Gentrification: thoughts from seven years as student and young professional in Philadelphia

Urban neighborhoods change.

We’ve known that for, what, like 150 years or something? In the past quarter-century or so, as educated (mostly, but not entirely white) professionals moved back to neighborhoods that had populations that didn’t always resemble them — in race or class or culture or all and more — there were natural clashes.

Mostly, I feel like those clashes have mostly been put in three categories, one initiated by new residents, one from more native residents and one that both share:

Continue reading Gentrification: thoughts from seven years as student and young professional in Philadelphia

Lessons in civic pride: Story Shuffle 6 audio is now live

Story Shuffle 6, with a theme of  Rebirth, I remembered a lesson I learned from an old neighbor: If I don’t clean it up, someone might notice.

Find all the stories here. Listen to mine here or below.

Listen here.

The chair that’s reserving your snowy parking spot in Fishtown

I’m no serious driver, but I’m fascinated by car culture in all its forms.

Like the severity with which parking is taken in many urban neighborhoods in even transited cities, Philadelphia certainly included. My own new neighborhood of Fishtown has all the makings of a fight to be had: long-time residents, a conflicting gentrifying population, limited parking, middle class to working class and, recently, a historic snowfall.

Where even the mayor seems to support saving street parking if you’ve cleaned out a spot and the requisite question comes of what that all means, I’m slowly developing my own opinion.

I’ve been in neighborhoods where people reserve parking year round — around a quickly expanding Temple University community with serious town-gown issues — and so these topics seem to vary. But mostly, I figure you ought to have a majority of these requisites to toss a chair of bucket to block off street parking.

  1. Snow storm or some other limited or relatively rare happenstance that dramatically limits parking
  2. You dug out the spot
  3. It’s in front of your house
  4. It’s on your block
  5. You’re elderly or infirm
  6. You have children younger than five
  7. You’re grocery shopping, moving or something else involved lugging or carrying from your car to your house
  8. It’s for fewer than 12 hours
  9. Only one per household