News: Neighborhood Power

Sean Hughes/photopresse.com The Fremont Troll, crushing a Volkswagen Beetle at a Seattle underpass, is the kind of public art that could enliven Cincinnati neighborhoods.

Cincinnati, "Queen City of the West," can learn a lot from Seattle, the real Queen City of the West. They have more in common than being built on seven hills, an obsession with professional sports and food fetishes such as ice cream and ribs here and salmon and coffee there.

Both cities have a large number of proud, distinctive neighborhoods struggling to cope with urban issues and interact with government bureaucracy. That's the reason Jim Diers is making a cross-country trek to Cincinnati's 2006 Neighborhood Summit next weekend, serving as keynote speaker for a pre-event dinner.

Diers, author of Neighborhood Power: Building Community the Seattle Way, says he doesn't come with a blueprint for this Queen City.

"I hear, 'That's a great thing for Seattle, but we're Cincinnati,' so I never try to tell people what to do," he says. "I just say, 'Here's what we're doing. If this might make sense to you, here's some things you might try or here's a different way of looking at things.' "

Not Government Inc.
With 3,000 community projects funded and implemented though a community-government partnership spearheaded by the city's Department of Neighborhoods, Seattle has achieved what Cincinnati activists are attempting.

"A lot of what inspires people is what ordinary citizens have been able to do," Diers says.

"I usually show pictures of those projects and tell some stories about what people have done. That gets people really excited, because that isn't tied to any particular structure or any particular setting. It's just stories about what common people have done when they take some responsibility for what happens in their community."

That's what Rick Derringer, president of Invest in Neighborhoods Inc., wants for local community council members, activists, citizens and government officials.

"We had some people say, 'Why are you bringing somebody in from out of town to tell us how to do things?' " Derringer says. "Well, it isn't so much that as maybe you can get some inspiration — to learn from it and to inspire people to think outside the box with some of the things they might want to do themselves."

The fourth annual summit includes more networking opportunities and peer-to-peer presentations.

"Many of our morning sessions are neighborhoods talking about their own projects, how they went about doing things," Derringer says. "Evanston's got a project where they had to recruit a lot of volunteers, so they're going to talk about how you go about getting volunteers on board."

Diers believes this grassroots training and interaction are essential, but the other half of the partnership that results in long-term success is city government.

"Governments, more and more, are just thinking of people as customers, and people think of themselves as taxpayers," Diers says. "I've heard governments say, 'We want to be the Nordstrom's of government.' But that's not what government's about. It's not a profitable business.

"If the things that government did were profitable, there'd be corporations doing things like feeding the poor and the different functions of government. Government in the United States is a democracy, so the relationship needs to go beyond the customer and the business."

Decentralizing services is important, according to Diers, but so is empowering communities to be a viable partner in the process. What's essential is a partnership of equals valuing the assets the other brings to the table. This means City Hall and citizens both need to change business as usual.

"It's important that they come from a position of equals," Diers says. "A partnership really is about people who have equal power, for there to be respect of those roles about why government is important, why community's important.

"It's especially important for government and neighborhoods to change their perspective about neighborhoods just as a place with needs and start thinking about it as communities of people with incredible assets. You change that framework, and then it becomes in government's self-interest to think about 'How do we partner?' rather than seeing neighborhoods as a nuisance or as a pain."

Of bureaucrats and trolls
One of the ways Seattle managed to effect this change was making government more accessible to people though "little city halls."

"(They're) storefronts in neighborhood business districts where people can go into their own neighborhood and do business with city government," Diers says. "So they can go in there and pay their public utility bills or not pay their bills. Often it's low-income people who access them in order to avoid the utility cut-off or make collection arrangements. People can also apply for passports there, purchase bus passes and they can pay their traffic and court fines. If they want to argue their traffic and court fines, there's a court magistrate who does the rounds of the little city halls.

"People can have a hearing in their own neighborhood rather than going downtown, risking a second ticket. The police have offices in the little city halls."

This local presence puts a face on the entity of government.

"People love to hate the bureaucracy, but they love the people, the individual bureaucrats they come into contact with," Diers says. "They really like the local librarian, the beat cop, the neighborhood service center coordinator — all the people they come into contact with. It personalizes city government and makes it more accessible."

Derringer believes some of those critical connections are being made in Cincinnati, starting with the mayor's office.

"In 20 years we've never had a mayor who said, 'I'm going to sit down individually with community council presidents and talk with them,' " Derringer says. "I know that (Mayor Mark Mallory) intends over the course of the year to meet with every community council president on a one-to-one basis to talk with them about what he would like to see their community do to contribute to the city and get a sense of what the city needs to do in that community."

Mallory will meet with citizens in several sessions of the Neighborhood Summit, and members of city council and the city administration frequently attend.

A result of collaboration could be a way to capitalize on Seattle's use of public art as a way to enhance communities. The Fremont neighborhood — the self-described "Center of the Universe" — is home to the Fremont Troll, an 18-foot sculpture that resides under a Highway 99 bridge. The Fremont Arts Council spearheaded the troll project, and the Department of Neighborhoods partially funded it.

But that kind of project might be a bit much for Cincinnati. Derringer seemed to think of such public art as a way to discourage homeless people from living under bridges.

"We had a significant issue with homeless people camping and living under the bridges down there under Fort Washington Way," he says. "A number of people who work downtown and live out in the suburbs and commute were complaining about it because they came around a curve and were confronted with all these tents, makeshift shelters and all sorts of thing."

He says the under-the-bridge project was quickly "disavowed" by a number of local arts organizations.