Neighborhood Integrity

1/22/10 What's wrong with open space?

If you are active in the crime watch group in your area, you have heard a DPD officer caution you to be alert for strangers hanging around your neighborhood. Pretty sensible advice, but sensibility takes a back seat to the latest neighborhood-busting fad -- community gardens.

Jim Schutze seems ambivalent about the issue, except he seems sure any neighbors opposing a community garden are closet racists, even if they have valid concerns.

Last week I attended a community meeting in East Dallas where an angry crowd of middle-class homeowners denounced community gardeners as a dangerous, invasive horde of "foreigners" and "maids" seeking to destroy the tranquility of their peaceful neighborhood.

... In the days before the meeting, I had spoken with one of those adjoining property owners, Daniel P. Callahan, an attorney, so I was prepared in advance for his rhetoric at the meeting. When Mr. Callahan speaks of an invasion of his neighborhood by community gardening hordes, one can't help hearing Winston Churchill ("We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds...").

He told me on the phone, "I will do anything I can to stop it from happening. I hope litigation is not necessary."

At the community meeting in the clubhouse at Winfrey Point on White Rock Lake, Callahan rose from the floor to warn against the garden in similarly stentorian tones: "If you try to come into our neighborhood, we will try to stop you every way we can. It will be long and unpleasant."

He brought with him a well-organized and articulate contingent of at least three dozen residents of his neighborhood, a subdivision of approximately 90 homes called "Maplewood," immediately surrounding the proposed site. They were completely united in their opposition to the garden and far outnumbered the proponents, who come from the larger surrounding area generally called Lakewood.

In what some of the Maplewoodites had to say, I heard a certain unfortunate tone. People expressed concerns that a garden would bring in "foreign traffic" and "maids." ...

If you have vacant, city-owned land near your neighborhood, and you bought your home in part because of its proximity to that vacant land, you might not want it dug up and chopped up to be used as a gathering place for people who don't live in your neighborhood. You don't know them or where they live. If you were going to case a neighborhood to see who worked away from home during the day, what better cover than a shovel or digging tool and a big hat to camouflage yourself?

With home burglaries a big percentage of the city's crime rate, you can't blame a community for not wanting strangers hanging around their homes. You can't be home 24/7.

It's not just about not wanting strangers scoping out your house or your neighbor's house. It's about personal security and protecting your family. What if the guy digging in the community garden you don't want near your home has been arrested for assault by our criminal loving DA chose not to prosecute?

And, it's not just about not wanting strangers (dangerous or otherwise) near your neighborhood. Why do we have to screw up every open space in the city?

When I bought my house in 2002, we had a lovely park nearby (between Webb Chapel and Marsh), with a creek running through it. People walked their dogs down there. Families used the covered tables for birthday parties and cookouts. Now, it's fenced off and all but inaccessible to nearby residents. All we have now for green space are our own yards.

It's worse for neighborhoods when small parks/green space near their homes get overrun by soccer clubs that take up all area parking spaces and leave beer cans and other debris behind for others and/or city crews to clean up. Not to mention the loss of the enjoyment of a quiet, open green space.

Why can't a small park in the middle of a stable neighborhood be left alone and belong to that particular community? Why can't it be a gathering place for that particular community? A place where the local children can play without their parents' guarding off dangerous strangers?

Why does every open space have to be used as a sports field? Why do soccer enthusiasts' wants take precedence over someone who wants a nice open place to sit and read or play with their dog?

Why do strangers' desires to grow stuff mean that an entire neighborhood will lose the use of land they want to remain open green space?

... The garden proposed at last week's community meeting would be created on 2.4 acres of vacant, city-owned land two blocks west of White Rock Lake, bounded by an abandoned railroad right-of-way on its longest border, a tree-walled alley on another side and four property-owners on the other two sides.

... Perfectly reasonable people from Maplewood also spoke at the meeting with reasonable arguments for not wanting anybody to mess with the vacant land in their midst.

Liam Gartside, a Maplewood resident, pointed out a fundamental difference between creating a garden on land that is basically unused by anyone?like the successful Lake Highlands Community Garden created on a disused parking lot behind an old armory?and trying to convert land people already value for something else into a garden.

"On the one hand," he said, "you're making something out of nothing. In this case you're making something out of something."

... "It [the proposed site] has been in the condition that it's in since we all moved there," he told me on the phone. "I have lived there for over 20 years. All three of my kids have had soccer practices in that park. I taught a dog I used to have who has since passed away how to catch Frisbees there."

... It's not their land. They know that. By the way, it's also not a park. Calling it a park is a bit of a ploy. It is actually vacant, city-owned land administered by the Park and Recreation Department, but not a designated park. As such it belongs to everybody in the city. But the people in the immediate little neighborhood around it have a love for this corner of green space, and they're not going to give it up without a fight.

... Here is where it all comes out at the bottom of the page. Nothing is worth more to the city than cohesive neighborhoods whose occupants feel deeply invested, spiritually as well as financially, in their own little neck of the woods. This one, Maplewood, comes across as just that type of place. It would be a huge mistake to treat this neighborhood poorly and risk running people off.

But the people behind the proposed garden, from organic gardening expert Howard Garrett to neighborhood activist Kimberly Haley-Coleman, are serious thinkers and opinion-makers, wedded to a fundamental, burgeoning cause springing to life across our entire society.

It's bigger than food. It's a retrenchment from the techno-industrial culture of cancer and obesity-causing consumerism, a return to a deeper and broader sense of community and social connectedness.

... Mick Weisberg, a Maplewood resident, told me that the presence of gardeners from outside the subdivision, "would completely disrupt the neighborhood and completely destroy the privacy, which is what the neighborhood is about."

And guess what? I get it. I know where that fear comes from. I live in an area that was a lot more dicey than this one when we moved in 25 years ago. We had crack addicts and whorehouses a block away. For most of recent history, the key to survival in the urban forest has been building a good fortress. ...

Here is where Jim gets off his usual liberal rocking pony, and comes to the core truth of the battle. Allowing a fad to destroy a cohesive neighborhood is just plain wrong. Things like "community gardens" are hip and happening until the next fad comes along. Neighborhoods that have to survive next to a fad, like community gardens and unsupervised soccer fields where there was once a quiet pocket park -- don't always survive.

People living in the city need quiet, open green spaces where they can just sit and be still.

Back in the early 90's when I was on the Plan Commission, I annoyed a lot of apartment developers because I kept demanding they provide internal green space for their tenants and their children to hang out or play. That was when apartments could ban children. The complexes were built for singles and adults. Now, the apartment owners rent those little shoe boxes to families. There are no play areas, no gathering areas. Rather than tear up existing green space to build "community gardens", why not make apartment owners tear up a few units to create a green space just for the enjoyment of their tenants. Why destroy one neighborhood like Maplewood, when an apartment owner could create a community garden or green space inside their own project? Digging in a community garden near your apartment might keep a kid out of a gang.

Not every kid is athletic or wants to play team sports, but almost all open areas in the city are chopped up into soccer fields or for other other sports. Now, the current fad of the month will take what little green space is left and chop it up for community gardens.

The phrase "community garden" is an oxymoron because having a bunch of outsiders take over a neighborhood's green space destroys that neighborhood's sense of community. The best defense against crime in this city are organized neighborhoods where people know each other and who belongs and who doesn't.

As Jim Schutze says: Nothing is worth more to the city than cohesive neighborhoods whose occupants feel deeply invested, spiritually as well as financially, in their own little neck of the woods.