In a message dated 6/21/02 11:05:40 AM Central Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< Over the past 5 years, Minneapolis has experienced a dramatic loss of community gardens. Community gardening is an important tool for neighborhood stability and community interaction. Losing gardens means losing public green space, neighbor to neighbor connections, neighborhood empowerment, direct access to nutritious food, and much more. Community gardening movements in the United States are often a reaction to social crises, and so it would make sense that community gardening would decline during the period of increasing economic stability of the late 1990s. Witness the dramatic reduction of the number of vacant residential lots in the city that occurred in response to the affordable housing crunch. >> Keith says; I tip my hat to the positive aspects of community gardens. I shudder whenever I revisit how the exponential rise in, "...the number of vacant residential lots in the city...occurred..."!! Now the number of vacant lots, and also community gardens, is decreasing. If anyone wishes to consider community gardens as much more then a temporary place-keeper, like a bookmark, that is fine with me. I watched, pained, for twenty years as the number of vacant lots increased. DFL City Leaders, one after another after the next, and with increasing ferocity, so people as placekeepers and the equivalent of bookmarks as they wantonly tore down this city's infrastructure of affordable housing to create those lots. And sent broken families to the shelters, to pile-on their relatives and friends, or under the bridge. Sharon Sayles Belton, Jackie Cherryhomes, Joe Biernat, Jim Niland, and so many others made manifest, through their focused demolition actions, what must have been their stealth policy goal: Economic and Racial Cleansing. I do not wish to use inflammatory language: I do wish all will calmly look at the actions and the outcomes. And then ask, ' Who did this, and why?' As I drove around the Northside today, along the different streets in our alphabet, I was astounded at the huge number of new housing starts. I was incredulous. It was as if there were two or three new foundations or framing on every block around A, B, C, D, E, F, and G between Lowry And West Broadway. And many more between Highway 55 and West Broadway. So that is the outcome of the demolition policy of the DFL City Leaders. Most all of us survivors, you and I, are going to benefit from our "New Neighborhoods". How long will reasonable, thoughtful people consider and remember that under most all of these new structures there is a story. And for how long will they care, and gain insight from the fact that most all of these lots held older houses, duplexes and apartments. That people owned this property and were forced off the land, along with many others who may have rented from them. These new homes may now be holy sites because of the havoc rendered upon the people who once dwelt there. They are certainly grave reminders and monuments. We should always remember the proper names that go with the improper deeds. We bought the lesson; what shall we learn from the lesson? Keith Reitman NearNorth _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
