Deacon’s Blog

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer: Strategies For Rebuiding Cleveland: What can be learned from other cities.

Like a flower in the sand, a peach-colored house blooms from a bleak and battered street in the inner city of Schenectady, N.Y.

On a block of outdated and sometimes boarded-up double deckers, the slender home wears vacation clothes. Its siding gleams in cool Caribbean colors. A decorative black fence necklaces a front garden bursting with colors.

Strangers might suspect they had stumbled upon an artist’s enclave or a bed and breakfast in the urban blight, but anyone from around this upstate New York factory town knows better. They will assume another Guyanese immigrant family has moved in and that, chances are, the street is on the rise. For where one Guyanese buys and restores, others follow.

Facing the kinds of job losses and abandonment known to Cleveland, Schenectady pursued a creative solution. It introduced itself to an immigrant group in New York City, lured curious couples north to view its impossibly cheap homes, and let capitalism and immigrant dreams run their course.

In less than a decade, people who hail from the South American nation of Guyana have become about 10 percent of the city of 62,000, and streets once considered worthless now stir with fussy homeowners.

“They breathed new life into this town,” said Albert P. Jurczynski, the former mayor who marketed his city with bus tours and his mother-in-law’s homemade cookies. “They changed Schenectady. And they never asked for a dime from anyone.”

With the real-estate catastrophe having devalued, crippled and partially emptied whole neighborhoods of Northeast Ohio, it’s time to ask, “What next?”

I love what Schenectady did. I have commented on it before, in other forums, and have recommended this model to civic leaders in other cities. This effort, along with other examples provided in the article, show that rust-belt cities needn’t weep over abandoned factories and boarded-up homes. Energy, leadership, vision, and a quelling of unfounded fears can rebuild what was thought of as lost.

On a recent weekday, Desmond Ramsammy and his wife of one year, Panchawattie, stepped out of an immaculate, two-family house near downtown Schenectady and surveyed a world they were surprised to find.

Crack dealers and layabouts once dominated Hawk Street at the edge of the Hamilton Hill neighborhood. Today, the narrow block reflects fresh paint and new energy. About 80 percent of the houses are occupied by Guyanese. They mind each other’s children, walk to West Indian groceries on busy State Street, and cheer the cricket matches over at Central Park.

Desmond Ramsammy, a heating and cooling mechanic, discovered the scene when he drove up from Queens to visit his brother. He came back with his wife.

“It’s much more relaxed here,” he said. “The cost of living is much less. Even gas prices are lower.”

The couple paid $127,000 for a house that had sat vacant for six years before Mohabir Satram, a Guyanese home restorer, bought and rebuilt it from top to bottom. Now it holds new dreams.

The Ramsammys expect to sell their small house in Queens for about $650,000 and use the money to start a business in Schenectady.

Annunciating words that are music to the ears of civic leaders, Desmond Ramsammy said, “We plan to raise a family here.”

The opportunities are there: urban farming, economic changes that will reinvigorate cities (see this from the Telegraph), industrious immigrants… Simply a change in the paradigm which will mesh with a return to core values (if we’re lucky).

Perspective, Political cities, Economics, Ethnicity, immigration

Yesterday I picked up a link from the Young Fogey which led me to a lengthy article at Rod Dreher’s site.

Mr. Dreher writes:

“The Crisis of Our Age” proclaimed [Pitirim] Sorokin’s view that the West was in a terminal crisis, but that its resolution, however shocking and traumatic, would not mean the End, as is often thought, but only the transition to a new and very different phase of that civilization. “Crisis” is a summation of Sorokin’s cyclical theory of social development. He believed that civilizations cycle through three basic states, based on the dominant view of the nature of truth within that civilization…

The article is one in a series of many I have been reading lately that choose to see the future, the mid-term future, as a period of marked change in the social order. This change will be brought about by a collapse of the current order brought about by global or regional traumas, or economic factors that evidence the inability of government and markets to maintain the status quo.

There are all sorts of reasons for this, and I ascribe much of the problem, the impending breakdowns, to the breakdown in core societal components - family, reproduction (having children), and community. These components were the building blocks for the outward successes of the last hundred or so years. We enjoyed the outward successes all the while distancing ourselves from those core components, hating God, home, and country because they got in the way - they required hard work and commitment to something outside ourselves. We replaced something we saw as the drudgery–cum–slavery of our parents and grandparents lives with an idealism (all must be made equal and free - in the sense of the world) that takes little work beyond a few donations and some sloganeering now and then.

Toward the end of the article Mr. Dreher notes

We will know that the transition is well underway, Sorokin says, when the most creative minds turn from engagement with the fields of endeavor that serve sensate ends, and are instead attracted to ideational/idealistic pursuits. We will know the transition is well underway when we see among us new St. Pauls, new St. Augustines — and new St. Benedicts.

Then he quotes from Alasdair MacIntyre’s final lines in “After Virtue”:

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead . . . was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. . . . This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless quite different — St. Benedict.

Interestingly I was reading an entry from one of the people I follow on Twitter, Brad Abare and came across his wife’s blog - Jamaica Abare. She writes in Monastic Movements:

I’m not sure why the book Punk Monk resonated so deeply with me, perhaps because it chronicles what God is doing in England which appeals to my perception that the British are a little ahead of the game intellectually. I’m somewhat familiar with the ethos of the new monastic movements that my generation is embracing, but this quote in Punk Monk somehow gives some intellectual girth to what my hear draws me to.

It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who prophesied:

The restoration of the church will surely come from a sort of
new monasticism, which has only in common with the old
an uncompromising attitude of life according to the
Sermon on the Mount in the following of Christ. I believe it
is now to call people together to do this

If the monastic movements of the past were driven by a need to provide an alternative to the compromise in the Church, then how much does our own predicament in the modern church parallel a need for an alternative…

This desire for an alternative is not born out of rebellion against the modern church, but rather a recognition that an organic gathering of people, not simply around weekly services, but around community meals, prayer, and acts of justice and mercy provide greater opportunity to see and be Christ to our hurting neighborhoods and world.

So I wonder, Is the monastic way of life, communally simple and Christocentric, the way forward? Is that the way by which civilization will be maintained and by which the building blocks of the “new world order” will emerge? Is it happening to you, where you live, among your associates? If so, in what manner?

Over the next few weeks I will attempt to explore Bishop Hodur’s take on this subject as spelled out in his epic The Apocalypse of the XXth Century.

Current Events, Perspective, Political Economics