Ethan Demme

Thoughts and Policy for Building a Better Pennsylvania

Gentrification is Anti-Family

 

When you think of a vibrant city, what kinds of people do you envision? The artsy hipster barista? The forty-something entrepreneur dressed in jeans? The fashionable women in high heels enjoying rosé in an outdoor canopy cafe? Now try to picture another demographic living in the city: a family.

As a general rule, cities aren’t designed (or redesigned) to accommodate the needs and desires of families. A series on cities from The American Conservative describes how more and more cities are being transformed into what the industry refers to as the Vibrant Urban Neighborhood. “The VUN—with its standard-issue bike shops and vintage clothiers, its “authentic” live-work spaces and dive bars, its predictable purveyors of vinyl records and locally-sourced foodstuffs, its de rigueur venues for generically hip “live music,” its uniform throngs of overwhelmingly unmarried and childless active or aspiring knowledge workers ritualistically intoning the shibboleth of “diversity”—has metastasized from those erstwhile white-hot centers of hipness—Williamsburg, the Mission, Wicker Park, Silverlake—converting Bell Town and Bushwick, Echo Park, Seward, and the Pearl District, transforming D.C.’s H Street Corridor, LA’s Highland Park, and dozens of other districts.” (source) This approach to city development is eager to attract young working professionals but doesn’t plan for how these working professionals can “remain in our cities as they age, change, or grow.” (source)

A city made or remade to accommodate young adults doesn’t require good schools. It doesn’t need to provide a diversity of housing options beyond the studio and one-bedroom apartments. Affordable eating options aren’t really on the radar and neither are playgrounds. In short, a city not built to accommodate families won’t be able to accommodate families.

Even worse for families is the process of gentrification. Indeed, gentrification is inherently anti-family. When a city undergoes this process of becoming the kind of place that attracts young, childless urbanites, it raises rent prices, often resulting in driving out poorer families that can no longer afford to reside in the city or at least forcing them to allocate more of their income to basic housing.

As we seek to revitalize and develop our cities, we must remember our obligations to the family. Being consistently pro-life means promoting the flourishing of all people of all demographics.

Pedal to Preserve 2017: Farmland Preservation Trust

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Did you know that Lancaster County is home to 425,336 acres of farmland spread out over 5,462 farms? According to the Lancaster Farmland Trust, “Lancaster County’s farmland and the industry it supports provide more than 51,000 jobs and contribute more than $4 billion to our local economy each year.”

On June 3, 2017, the Trust will host the Pedal to Preserve, a bike ride to raise money in support of the Trust’s conservation work. The event included three marked routes allowing participants to choose between 6, 20, and 51 mile rides through Lancaster County’s pastoral countryside.

The Trust was established in 1985 and its mission is to “preserve and steward the beautiful, productive farmland of Lancaster County that reflects our heritage, supports our economy, protects our environment, nourishes our health, and enhances our quality of life.” The Trust website explains that:

Land conservation offers many benefits to the community, including attracting jobs, enhancing property values, safeguarding a valuable way of life for future generations, ensuring an adequate, fresh food supply, and protecting the quality of the environment.

To learn more about preserving Lancaster County’s farmland, and to sign up for this years, Pedal to Preserve, visit the Trust’s website here.

A City Transformed – Book Review

Lancaster City is one of the oldest inland cities in the United States of America. It was originally settled in 1709 by German immigrants, the Pennsylvania Dutch. Lancaster was originally known as Hickory Town and was designed by James Hamilton. Lancaster was chartered as a city on March 10, 1818. During the Revolutionary War, Lancaster was the capital of the American colonies for one day, September 27, 1777, when Congress was fleeing from the British. Lancaster was also capital of Pennsylvania from 1799 till 1812.

In his book A City Transformed, David Schuyler traces the history of redevelopment in Lancaster City from 1940 through 1980. Schuyler is Professor of American Studies at Franklin & Marshall College and he has spent a lot of his academic career exploring the challenges cities faced during the second half of the 20th century.

In the postwar years, cities across America faced drastic economic decline. Lancaster was one such city and in order to try and address this decline, the city adopted various urban renewal programs with the goal of revitalizing the city and particularly downtown.  Sadly, as Schuyler documents, most of these government-driven programs were failures that often exacerbated the problems. One of the greatest issues facing Lancaster was the need for affordable housing. Schuyler writes that “the discovery of a crisis in housing was the initial step in the development of a comprehensive urban renewal program for Lancaster” (pg. 35) After the Lancaster newspaper drew attention to the substandard living of poor residents in Barney Google Row and Shanytown where the “houses” were shacks with no running water or electric, Lancasterian leaders decided that something needed to be done. Unfortunately over the course of the next several decades, providing adequate housing for poorer families would prove a harder task than what was imagined.

Pertaining to housing, Schuyler documents in heartbreaking detail the unintended effects of gentrification with the Church-Musser plan for townhouse development which led to large increases of rent driving out poorer families from their homes. Schuyler also explores the ugly reality of segregation and the ways in which racial tensions also hurt families and kept them from accessing affordable housing.

One recurring theme in A City Transformed is how government intervention consistently made things worse. For example, during the summer of 1965, Lancaster’s leaders decided to demolish the historic west block of Lancaster despite intense public opposition. Schuyler writes that “despite the concerns, citizens voiced at the September 1964 public hearing, and despite editorials that warned against turning downtown into a rubble-strewn wasteland … members of City Council and the Redevelopment Authority abandoned a policy that had prevented premature demolition and adopted a new one that ensured it.” After demolishing the west block, the block sat vacant for almost a full decade and became known as “our hole in the ground” (pg. 87).

A City Transformed is a sobering account of Lancaster’s history here in the 20th century and the struggles for economic sustainability and affordable housing. Despite the best interests of Lancaster’s leaders, often the very initiatives that were hoped to alleviate the problems of the poor and revitalize the economy had the opposite effects. Nevertheless, the book is also a celebration of the enduring spirit of Lancastrians, their compassionate conservatism, and their work to try and make the city a better place for everyone.

David Brooks on Lost Hills and Strengthening Communities

If you ask New York Times columnist David Brooks what he thinks is the defining issue of our day, he would say social isolation. In one of his columns, he writes that “gaps have opened up among partisan tribes, economic classes and races. There has been a loss of social capital, especially for communities down the income scale. ” Brooks is thus pointing to the same negative phenomenon noted by Luvin in his new book The Fractured Republic (read my review of that book here).

To illustrate this problem, Brooks references Lost Hills, a farming town, writing that “there’s still no permanent church. Up until now there has been no library and no polling station. The closest police station is 45 miles away. Until recently there were no sidewalks nor many streetlights, so it was too dangerous to go trick-or-treating.” Fortunately, Lost Hills is the location for a new experiment in developing the social capital of the community. Brooks writes:

The experiment is being led by Lynda Resnick, who, with her husband, Stewart, owns the Wonderful Company, which includes FIJI Water, POM juice and most of the pistachios and almonds you eat. You should know that I’m friends with Lynda and Stewart and am biased in their direction. But what they are doing is still worth learning from.

…They’re not trying to find one way to serve this population. The problems are so intertwined, they are trying to change this community from all directions at once. In Lost Hills there are new health centers, new pre-K facilities, new housing projects, new gardens, new sidewalks and lights, a new community center and a new soccer field. Through the day, people have more places to meet, play and cooperate with their neighbors.

Brooks concludes by noting that communities are where social repair takes place. “The community is the right level, picking a piece of land and giving people a context in which they can do neighborly things — like the dads here who came to the pre-K center and spent six hours building a shed, and with it, invisibly, a wider circle of care for their children.” – Read the whole thing here.

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