Fighting Blight, Collaboratively (Anna Malone, Team 2)

Since last Tuesday, our project has changed a great deal. At the same time, our project has not changed much at all.

For most of the semester, we have known that we wanted to approach blight in a new way, by focusing on the history, promise, and human value of abandoned buildings, rather than the problems they cause. By designing an installation that prompts people to look closely at spaces that are usually ignored, seeing them anew, we hope to solve a negative side effect of blight that is more social in nature.

Usually, people focus on the economic or health related issues associated with blight. They tear down or renovate buildings with the intention of revitalizing the area and bringing in new residents. However, other activists, who see this process as a form of social erasure and cultural whitewashing, generally villainize this approach. Gentrification is recognized as heightening the social and cultural pain caused by poverty, economic devastation, and blight for long-term residents, even as it makes the geographical area safer, economically vital, and accessible to visitors.

Essentially, our project has centered on the following two questions:

• How can we address the negative social and emotional impact of blight for long-term residents of a community?
• Can we design a plan for “fixing” blighted buildings that does not have a negative social impact on long-term residents?

Identifying these questions was easy, but actually designing around them has been very difficult. There is a lack of policy or design initiatives surrounding these questions because they represent such wicked problem spaces. Renovating and reusing, even demolishing, a blighted building is next to impossible without a certain level of economic power. Even the useful toolkits we have found that are supposed to make the process easier and cheaper fail to offer opportunities for the large amount of low-income families in Wilkinsburg. Therefore, how can we attract the right kind of buyers to the area, buyers who will become part of the existing community and respect the history of the area and the houses? How can we get local community members involved in the fight against blight, so that they still feel ownership and agency in their neighborhood, even as it changes?

Our initial design involved a one-time installation by an abandoned house that would allow people to look through a transparency and see what the house used to look like in full vibrancy, as well as signs around heavily foot trafficked areas and bus stops that would tell part of the story of the house and its residents, leading passerby to the physical house itself and/or a website about the project.

This design did not seem to carry the risk of impacting the community negatively in a large way because it didn’t seem like it would cause a large impact, period. Earlier in the semester, we installed cultural probes throughout the neighborhood, attaching blank boards and nametag stickers to abandoned houses and inviting residents to write on them. Through our question prompts, we hoped that people would write what they wanted the future of that building to be, or their memories about what that building used to be. However, only one person interacted with out installations, and we realized that our approach needed to be more systematic. After Tuesday, we realized that we needed to design a program that could be run with the help of an organization, year after year, actively encouraging community involvement, rather than passively hoping for it.

Now, we are leaning toward an interactive, annual, vacant house tour through Wilkinsburg. We want to work with the Wilkinsburg CDC to make this a reality, although we will not have time to actually implement the tour systematically by the end of the semester. The tour would be intended for potential buyers, encouraging them to consider buying a vacant house as an investment in a community with a rich history that should be respected. We also hope to engage current residents in the tour by allowing them to “Adopt a Vacant House” on their block, contact the owners, and get pieces of its history in time for their findings to be presented in the next year’s tour.

While I think that our new idea has more potential, it also carries more risks. What will happen if the tour does not actually encourage a sense of continuing yet evolving community? What if current residents are skeptical of the whole process, and do not want to be involved? What if we end up with the same kind of gentrification, yet again? Also, since we now have an extremely limited time frame, our options for iterative prototyping and testing are also limited. How can we make sure out design is viable and desirable to the two user groups we hope to engage?

With our burgeoning design ideas, can we make neighborhood revitalization and fixing blight a collaborative process between potential new residents (with money) and long-term residents who do not have money to address the issue economically?

Telling Stories About Millage Rates — Anna Malone, Team 2

A Failure

Yesterday, Ken and I tried to tour Hosanna House, a community center in Wilkinsburg. We went there per Kristin’s suggestion. So far, we have spent lots of time talking to experts on neighborhood revitalization and blight. These experts include CDC members, community building strategists, and gentrifiers. Many of these hard working people know a great deal about what’s happening in Wilkinsburg on the “front streets,” the streets that are the most accessible to visitors from outside the neighborhood or streets that are used as commercial spaces.

However, finding out what’s going on in the neighborhood outside of these areas has proved to be a more difficult task. What are the issues in Wilkinsburg, as residents perceive them? How are these issues being addressed or not addressed, and how can we become involved? Kristin suggested Hosanna House as a fruitful space to visit because information about activities, events, and projects occurring in the “back streets” of the neighborhood is generally advertised and shared there. Perhaps predictability, our first visit to Hosanna House did not go as expected. It didn’t really “go” at all. To enter the building, a membership pin must be entered in a keypad. We could not even get in the building. Therefore, we will need to set up a time to visit next week.

Active Research

Like Ken, I worry that our project does not have enough direction. At the moment, it feels like we are attacking the issue of blight from a variety of angles. These attacks often feel less than strategic, probably because the topic is so huge. We keep doing research, but we also want to start doing something that feels more tangible. Yet, to produce something concrete and physical so quickly requires a great deal of guesswork.

Can we continue our research by making things, physically placing them in the neighborhood, and seeing how people respond? Can iterative prototyping work in this context? Can iterative prototyping be viewed as rapid hypothesis testing, a process that begins blindly but leads us closer and closer to the “right” solution each time we throw the next iteration away? How do we move through this process without negatively impacting anyone, building up an unobtrusive presence in the neighborhood? When we are talking about problems associated with blight in a neighborhood that often seems inaccessible to us, what does participatory design look like? How do we make sure everyone is involved in that design process, not only artists and activists who have recently moved onto the front streets of the neighborhood?

Making Abandoned Buildings Interactive

This weekend, we are using Candy Chang’s portfolio as inspiration. As Robyn mentioned, Chang does a lot of work with abandoned buildings that encourages community members to interact with the structures. These interactions simultaneously bring new value to the buildings and reveal information about the desires, wishes, and needs of community members. Can we find out information about an abandoned building in Wilkinsburg by placing carefully designed stickers on said building? Can these stickers invite responses that help us begin to form a story about the building’s history and the building’s future? For examples, will stickers that leave spaces for responses to the prompts “This building used to be…” and “I wish this building was…” give us useful and inspiring insights about blight? We are going to put up some stickers on Saturday and see what kind of response we get, if any.

Storytelling

As our research has continued, we have begun thinking of storytelling as a design method or tool. For most activists, gentrification is a four-letter word. The five of us ended up working on this project because we wanted to find a way to deal with blight that did not involve gentrification. Only after we began working and Tim asked us “What’s good about gentrification?” did we realize that we had never actually defined or explored the phenomenon. There are positives to gentrification. Gentrification is economic revitalization of a devastated area, a theoretically positive process. Then why does it make us feel icky? During our discussion this week, I think we finally uncovered the element of gentrification that disturbs us, the aspect that we actually want to avoid. Often, when people attempt to revitalize a neighborhood, they forget to ask: “What did you use to be?” This question is incredibly important. A neighborhood that has fallen on hard times does not need to be erased. It does not need to “start over” or be returned to a blank slate. Before that neighborhood declined, it was something else, something that people remember or want to remember. What people are searching for in abandoned, falling down buildings is the secret of what that building used to be and what that building could be again. If we search for future solutions that do not account for the past, those solutions will be soulless. If we incorporate and take inspiration from the past as we design our solutions, those solutions will feel continuous, natural. They will be part of a living history. These are the solutions that people respond to, that community members can gather around.

We have decided to first try an approach that takes these ideas of history and storytelling quite literally. A Pittsburgh blogger named Jonathon Denson has a website called “Discovering Historic Pittsburgh” [http://www.jonathondenson.com/]. On this site, he posts detailed histories of abandoned buildings around the Pittsburgh area, followed by a call for someone to invest in the property. He won an award from the Pittsburgh preservation society for his work, and we are trying to set up a meeting with him to learn about his research methods.

Ultimately, we hope to use this information to write our own building histories for Wilkinsburg properties. We want community members and visitors to tour the neighborhood and interact with these buildings, to learn their histories and become invested in them. Can this personal investment translate into something bigger?

Millage Rates Suck

While we are all feeling inspired and excited about this plan, we also realize that we have another problem to deal with. When property values plummet, property taxes soar. In order to pay for services like trash removal in a neighborhood, the city needs to get that money from somewhere. Therefore, the tax rate on properties will be a higher percentage of the total property value if that property value is low. The millage rates, and thus the property taxes, in Wilkinsburg are very high. This system discourages potential buyers from investing in properties within blighted communities. A restored property in Wilkinsburg will ultimately cost the owner more than a nice property in a neighborhood with higher property values because the expensive house in Wilkinsburg will also still be subject to the higher tax rates. Once we get residents and visitors emotionally invested in abandoned houses in the area, what happens next? Who actually has money to invest in these buildings? How do we work around this policy issue? How might “storytelling” help us here? Definitely applying for tax abatement is one way to deal with the issue. Can we make the application process easier for people? Can we translate documents and requirements from legalese to natural language?

Looking Back, Looking Forward – Anna Malone

When I was 17, I went on a trip with my friend’s church youth group to Juárez, Mexico. I hesitate to call it a mission trip in part because I have never been religious. (It was my friend’s church.) However, most of all, I hate to admit that I participated in a mission trip, that I wear the label of “Girl Who Participated in a Mission Trip,” that I have a photo like this, archiving and preserving my past self, the self who didn’t know any better, who didn’t even know that she should know better:

(Note: To find any photo evidence from this trip, I had to search Facebook for a good thirty minutes: I hid it from myself well.)

I want to make several comments about this picture, observations that reflect on that mission’s project as a whole. Our goal was to build a house for a family that did not have one. Our time frame was a week, the length of Spring Break, because after that we had to get back to school, to our real lives. Looking at this photo, you might notice several things:

1) The background shows the neighborhood in which we were working receding into the horizon. It seems to go on endlessly. Many other houses and shacks in this neighborhood were falling apart, in need of repair, or abandoned.

2) Everyone that appears within the frame of the photo is an American volunteer. Local residents of that community are nowhere to be seen.

From where I am standing now, after seven years of reading, growing, changing, and learning to be thoughtful—I realize the difference between the kind of work I did in Juárez and the kind of work I want to do for this class, and in the future.

In Juárez, we came into an environment that we did not understand. We came into this environment with a problem already identified and a plan for “solving” that problem already in place. We did not immerse ourselves in the community to find out what any of the residents actually wanted, what they thought the problems were. We did not do research on a systematic or policy level to better understand the complex and multi-layered issues that make Juárez what it is today. Juárez is a city where families do not have houses, but giving one family one house is not a solution to this issue. Homeless families are a symptom, a side effect of deeper problems—problems that extend past that neighborhood, past that city, past that country even.

Why is Juárez a city plagued by crime and poverty? To build a family in need a house might be an act of compassion, or it might be a gesture made back at oneself. Is “charity” a humanitarian action, or is it an easy way for the volunteers to feel good about themselves, to feel like they are saving the world, without actually considering what this would mean? While relief efforts have value, especially in emergency situations, I now realize that they will never produce change. They will never root out and solve problems on a systematic level. Relief efforts and “charity” will never prevent the conflicts and traumas that lead to our need for them.

Humanitarian work will not have a deep impact if: it operates on an accelerated time frame, does not involve active collaboration with the community it attempts to help, and does not value extensive research and imaginative thinking when it comes to identifying problems and iterating solutions. I want to make clear that mission trips are not the only example of this “band-aid on a bigger issue” work.  For example, as Carl DiSalvo explained during his talk “Design Experiments in Speculative Civics” yesterday, 24-hour Civic Hackathons also often produce “band-aid,” short-term solutions. Working under unrealistically tight timelines, often motivated by the idea of attracting potential future employers, getting funding, or having a unique experience, teams at these events don’t take the time to consider the long-term causes of the civic problem their app is supposed to address. They don’t consider alternative or parallel solutions that don’t involve tech. They also do not receive input from community members negatively affected by the problem.

How can designers and policy makers work with communities to come up with real, long-term solutions to issues that are affecting their lives for the worse? Can we plant the seeds for long-term change on a short-term time schedule? Definitely, the idea of researching, designing, and perhaps implementing our project in the course of a semester is giving me some anxiety in these beginning stages. I am excited to move forward with my team’s project. Yet, as we continue working to turn blighted properties into something of value, I want to ensure that we are continuously touching base with real-live community members from that neighborhood. Can humanitarian work re-imagine community members as active participants in a project, rather than as people to help? And how might shifting our view of these dynamics increase the rate of effectiveness such projects ultimately have?