The Holy Ground campaign meeting...

I was here at the office late yesterday, and missed it. Did you go? How was it?

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This and that

Coming events

This evening, the Pittsburgh Interfaith Impact Network will continue its Holy Ground campaign with a meeting at Mother of Good Counsel Church at 7705 Bennett Street. Zone 5 acting commander, Lt. Kevin Kraus, will address the 6:30 gathering, which will focus on how to reclaim the streets from drug dealers and the like.

This weekend, Community Empowerment Association is sponsoring the Black Family Reunion. The flyer touts the event as "promoting urban peace, justice and empowerment," but many folks may turn out just to have a good time. Especially with musical artists like Wiz Khalifa and The Delfonics (yes, THOSE Delfonics) on the schedule. And food and vendors and stuff. It all happens at Mellon Park on Saturday and Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Speaking of festive events, the Homewood Brushton Community Coalition Organization's Community Day Festival will be held August 22, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., on Homewood Avenue between Bennett Street and Hamilton Avenue. The program has not been worked out in every detail, but plans so far include a classic car cruise, a food court, live entertainment and a petting zoo for kids. The theme for this year's Community Day is "Charting a New Future for Homewood." The organizers are still looking for volunteers; to learn how to contribute some time to a great community event, call Khalif Ali at (412) 731-1908.

Real Estate Watch

There was only one transaction reported this week, using info from RealSTATs:

1021 Perchment St., for $40,000

Imaginings of an....insomniac?

Lying awake in bed, I was thinking about how to get more residents of Race Street more excited about what Race Street can become, and I thought about the power of images, whether on paper or in one's mind, or constructed in 3-D with clay or balsa wood.

And I thought about kids - Catherine, our tenants' daughter; the kids next door. And I imagined myself getting them together with a giant piece of paper and some crayons or coloring pencils and saying something like, "Draw a picture of Race Street the way you would like it to be."

Then I imagined having some sort of art event for all the kids in Homewood. Or maybe a more extended program, led by someone like Kyle Holbrook. Then I imagined the end result of the event or program: an exhibition - "KidVision - Glimpses of Homewood's Future By Its Youngest Residents," or something like that. So that we could all see our kids' dreams.

And after the exhibition, I imagined we grownups who are responsible for Homewood taking all the drawings into a meeting to answer the question, "How much of what is already in our children's hearts can we deliver for them, and how?"

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Obama supporters to canvass Homewood

Local members of Organizing for America , the Democratic National Committee's project to build on the Obama campaign's success in grassroots organizing, will canvass Homewood Saturday to garner support for the President's health care program. The group will meet at 9:30 a.m. at the corner of Homewood Avenue and Bennett Street, and work the streets until noon. For more info, call (412) 901-3052

For Kiva Fisher-Green, the event is about more than Obama's health care program; it's also about bringing OFA more fully into Homewood. From her email:

"They are looking for a headquarters in the Pittsburgh area and I am hoping they consider Homewood-Brushton. As a resident of a community that has been disenfranchised for so long, I feel having OFA in the community would be HUGE. I also believe that the former Dollar Store building on Frankstown Ave. would be PERFECT.

Anyway, OFA is coming to Homewood this Saturday to canvass to let residents know about the three principals of President Obama's health care reform. The more volunteers we have here in Homewood the better our chances are of getting the HQ!"

The "former Dollar Store" refers to Homewood Plaza, the building at 7240 Frankstown that was built for occupancy by Family Dollar, who decided at the last minute not to locate there. More on that next time.

Heard in passing
I attended the party given Sunday by Jackie Dixon for people who made deposits of $1,000 or more at Dwelling House. I went as a guest, not as a reporter, but I did take a pen and a notepad just in case someone said something interesting. Sure enough, Ms. Dixon herself said, just as a parenthetical comment during a conversation, "Relationships continue where money stops."

Just thought I'd share that.

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RSP: Making connections, pt. 2

I used the first point to acknowledge that there's some history between residents of Homewood and outside parties that could lead to - I stole a phrase that Dianne Swan had used earlier that morning - "infected perceptions."

I expressed the hope that those of us who work together on the Race Street Project will be able to move beyond that history. I  emphasized that we, the residents of Race Street, are taking responsiblity for our street and that, while we will certainly appreciate any help that we receive, this is our process.

And to our visitors specifically, I said something like, "If you ever feel like we're being slack or whiney, you can call us on that and say, 'You folks need to step up.' Likewise, if we ever feel like you're trying to take control, we will push back."

Everyone seemed to take that well.

On the second point, we moved around the table. Andrew Butcher spoke first, about the opporunity that the project would provide "to pilot cooperation," and said that he wants "to become a productive member of a large team."

Dianne Swan was next. She highlighted what Kim Graziani would afterward call "the elephant in the room," namely, that the leadership of all of the organizations meeting with us, excluding herself and the Rosedale Block Cluster, was all white. Even worse, she had come out on her own - she had not been invited, despite some 14 years of experience at doing, on and around Rosedale, the very thing that we were talking about doing on Race.

"It is not inclusive," she said, clearly hot under the collar. But civil.

She then went further, challenging the organizations to develop diversity within their own ranks. Regarding the project itself, she said that she wants to see children from the community "engaged and getting paid" for working the vacant lots on Race Street.

At that point, as they could have when I spoke about the Committee owning the process, some of our guests could have taken offense or decided not to work with us. They didn't. Again, they received it well, acknowledging the validity of the points being made. After the meeting, Dianne said, "I believe we turned a corner today."

Indeed, Rob Stephany, the next speaker, seemed even more enthusiastic than he did after we first met, offering a slew of suggestions about how we might proceed, and just as importantly, emphasizing the URA's role as helpers: "We're best as followers. We're worst as leaders."

There's more to say about the meeting; for now I'll say this: Dianne touched on an issue even larger than the complex relationship between Downtown and Homewood - namely, the degree to the green movement seems to be white, and this project's potential for exemplifying a new degree of inclusion.

California professor Paul F. Steinberg put it well in a piece, "Black and green," published in the PG's Sunday Forum Feb. 8:

"In a welcome departure from the stereotypical image of environmentalism (think Birkenstock-clad white male), the conservationist-in-chief is African American. In a presidency celebrated for historical breakthroughs, Mr. Obama's breaching of the green-white wall may be one of his most enduring legacies to the American environmental movement.

With the new administration aspiring to build bridges and break old patterns, now is the perfect time to recast environmentalism in more inclusive terms, recognizing its inherently broad appeal and reshaping its public image. It is time to foster a more diverse culture of sustainability that cuts across lines of race, class, political partisanship and urban/rural divides."

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RSP: Making connections, pt. 1

RSP stands for the Race Street Project. When I first wrote about the project, I said that I have shared the RSP outline with a bunch of other folks, and received positive responses.

A little more detail about that: I first spoke with Court Gould, executive director of Sustainable Pittsburgh. He got excited, and offered to arrange a meeting with Kim Graziani, the Mayor's Director of Community Initiatives. She got excited and invited me back to meet with her and Rob Stephany, executive director of the Urban Redevelopment Authority.

Rob Stephany is more low-key than Court or Kim (listen to me, calling folks by their first name), so maybe I should not say that he got excited. But he was real interested, and very encouraging.

One of the things that he and Kim were so drawn by is the scale of the project - five city blocks. There are people doing great things all over the city in terms of green, they said, but there has not been a single project large enough for them to work together. The Race Street Project could be that project.

So, Rob and Kim suggested a meeting between the Save Race Street Committee and a bunch of folks who could be helpful to us in getting the project done.

That brings us to this week. Tuesday morning a pair of interns with the Urban Redevelopment Authority came by to do a walk-through and to take photos to document the present state of the street.

Yesterday morning, the big meeting happened, the first meeting of the Committee with our potential helpers.

Actually, not the entire Committee was there - it was chairman Min. Terry Fluker, member Latif Yeniceri and myself.

Besides Mr. Stephany and Ms. Graziani, our visitors included the interns, Derric I. Heck and Emily Burnett; Lauren Byrne, also of the URA; Dianne B. Swan, executive director of The Rosedale Block Cluster, Inc.; Andrew Butcher, chief executive officer and Chris Koch, chief operating officer, GTECH Strategies; Miriam Manion, executive director and Julie Pezzino, associate director, Grow Pittsburgh; Joe McCarthy of Penn State Cooperative Extension (I don't remember his title and don't have his card); and Khalif Ali of Operation Better Block, Inc (ditto).

That was about twice as many people as I expected.

We met in front of Baptist Temple Church, which is at the intersection of Race and Sterrett streets. Terry told the group how the Committee got started, then I said a few words about the project, and we began a walk-through of Race Street. First we headed west to the start of Race, at Lang Avenue, then we went back east to where it ends on the slope of Brushton Avenue.

Emily brought URA maps and panoramic images of the street assembled from the photos that Derric took Tuesday. We stopped often to consult the maps - who owns this property? Is this property tax delinquent? Could this vacant lot become a sideyard for the neighbor who is apparently already taking care of it?

What I had expected to be a brisk jaunt with a half-dozen or so people became a more leisurely stroll with more than twice that number.

We then went to the Homewood-Brushton YMCA to meet.

I had a three-point agenda for the meeting.
1. Establishing basis for engagement
2. Clarification of interests: What do I/we have to offer? What do I/we want to receive?
3. What are the next steps?

More about the meeting in the next post.

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