). And these old houses and their potential is what makes a lot of them sing. Even if they’ve never touched a saw, new homeowners around here take passion in learning how to care for these old places. And all the renters I’ve talked to love the historic character of their apartments and want to be a part of shepherding them on.

I want to know what is already here–in the gifts, talents, passions, and purses of my people–that could help us to help ourselves. Another reason I’m so crazy about asset-mapping.

What are your ideas? How could we mobilize what we already have to improve this housing mess?

Coming: Part II, Diversity

Slow-going…But a lot coming?

So there’s a lot of planning going on in Dayton’s Bluff and the Near-eastside at the moment…

• The Eastside Co-op working group is setting up their governance structure and raising funds for site exploration.
• The Dayton’s Bluff Community Council is working with the city and the Dayton’s Bluff Business Association on the “Make it Happen on 7th” initiative to develop our business district.
• In addition, the DBCC is moving forward with DB-CAN to increase community engagement in the neighborhood, using community listening sessions and asset-based development tools.
• Gateway 94 has recently received more funds from the Counties Transit Improvement Board to finish their transit study which may bring light-rail or bus rapid-transit to 7th St.
• The East Side Prosperity Campaign is sponsoring an “Engage East Side” initiative to get community members involved in improving transit on the East Side.
• Merrick Community Center has a lovely design for a brand-new facility on Railroad Island, with community meeting space and classrooms for healthy-lifestyle programming in the works.
• MnDOT has received the go-ahead for lane expansion on I-94 near Mounds Boulevard through the Statewide Transportation Improvement Program (STIP), with construction to begin in spring of 2015.
• The Lower Phalen Creek Project is getting traction with their dream of connecting the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary to the Mississippi River with a bike/pedestrian bridge.
• Metro State University is expanding, and they’ve got big plans for a parking garage and student union to take up the entire block bound by 6th, Maria, 7th, and Bates.
• Youth in Transition, a group for teens leaving the gang-lifestyle, is working on developing a recording studio with an artist-in-residence at Dayton’s Bluff Rec Center.
• My church, Imago Dei, is developing its mission statement and getting ready to dirty our sandals in the neighborhood as a partner with DB-CAN.
• First Lutheran is working in concert with their new missional church partner, Shobi’s Table, to develop indigenous leaders from their old “Love Grows Here” Thursday-night ministry.
• Might there be a move in the works for the DBCC offices, including a welcome center for the neighborhood?
• I’ve heard rumors of a new restaurant and cafe…

Seems like a lot of planning is going on in our little part of the world. It does make one impatient for action, though. So many of us need to see change in order to believe it. Planning and networking can be exhausting!

What are you involved in? What else is out there? What’s exciting to you right now?