Here are a few stories of creativity I’ve read recently…

1. With all the foreclosures there are a lot of neighborhoods with houses with rather unpleasant plywood covering the doors and windows. An artist in Chicago took advantage of the opportunity and began offering his boarding contract services with a twist. Basically he puts boards on windows, but he paints the boards to look like windows and doors, rather then just boring plywood. He’s done it to a few houses in my part of the city and is hoping to get a big city contract. I’d sure like to see more art in the neighborhood. –Star Tribune
2. There’s this guy Steve Lambert, who is pretty awesome. He runs the Anti-Advertising Agency. They are responsible for stuff like PeopleProducts123, and this video (which I’ve shown before)
   
   There’s a great interview with Steve in Gelf mag.
3. And the last one is this pastor from Detroit named Harvey Carey. He spoke at Sanctuary Covenant recently and he mentioned one of their creative activities. The men of the church go camping every summer. They get their tents and lanterns and they set up in front of the drug houses in the neighborhood. They hangout, cook s’mores and basically keep any business from happening. And when they drug dealers move out to a new location, the church camp out moves with them. He said they’ve shut down 15 drug houses that way in the past few years.

We need more creative stories.

My wife had this brilliant thought the other day (this occurs most days, the really brilliance is when my brain stays focused long enough to remember it): “If the government is just giving away money with this Economic Stimulus package thing, then why not at least give it to the people it was once promised to.” Brilliant.

Okay, so I know it’s a little late for the suggestion, but it’s worth dreaming about. The government is giving $600 to every person who made over $3000 and filed their taxes this year. Now, I don’t think it would right years of slavery and oppression, but it seems like it would be a small gesture in the right direction.

I believe the Economic Stimulus is a $168 billion bill, and at the 2005 census there were 40 million Black and Native People’s living in the USA. If you just split the money that way you’d have $4200 per person, and that included children.

It’s a shame that the term, “40 Acres and a Mule“, instead of being a honest attempt to right the terrible injustices of our history, is just one more indication of how the people of this country have been oppressed and mistreated. It was another unkept promise, one of many from the past and just another of the many to this day. I know this one might spark some controversy too, but I had to throw it out there.

Okay, this isn’t necessarily my solution, just the most recent thing I’ve come up with, but it would take a LOT of effort for it to happen, and there are probably a great many problems to it as well (my more conservative brethren can speak up now). But, here’s my idea.
I think urban centers that have experienced the negative affects of absentee landlords (many slum lords) and now the recent foreclosure crisis, should make homesteading mandatory in those neighborhoods. What homesteading means is that a home must be owner occupied, they must live there. I slightly looser option would be that all owners of property in that zip code or neighborhood must live in the same neighborhood. Basically, this would mean you can only own property in the neighborhood if you lived in the neighborhood.
One of the primary things I believe this will do is create a vested interest in the community. Many of our problems today from slum lords to sweatshops exist because we are able to distance ourselves from the injustices we often passively (or actively) contribute to and participate in. Requiring all owners of pieces of a community to actually be a part of that community would create geographic proximity that would build awareness and sensitivity to the problems within that community.
As it relates to the foreclosure problems currently, it would force banks to liquidate the properties in a community, rather than being able to sit on vacant houses in hopes of riding out the low parts of the real estate trend. And, those properties would then be available to people who are interested in living in that particular community and not a wealthy investor who is interested in the bottom line rather then the interest of the people in the community. This would more then likely drop the value of the property in a neighborhood considerably, since those interested in purchasing and living in the neighborhood might not have the financial means to offer what the previous market values might have been. However, the benefits of increased homeownership in a community, vested interest, and the possibility for individuals to build equity would far outweigh the loss in property value.
It seems this sort of thing has been done in a few cities before, but the goal was more for a sort of ‘urban renewal’ that brought middle and upper class folks back into cities. It in effect pushed the people of the neighborhood out and basically gentrified the neighborhood to the degree that the original people of the community were no longer there. I think efforts toward this sort of required homesteading would need to be done sooner in a city facing a lot of abandon and foreclosed houses, so that the original community isn’t displaced.

I haven’t thought through all the ins and outs but it seems like, with the right planning, it could be a very beneficial solution to many urban neighborhoods.