The Great Divide: Reaction Silence Cynics Through Grass-Roots Activism Neighborhood Councils Offer Opportunity For Progress
When a friend introduced me to her as a neighborhood activist, Mona Locke, who was campaigning for her husband, then-candidate Gary Locke, jokingly said to me, “You let your friends call you that!”
I know exactly what she meant. Many view neighborhood activists as reactionary whiners - until it is their turn to react to a freeway being sited in their neighborhood, or a huge city maintenance facility being planned in their back yard, or the zoning change that allows a large apartment complex across the street.
Neighborhoods are where we all live and where that fuzzy term “quality of life” is anchored.
The function of government is primarily to protect public health and safety. This includes land-use planning, developing and maintaining transportation systems, ensuring safe water supplies, sewage and waste treatment and providing police protection and a criminal justice system.
These are expensive items. These systems are in continual need of maintenance, expansion and modernization. They require experienced and highly trained people. The well-being of these systems reflects our social values beyond their immediate function.
Will we protect the aquifer by limiting the land use above it?
Will the streets of our older neighborhoods become freeways to new development?
Will we create safe places for all our children to discover their place in our community, or will we build more jails to house those we failed?
How can a community deeply in debt, with a diminishing tax base and 20 percent of its population living in poverty find the resources to protect and improve these systems? The psychology of poverty permeates our thought process as we continually say “no” to increased expenditures.
We notice cracks in the facade of well-being in the neighborhoods. Daily we experience traffic congestion, unrepaired streets, parks less well maintained, lack of code enforcement, increasing crime and the lingering fear that comes with it. Dying urban forests are not replaced. Buildings are abandoned. Police response time grows longer and is more selective. We see our children working full time and unable to pay rent, much less have health insurance or make a car payment.
Government by itself seems unable to solve these problems. Traditional alliances with the business community have not been able to leverage the resources necessary to bring about change. As a community we need to expand the partnerships required for solving our problems in a new way.
Recently the city of Spokane created a program of neighborhood councils. This has the potential to create a new wheel of citizen involvement with a far different outcome than cynicism.
The future is ours to define if we are willing to do the work. Otherwise the neighborhoods will be left to react in isolation to whatever befalls them.
MEMO: Sheila Collins, co-owner of a catering business, is a neighborhood activist in historic Cannon’s Addition.