October 2013 wasn’t the first time the Decatur, Ga., City Commission heard pleas from residents of the gentrifying Oakhurst neighborhood to halt the disintegration of their community. In February 2003 another group of Oakhurst residents asked the City Commission to “have their backs.”
Gentrification is global. Decatur, Ga., resident Ted Baumann compares and contrasts gentrification and the politics of race and class in his adopted Georgia city and in a post-Apartheid South African suburb in a new two-part National Council on Public History post. From the History@Work post, “Race, politics, and property: Two cases of gentrification”:
My experience in Decatur has been different – especially the absence of any organised resistance in the low-income community to domination by gentrifiers and real estate interests – but remains eerily similar in some ways. Many of those who drove the exclusionary MID agenda in Muizenberg considered themselves socially and politically progressive, just as many Decatur gentrifiers do, and reacted with anger at suggestions of racism. As in Decatur, vicious personal attacks and slander were directed at me and other “treasonous” property owners who sided with the refugee/renter population. And as in Decatur, it was largely impossible to raise issues of equity and social justice with people who reduce all social relationships to impersonal market transactions, regardless of their effects. Continue reading
Last night the Decatur, Ga., City Commission unanimously voted to enact a 90-day moratorium on tree cutting and then voted to defeat a temporary moratorium on the demolition of single family homes. The city will protect trees and not people. The three commissioners who voted against the teardown moratorium abrogated their responsibilities to the city’s most vulnerable citizens. Continue reading
Oakhurst does not fit any colloquial or technical definition of “food desert” — “L.T.”, August 4, 2012
L.T. is a 30-something software professional who describes himself as an “amateur economist” in his Twitter profile. He wrote several comments on this blog reacting to a June 2012 post on Oakhurst’s food desert. He strongly objected to my description of his neighborhood as a “food desert.”[1]
After several comments on the blog and private emails, L.T. admitted, “I had never heard of a food desert before you posted about it. I’m just a guy who can read and do math.”[2] This post responds to L.T.’s assertion that Oakhurst’s hip bars and eateries and an overpriced boutique market preclude his neighborhood from being described as a “food desert.”
Decatur, Georgia, recently got lots of attention when placemaking PR man Scott Doyon blogged about his neighborhood’s pub sheds in “Pub Shed: Mapping your five minute stumbling distance.” Doyon’s post went viral among new urbanists.
The Decatur, Georgia, pub shed.” Adapted from Placeshaker’s larger map at http://placeshakers.wordpress.com/2012/05/03/pub-shed-measure-of-the-five-minute-stumble/
Missing from Doyon’s post, however, is that some of his Decatur “pub sheds,” notably the ones in Doyon’s own Oakhurst neighborhood, happen to be co-terminous with food deserts.
[June 6, 2012: See the note at the bottom of this post for updated details.]
Many elderly African Americans living in Decatur, Georgia’s Oakhurst neighborhood live in fear for when the next shoe will drop. Or, more accurately, when the next house will fall.
“It’s kind of a shock. You know, all of a sudden the next thing you know the house is torn down and another one is put up quickly,” said Elizabeth Wilson, an 80-year-old African American woman who has lived in Oakhurst for nearly four decades and a former Decatur mayor. “And then we get a little nervous about that because you know, it’s like when will the next one go and how is that really going to impact me?” Continue reading