community + cultural info
CLEAN AND GREEN: A Radical Strategic Plan for Lower Braddock
“Change is the only constant. Hanging on is the only sin.”
Denise
McCluggage (b. 1927), U.S. race car driver. As quoted in WomenSports magazine,
p. 18 (June 1977).
Today, Braddock is
facing the exact same problems it has been facing for over a half of a century.
Encroaching poverty, crime, deteriorating neighborhoods, collapsing buildings,
loss of businesses, unkempt streets, unkempt yards, polluting factories, litter,
a financially challenged infrastructure, an eroding tax base, a sense of
continuing doom, and a promise of salvation just around the corner of the next
annual budget – when times get better or when a dream comes true. Braddock was
once a bustling, robust center of commerce – industry, retail, and arts, - of
political and civic reckoning. It had what is commonly, but never lightly,
referred to as community. But the community has fallen and all the king’s horses
and all the king’s men, with all good intentions, have not been able to
successfully transition the community from an industrial economy to a service
economy.
If change is the only
constant, the important question becomes how is it that Braddock has managed to
evade the laws of physics, remaining stuck in sameness for over fifty years? As
the quote above reveals, there must be some sin associated with this hanging on
to the old at the expense of a community struggling to regain its vibrant
heritage. Treading on a thin ice flow, we could point fingers at local
politicians succumbing to false hopes rooted in false promises of vested
corporations. We could point fingers at vested corporations arguing that one
person working is better than no person working. We could point fingers at state
bureaucrats who over time have acclimated themselves into schemas of
bureaucratic security that feed off tax roles that feed off feigned justice in
the name of capital improvements designed to fail. We could point, but what
would be the point in that. Let us acknowledge the sin and move on.
In tailoring an
emergence strategy for Braddock it is important to review successes and failures
of communities that have suffered and overcome similar stagnation. It is also
important to develop a realistic scope in conjunction with a realistic timeline.
It is also important to acknowledge that the scope of the projected
transformation, or the “vision” take into account core value judgments. Is the
community after jobs? If jobs, should it be manufacturing jobs, research and
development jobs, retail, consumer service or commercial service jobs? Or should
the community focus on quality of life – a consumer driven tax base – realizing
that workers that export their skills to neighboring communities still bring
their paychecks back home to their home community. Or should it be a combination
of commercial and consumer concerns?
There is an emerging
cultural and economic transformation taking root in Urban America. The media cry
constantly reminds us that the rich are getting richer and poor are getting
poorer, but the statement offers a skewed proportionality unless it is also
noted that the rich and the poor segments of the population are not growing as
fast as the middle class segment. Our society is experiencing a dwindling rich
class, however, the rich that can hang onto money are hanging onto larger and
larger portions. There is also a dwindling poor class, however, the remaining
poor class is getting poorer. Maybe a more appropriate way to state the media
cry is that the middle class population is expanding and the delta between the
poor and the middle class and the delta between the middle class and the rich is
widening.
As we have learned
from our studies, it is in the delta where opportunities are found and where
change is most fluent. An accurate economic definition of middle class is having
enough money to modestly get by with a few dollars left over for discretionary
spending. Pooled, this discretionary spending opens opportunities for leisure or
convenience spending. The market dynamic of this increase in discretionary
spending has fostered rapid deployment of an ever-growing service industry. This
service industry trend couldn’t have appeared at a better time, especially, when
we factor in that the manufacturing of goods has been exported overseas.
Braddock is situated in what is known as the Mon Valley. One of the few rivers
that flow south to north, the Youghiogheny River, flows into the Monongahela
River, which meets up with the Allegheny River to form the Ohio River. Braddock
grew up on the banks of the Monongahela River approximately nine miles upriver
from downtown Pittsburgh. The entire Mon Valley has vacillated in the
transformation from an age of dirty steel manufacturing to an age of
information, research and development, and a service sector driven economy.
Arguments have been made that high paying steel jobs are more desirable than
lower paying service jobs. Communities along the “Mon” have repeatedly succumbed
to this reasoning. What the communities have lost sight of is that these
leftover rehabilitated steel manufacturing plants have been retooled by a
service industry that has enabled the manufacturing process to drastically
reduce the need to employ large numbers of steelworkers. The mills, although
burning cleaner than they have in the past, still pollute, leaving the community
hostage to a questionable environment. For the most part, the improvements and
retooling that has been done on these remaining steel plants has occurred on the
interior. The dilapidated outdated rusting metal exteriors of these plant
structures are surrounded by coke ash, slag, and other waste products too
numerous to mention. These industries, when approached to clean-up the vista,
cry that the cost is too much and that it would be more economical to go
overseas, implying a threat of eroding a debased tax base all the more. For
fifty + years these implied cries have stained the Mon Valley with rust,
cinders, and sumac trees. The increasing middle class fled, literally, to
greener pastures, leaving the poor who are getting poorer to stand alone against
these manufacturing megaliths of political and economic clout. Is it any wonder
that successive attempts to reinvigorate a sense of community are met with
disillusionment and a sense of “only-what-we-can-do-today” despair? Viewed from
this “stuck in the middle” mindset, the task of change is overwhelming and
daunting when the uncertainty of tomorrow is matched up against the certainty of
squeezing one more sure dollar out of today’s steel.
Sacrifice a dollar
for prosperity. In a society that has relegated pollution and industrial waste
as dirty mementos of the past, a community that does not project a “Clean and
Green” image is bound-up with those dirty mementos and the community, itself, is
relegated to the past. What are the chances for a community that is relegated to
the past to move forward into the future? It’s a slope that can’t be climbed. A
bulldozer is required to level the mountain or, in the least, reduce the taper
of the slope. Maybe the time has come to prune away the past. The tree that
grows in Braddock is not steel. The roots are the same roots that settled
Braddock in the 1700’s. The roots are people looking for a place to live, a
place to prosper, a place to raise children, a place to live and a place to die,
a place to faithfully call home. Over the years the tree has become so overgrown
with vines of steel that it has become hard not to think of the laded limbs as a
tree of steel. Tear away the vines. The tree is alive, longing for sunlight and
virgin soil.
We are talking major
landscaping, turbulent tilling. The stakes are high. The recovery period long,
but surely not as long as the stagnated demise. One of the dilemmas, now facing
Braddock, is that real estate investors have anticipated the logjam of demise
breaking for almost as long as the demise has existed. Properties, appear
abandoned, overgrown with weeds and collapsing roofs, yet the price that would
induce the owner of the property to sell is three or four times what modest
investors are capable of paying. The polluting factory, across the street,
diminishes property values while it raises property values at the same time in
anticipation of the day the polluting stops.
There is evidence all
up and down the valley that the polluting will, indeed, one day stop. The
question for fifty years has been, when will it stop? When the questions, all
along, should have been, how do we speed up the process? How do we promote the
change? How do we leverage the change? How can the change catapult us into the
future and into renewed prosperity? Rather than brace against change, a cleaner
strategy would have been to anticipate change by taking offensive measures
rather than defensive measures.
J & L Steelworks,
four miles downriver from Braddock, has been replaced by a research and
development office park. Two miles downriver from Braddock the Homestead Works
have been replaced by an upscale outdoor mall and housing development. One mile
down river from Braddock, 400 acres lay leveled waiting for development. Two
miles upriver, the Duquesne Works are being transformed into a bustling light
manufacturing and industrial park. In the neighboring river communities that
have managed transformation, it is the wrecking ball that finally broke the
logjam of demise that has kept these communities flooded with false hope and
repeated despair.
The goal of the above initiative is to break the cycle of repeated
disillusionment that is rooted in undelivered promises. The most important
aspect of the above initiative is sustainability over time. The community must
witness Clean and Green changes for a long enough period so that a true belief
of “what can be” begins nourishing the roots the community. It is anticipated
that “buy-in” by existing commercial interests is dependent upon residential
buy-in, which is dependent upon local leadership commitment.
While the above strategies are necessarily dependent upon seed money or government assistance, the more important goal is to begin shifting governmental subsidies and foundation grants away from local government coiffures and into the hands of the grass roots initiatives on which this strategic plan banks. The investment must be in community if we are to succeed in realizing a community return.