Gentrification is Only One Way to Develop A City

author : People for a Participatory City (PPC) topic : People for a Participatory City

by People for a Participatory City (PPC)

The decisions that shape a city are too often the results of conversations between politicians and investors. There are few places for other kinds of people to put themselves into the process, and so no guarantees that the experience and analysis of other kinds of citizens will be heard and used when the would-be experts meet.

We want to see an Olympia shaped by a vision created by all the people that live or work in the city - not according to separated, unaccountable groups within it that have no connection to most of the excitement and variety of life in the city as it is now.

When policy decisions are made - away from where we might see or participate in them - they are made in the name of “the public.” We look and we see gentrifiers framing current problems in a way that excludes certain people from their idea of “the public.”

We call these excluded people the “talked-abouts.” People who are talked about and spoken for, like “the homeless,” “RV campers,” “students,” “panhandlers,” “families,” “vandals,” most people in “local business,” and “the public” itself. The talked-abouts don’t hold public office, invest in real estate, or run big publications, and so don’t get to publicly describe and defend their needs and their visions of a desirable Olympia. They just get to be talked about.

Here are some of our specific goals as a group:

- We want to prevent the isthmus rezone

- We want to prevent Triway's proposed developments

- We want to prevent the proposed noise ordinance

- We want to reverse the pedestrian interference ordinance

- We want to reverse the RV parking ordinance

These ordinances and proposals are part of a greater movement to transform downtown Olympia's character to the benefit of investors - not to the benefit of the citizens that live and work in downtown.

Development is vital to a city, but gentrification is only one way to develop. Whatever freedoms gentrification claims to offer can be made in other ways, without sacrificing the needs of any sector of the society in the name of any other sector’s aesthetics.

We also identify these broader goals:

- To see more affordable and sustainable downtown housing

- To see more jobs downtown

- To create a permanent, accessible means for the public to guide or influence development in Olympia - inclusive of all people who live anywhere inside the city limits, as well as businesses & institutions that aren’t excited about the Olympia Downtown Association’s way of doing things

- To redefine city government’s relationship to downtown business so that the ODA no longer gets special privileges.

- To create more public spaces (parks, museums, forests) and maintain those that already exist

- To see ecological design in any further development in Olympia

- New approaches to tending to emergencies - calling the police isn’t always a good solution

- To see the city to re-fund the Tenants Union, because it provides vital services to renters, who make up almost half of our city's population

- To see the Olympian consistently reporting a variety of perspectives

- Above all, to see changes that maintain Olympia's 'Olympia-ness'

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There are already several groups that have formed in opposition to Triway’s condo proposal. People for a Participatory City’s current project is to add its work and its voices to this opposition. We ask people who also connect the condo proposal to gentrification to join us in putting this connection out in the open and taking action.

Our long-term proposal in short: Let’s develop systems for making public proposals in which anyone affected by a proposal can participate equally in making it. Instead of always reacting to professionally designed proposals to coerce people in the name of “development.”

We are talking about the invention of a participatory city.

What do you want? We seek collaborators who want to answer this question. Even if you don’t talk to us, talk to each other.

PPC meets each Monday from 7-9 PM at Bread and Roses Advocacy Center (1009 4th Ave). Our current contact email is shoutdowncc@gmail.com.