The Warfield

I remember that long drive west on the California Delta Highway from Stockton to the San Fransisco Bay. My brothers and I made our perennial pilgrimage to see the Grateful Dead on New Year's Eve at the Warfield on the Bay.
Somewhere on the Cal. State Rt. 24, between Walnut Creek and the San Fransisco Bridge, was "Gunsmokeland", or "Cokeland" California. We made a point to make that leg of the journey during the daylight hours.
Oakland California was legendary for many reasons but among the fans at the Dead concerts it was mostly known as the place where you do not want to go stumbling around after the show gets out at night.

During the late 80's and early 90's, Oakland had nearly twice the homicide rate as San Fransisco or New York. And during the first decade of the 21st century it was considered to be in the top 10 most dangerous cities in America. If someone told me in 1995 that the cost of rent in those terrifying hinterlands across the bridge would in two short decades be the second to fastest rising in the country, I would never believe them. But then again, I had never heard of Gentrification back then either.

Like Brooklyn New York's transformation during the last few decades of the 20th century, the city of Oakland is gradually showing signs of affluence and and racial homogeneity as more members of minority communities head for the surrounding suburbs. The sharp increases in rents and property values are driving lower income families further inland and the richness of culture and diversity of the neighborhoods fade in their wake.
From one perspective this is a welcome change, the streets in some communities are safer, ghettos in disrepair are being replaced by condominium complexes, and liquor stores are transforming into coffee bars and vape shops.
But what about the lives of those who have to commute for hours to work for minimum wage? What about the families that must double or triple up in small apartments outside of the communities where they grew up? Perhaps there may have been better ways to make the streets safer and the housing more affordable than to simply displace them with hipster- millennials.

I grew up in Portland Maine and I moved away during the late 80's up until about the turn of the 21st century. When I got back to Portland the first thing I noticed was all of the restaurants, art galleries, clothing consignment shops, and the unrecognizable transformation of "Munjoy Hill" (used to be the nearest thing to a ghetto in the downtown area, now it is the symbol of concentrated gentrification in Porland).
My early imressions were good...it looked to me like Portland was thriving and businesses were regaining a foothold in the city that at one time seemed to be going the way of Detroit and fading into the ashheap of history. However, now I have had the experience of working in Portland but finding it impossible to live in the same city because of soaring rents.
Some of the residents of Oakland may be reveling in the changes to their city, but there are many who would have preferred to stay where they were as well as enjoying safer communities. Maybe people should invest some of their resources not only to purchase properties, but also in the schools, community centers, education and job training and perhaps the city's transformation would benefit everyone and not just those who can afford it.

Gentrification transforming face of Oakland http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Gentrification-transforming-face-of-Oakland-5387273.php

Wicked Bad

I woke up Monday morning and the first news I heard was about a mass shooting in Las Vegas. I found out quickly that it had happened at an outdoor concert downtown on the famous "Strip".
My younger brother works for a company that does the technical rigging for lighting and scaffolding for just such events in that area.
I picked up my phone and I sent a single text: "you alright?"
A short time later when my brother awoke and read my text he replied: "I'm good; I was working a different event further down the strip"
As simple as the exchange of texts may seem, the fact is that I was checking to see if he was alive...for real. This is what it's like to have it hit pretty close to home. It was just a matter of time.
I thought about how my brother and his young daughter now live in the community that just experienced one of the worst mass shootings on record. How will things change for them? What sort of new security measures will be taken to assure that this can't happen again? Will there be new legislation to strengthen gun regulation?
The sound from the hundreds of shots that were fired from the 32nd floor of a Tropicana Street hotel will echo through the streets for years to come. The only sound to rival the horrors of yet another automatic weapon used to commit mass murder is the sound of deafening silence coming from the White House and the Halls of Congress.
The issue is that many legislators in the House and Senate, members of the Administration, the Judiciary, powerful lobbying groups and other parties with converging interests would like you to believe that gun control is a "wicked problem".
After reading the selected chapter from Wicked Problems and Social Complexity (Conklin, 2005), I began to see how the political spin on the issue of gun control is meant to make the problem seem intractable and that powerful forces are at work to create the appearance of social and technical complexity. It is held that this complexity makes any reasonable attempt to solve problem likely to have a negative impact on something else of equal or greater concern. Talking points are aimed at creating confusion, ambiguity, and equally distributed blame across many social influences. The ultimate goal of these efforts appears to be for profit and political expedience.
 The truth is, gun control is not a wicked problem at all. There is nothing intractable or technically complex about sensible firearm regulations and the only negative impact will be on the bottom line of a gun manufacturer's profit and loss report and on the reelection campaign coffers of the many unscrupulous lawmakers who enable these massacres through inaction and willful ignorance.

Refernces:

Conklin, J.E. (2005). Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems. 

 

  Rittel & Weber, (1973). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning