|
|
||||||||
| * Minneapolis Shirts | ||||||||
|
* Political
Stickers |
||||||||
| * Tote Bags | ||||||||
| * Site Index | ||||||||
|
|
||||||||
|
Copyright
© 2001 - 2008 CONTEMPL8 T-SHIRTS |
||||||||
 |
|
|
||||||||||||||||
|
$16.95 US |
|||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
| Larger Photo of front | Photo of Back of Shirts | |||||||||||||||
Why
I made the t-shirt Condos Are Ruining My Neighborhood This shirt was specifically made about the situation in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. But, there are many other "uptowns" that have had and/or are having the same issues (Manhattan anyone?!). I don't mind some of the condos downtown and in select other areas of Minneapolis. When the condos aren't built where small businesses like Let it Be record store used to be, then it may be appropriate. Downtown is the place where you would expect to find condos next to the skyscrapers. But they don't belong in Uptown unless your aim is to gentrify the current residents and culture out of Uptown. Uptown is full of young people, artists, musicians, people who want to live in a vital area with grassroots communities, as well as working class and middle class people who can't afford to live elsewhere and/or who want to live close to where they work rather than driving for hours each day to and from work. They don't belong in Loring Park either; at least not in the increasing numbers that are going up now. Loring Park is another vibrant area filled with artists and a huge diversity of people. So why are the condos going up in huge numbers? There is a plan (The Comprehensive Plan or the Minneapolis Plan) that the mayor and the city council have put in place that encourages them. The plan was adopted in 2000 under then Mayor Sharon Sayles-Belton and crony city council members such as Cherryholmes and Campbell. But, the current administration cannot point back to them and say its all their fault. Many in the current city government are ready and willing to participate in the gentrification "plan". From an urban planning perspective, condos in Uptown doesn't make sense. The wedge area is already one of the most, if not the most, densely populated areas in the city of Minneapolis. There are plenty of other areas in the city that are nowhere near as dense. So, why not put the condos there? It really only makes sense from the perspective of people who want to make big bucks by carving up our city and flipping properties. They don't even live here lots of times. They come here, buy some properties, convert them to condos and then sell them. They usually go for prices that cannot be considered affordable. Even the ones that are closer to affordable will not be once they've been flipped a time or two. This condo boom is about turning our city into a big slot machine that gives winnings to some and makes losers of others. The winners are the realestate investors and developers, and the losers are average working class and middle class people who will no longer be able to afford to live in their city. Make no mistake, flipping and making money off of realestate leads to more homeless people. Constantly driving up the cost of housing by flipping units just continues to raise the cost of housing at a much quicker rate than wages go up. Its pretty sick that some rich person is making some extra money to blow in the stock market or to buy a yacht or another car or another... and they don't care one bit that they're helping to make more people homeless. More people that they will then bitch about being on welfare. This is yet another example of aggressive class warfare waged without provocation by the rich and against the working class and middle class. And then they have the gaul to wonder why people are angry. They probably go to church and listen to stories about Jesus feeding the poor, and then as soon as church is over they're out there making life harder for people of lesser means. This is really a lot like an occupation of Uptown made possible by a city government made up mostly of cronies who do what they can to get rich developers who don't live here to come in and take our city from us. [This is similar to the aggressive selling of the Twin Cities as a great spot to have the Republican National Convention. Even though just like the one in 2004 in New York City, the people of the city overwelmingly do not want the Republicans here.] The mayor and city council will trumpet it as a way to "clean up" the city. They're going to collectively punish all people who make less than $50,000 a year because there are a few criminals who commit crimes. Simply make it too expensive for working class people to live in Uptown anymore, and replace them with yuppies and rich kids and it will be all "cleaned up". But, so too will the culture which makes this area so full of life and so interesting in the first place. Just look at the Hennepin area of Uptown. Its basically become a drab overpriced landing strip for people from the suburbs to come in and take over the city on the weekends. Local businesses are dying in droves there. This will be spreading eastward in the future. How do condos affect the rest of the housing units in Uptown, and how do they affect the people who could never afford to live in condos you ask? Simple, they raise property values. That's great for the flippers who are only in it for the money, but it soon makes Uptown unaffordable for others because the rents in apartments also go up when condos in the neighborhood gain value. But, the condos are not all selling you say. Well, not now they aren't all selling. However, the area will re-saturate soon enough when more people move in from other cities. That's in the plan too. There's a "build it and they will come" provision in "the plan". Once that happens the current renters market will again become a landlord's market and the current buyers market will become a seller's market. The average price of a one bedroom apartment, which is currently somewhere between $600 and $700 per month, will shoot up to $1000 or more very quickly when this happens. I'll give it five to ten years at the most before this occurs. Remember too that while prices go up for almost everything over time (usually because of just this type of speculation), wages aren't going up for most folks these days. Instead they're going down when compared with inflation and cost of living increases. A lot of people aren't going to be able to live in Uptown thanks to condos and the greedy developers who love to make money on the backs the working class and the middle class. Its enfuriating to the current residents in Uptown to be told, "Hey we're going to take Uptown away from you and give it to other folks. Richer folks. Better folks." This is basically what is being done. "The Plan" has made it possible, if not encouraged it. The back of these t-shirts gives vent to this emotion when it says "End the Occupation of Uptown!" I can't say I know what its like to be an Iraqi or a Palestinian who has literally had their land put under the control of foreigners, but its a similar feeling. Politicians pulling levers of policy are slowly but surely removing people from their neighborhoods, and as usual there is a huge class element. A huge assumption that people with more money are better people. Its not right, its not fair, its not cool.. The whole "crime wave" news you hear all the time isn't helping anything. Last year in the first eight months of the year, all you heard was that crime was up, more murders had happened than the previous year by X percentage. Never mind that X percentage of the Minneapolis crime rate ends up being a single digit increase in the number of murders. Not that these lost lives don't matter, they do. But, single digit increases in the numbers of murders is not a very good indicator of a trend. Who cares! The sky is falling. It gives the politicians a good reason to have plans that encourage (if not subsidize) the building of condos, so that we can "clean up" the neighborhood. With all the blood and guts sensationalistic news coverage provided by local television, people who might normally be more skeptical become scared and go along with the good old line that "something has to be done." That something is always up to the politicians and the people who pay the most into their coffers to figure out. Funny thing is that I didn't ever hear the final statistics on murders etc. in Minneapolis for 2006. I'm guessing that's because it wasn't really that much higher than previous years after all. Maybe it leveled off a bit like I expected it to? But, the idea planted in the minds of the public that we have a huge crime epidemic has certainly not levelled off, and so passive support for building condos to "clean up" the neighborhood will continue. Unless people challenge the status quo in city government and elect people who will actually make retaining and expanding affordable housing an action item instead of a "priority" that is talked about in speeches, but which perpetually rides the bench. Ironically, the decrease in affordable housing (along with cuts in education and other public services) is quite plausibly part of what leads to increased crime. As more folks get squeezed they may do more desperate things. That's not a justification for crime, just a plausible partial sociological explanation. Speaking of crime, this is another example where the politicians coddle the biggest ciminals. Biggest in the sense of impact. A pick pocket steals some money from individual people. That sucks. But, what sucks more is the white collar criminal who steals from thousands of people. Remember Enron? That was a long time ago I know. And it was just a "bad apple". But, more bad apples are still growing, and we're still paying extra taxes because of bad apples like the savings and loan jerks. California residents paid $30 billion extra for energy thanks to Enron (the same 30 bil that got Gray Davis thrown out of office). The white collar offenders (they're not all crimials since the good old boys and girls in government go out of their way to make a lot of what they do legal) hurt more people than all the street crime combined. Population transfer and collective punishment are war crimes under certain circumstances when ethnic cleansing is involved. I think that class cleansing via gentrification is just as bad in some ways. But, the white collar people who perpetrate class cleansing almost always seem to get off scot free in our society. Makes you feel like we're just little plastic toys in their neo-feudal sandbox... MORE INFORMATION Read about how all the condos being built may be sucking out the current and future economy when it comes to industrial, and other non-retail businesses here. Here's an interesting website from the landlord perspective that seems to say that both landlords and renters are being chumped by the city which favors hooking up the greedy developer class. Check out "The Plan" here on the city's website. Check out some grassroots organizations trying to stem the loss of affordable housing here. Copyright
© 2007 CONTEMPL8 T-SHIRTS View or BUY Condos are Ruining My Neighborhood t-shirts |
||||||||||||||||
