Indiana Prisoner Support

There are Aramark warehouses here in Evansville.

PART 1: Direction (trajectory)

“The pioneers get the arrows and the settlers get the land.”  This is the quote Bob Grewe uses to begin the article Urban Design Center – A Pioneering Experience, about the use of a building at Haynie’s Corner. The symbolism is apt in it’s display of the theft of the land from existing neighborhoods, as well as the city’s arrogance and racism. Grewe references the genocide of indigenous people as if it’s not still happening, as if that war isn’t now being fought with automatic assault rifles ,and the settlers- multinational corporations. http://www.submedia.tv/stimulator/2013/12/12/front-end-loader-dreams/ Grewe’s indulgence in romantic baffling allowed him to dismiss the cliches of gentrification as “pioneering” and “settling” a wilderness, because racism and idiocy is popular in Evansville. In talking to a resident and “artist” who used to live almost directly across the street from this “design center”, then referred to as the “Artist Colony”, he told me the plans for the area were a form of progress, “ Like Roman colonization. It brought people running water.” A total dismissal of slavery and savagery. I told this person then, that if things “progressed”, they’d be priced out of the area. They were. That house was torn down. The house they have now is consistently under-fire by neighboring artists who aren’t as struggling and complain about property values.

Oddly enough, someone who was concerned about the gentrification in the area, was Saul Melman, the artist who received twice the average annual income of the area residents to put an installation of a fiberglass door in the empty lot across from the Design Center. Quickly and correctly someone shattered the translucent symbol of ahistorical “liminality” that opened onto a past and present that doesn’t see color; not the predominantly black dispossessed residents who have invested their own worth in the area , or the white privilege and disaffection of the suburban youth who have moved there from New burgh. In an article for The Believer, Melman said that upon arrival in Evansville, “Graffiti on a sign directly across the street from my installation site indicated that the city’s efforts to ‘revitalize through the arts’ in the low-income neighborhood of Haynie’s Corner were contentious, and my sculpture might not be welcome…Two weeks later, it was demolished, just like the house that had stood there before it. It was smashed to pieces by a   vandal. “

In response to the direct action of the vandal, Hilary Braysmith, Sculpt EVV’s director, said “We cannot live in fear. We can’t be afraid to do something because something might happen.” The smashy smashy vandal and graffiti vandal preemptively took Braysmith’s words to heart.

2011 letter to the Courier

COMMUNITY COMMENT: Cities built best with neighbors

• Posted September 25, 2011 at 3 a.m.

I enjoyed the last couple of rainy days watching my fall garden soak up some much-needed moisture, from my picture window where I read.

I was reading the book “Urbino” by the late Italian architect and planner Giancarlo de Carlo.

At a point in the mid-1800s, he identifies a new and groundbreaking trend, “the meeting.” Cities were being torn apart and redesigned to focus the populations and their creative potentials to meet at planned downtown centers.

In Urbino, Italy. this resulted in a jolt of social expression in the downtown that quickly faded like echoes in an empty arena. The low-income neighborhoods that were the historic support of the city crumbled as the energy of their inhabitants was pulled out of them. The only lasting development was the “high-class residences” where the flow of money is always centered.

This made me think about Evansville’s Downtown projects to bring new residents and new businesses. New development lines the same old pockets of the rich and the politicians. Existing neighborhoods and the residents that comprise them are exploited as cheap and disposable. Money changes hands and people are kept in their place.

Evansville’s struggling residents would do well to build up what is at our own front steps. The best hope for even the most wishful and far off future is to focus on the times we live in and work against the decay of the places closest to us.

2009 Evansville Landtrust

In 2009 a group of friends and neighbors living in the south-side of Evansville began meeting twice a month to discuss plans for the area where they lived. I was one of these people. There were plans to develop subsidized housing, an arts district, and a tiff district. None of those plans were ours.

The city of Evansville had hired a developer to create a space salable to “artists”, so that in return the area would increase in value and become salable to people of a higher financial means. That developer was Tom Barnet, who in a public meeting at the Wilard Library said, “I don’t house people. I develop economies.”

One aspect of this development was “low income” new home construction, which the city began with “Art Homes” and then transitioned to “Homes of Evansville”. On average, household incomes were just about $10,000 annually, in the 47713 zip code, according to the IRS figures. A quarter of the households made less than $10,000, half of the households made less than $25,000. To quote the Evansville Courier & Press, “The program accepts families based on their size and income. Some of the homes take people who are below 30 percent of the area’s median income. Other homes take families that earn up to 60 percent of that figure. For a family of three, 30 percent of the area’s median income is $16,400 a year; 60 percent is $32,820.” This places the median income in their calculations at about $50,000. 31 of these 4,263 households made an average of over $400,000 each. The stratification in the area could only be more visible by walking it; from the mansions on first to the habitat houses beside Lincoln Elementary. Considering the stratification, a median figure ,as apposed to an average or majority, is recklessly deceptive.

As the city cleared away any alternative to their plans, boarding-up and razing houses, our neighborhood group outlined a plan to construct a community that could appose the erosion that was to make way for the velocity of that “economy”. The plan was to purchase vacant houses, raze what couldn’t be repaired, salvage the materials from what was razed and warehouse them, and turn the newly vacant lots into community-gardens and parks: all owned by a landtrust, the board-members of which would be residents of the neighborhood.

The one meeting attendee who didn’t live on the south-side, had family members who did, as well as held the necessary licenses for the demolition and excavation work, and the required equipment. One resident-attendee held the necessary construction licenses. One attendee brought to the discussion an experience and trade(often extralegal) in materials from antique homes. With this last consideration there was an unresolved problem of whether to sell materials, and if so to only sell them in the area as to not “mine and export local resources “.

While trying to configure the ins and out of any formal endeavor we were going to organize, there were a couple informal “barn razings”. After someone received permission, but a permission that was of the “I’ll turn my head” type, from a contractor holding a demolition contract from the city, some folks descended on a house. I say some folks, because as any one from the meeting was in the house removing newish double pane vinyl windows, a neighbor of retirement age, whom we had never met, crawled through a window cavity and asked if they could take what they wanted. The police came, and the “permission” allowed people to keeping what they had gotten, and leaving without charges. Other ventures were smaller, more clandestine, and as well less consequential.

We as a group never did take on anything near the full scope of what had been hypothesized. I’m not sure I can think of one attendee however, who hasn’t pursued land use ventures of some similar intent though all of reduced expectation. The city seized hold of the potential of the area and made the incisions at the points to render it impotent.