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
I think gentrification has made the neighborhood less of a neighborhood — Oakhurst resident, April 2012.
Last week the National Council on Public History released a post on its History@Work site previewing clips from the rough cut of my documentary video, Oakhurst: An Oral History of Gentrification. In its Facebook update announcing the post, the organization noted: “This is what gentrification looks like.”
That’s precisely what a group of developers and third-wave gentrifiers did back in 2007 when they created One Oakhurst to gin up opposition to the creation of a proposed Oakhurst local historic district in Decatur, Ga. Several of the folks behind One Oakhurst were web-savvy IT professionals who created untraceable anonymous email accounts and a blog that successfully avoided caching by search engines like Google. Continue reading
[Ed. Note: This was originally published in September 2012.]
My wife and I went to sleep one night in 2011 and awoke in a Twilight Zone episode. Back in 2007, anti-preservation activists settled for yard signs, rude emails, and disappearing blogs. Today residents in Decatur, Georgia’s Oakhurst neighborhood who oppose historic preservation and who defend destructive gentrification in their neighborhood anonymously use Twitter and other social media sites to settle scores with folks with whom they disagree. They create and post vulgar and defamatory animated videos that offend their more sensible neighbors and demean their entire community.
Screen capture from one of the fake Twitter accounts. The hyperlink originally pointed to the site xtranormal.com where four offensive animated videos had been created and posted by the individual calling him/herself @OakhurstVillain.
As of this writing, Twitter has suspended three “fake” accounts (the status of a fourth is undetermined); complaints have been filed against others and remedial action by Twitter may be pending against them. Sure, people — myself included — use Twitter for mischief sometimes. Parody accounts and other legal uses abound. But there is a bright line between innocent, albeit boisterous, posting and harassment and defamation. The people in Decatur behind these accounts have crossed that threshold.
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