a resident's concern about the proposed medical marijuana dispensary

See this 09/09/2011 message passed along by ANC 5C03 Commissioner Hugh Youngblood:

A resident of the Unit Block of Florida Avenue NW shared the following concerns to facilitate dialogue about medical marijuana in the community.

``Wow!! Soon our neighborhood will be the epicenter of feel-good pharmaceuticals in the District of Columbia. New businesses are sprouting up everywhere around us. One night, Volunteers of America slipped into the Madison at 52 Florida Ave. NW and is distributing psychotropic drugs from that location. About a block away, we will have a ``legal`` marijuana distribution operation on North Capitol Street (just south of the Halfway House on Quincy Place NW, just east of the Mental Health Clinic on Florida Avenue NW, around the corner from the S.O.M.E. Soup Kitchen and n nestled in between the Ex-Offender Project and the Homeless Transgender Clinic on North Capitol Street NW).

Throw in the crack operation which comes and goes along First Street and a liquor store on every corner, and we service about every drug culture out there. In retrospect, it is regrettable that the methadone clinic has closed. The opiate crowd is not represented. Think how diverse our neighborhood will become with the influx of the new consumers. A heavy burden will be lifted from MPD. Why chase the drug trade when it will be impossible to determine the legal from the illegal? Now that we have attracted them here, it is only right that we provide accommodations. After all, smoking is prohibited in most enclosed areas such as restaurants, taverns, fast food outlets, etc. It would be unsightly to allow people to sit on our steps and nod off, plus that marijuana smell can be pretty obnoxious. My suggestion is that we face reality and create space for our new neighbors. The new Florida Ave. Park is now just beginning a million-dollar facelift. As we all know, the old Park was a haven for alcoholics, druggers, prostitutes and the like. It was seldom that you walked by and did not detect the odor of burning marijuana. The original idea for the new Park was to create a space where children could play and the neighborhood could come together. This is unrealistic. The City is just wasting its money. The new consumers will be attracted to the new Park just as bees are to honey. Forget the children`s play area, the horseshoe pits and the basketball courts. The Park needs outside toilet facilities, space and safe furniture for those who are physically impaired while under the influence of the pharmaceuticals we are providing. Sunset liquor store can expand to a head shop to conveniently provide pipes, bongs, cigarette paper and perhaps even water pipes for use in the Park. Those who opposed gentrification (whatever that means) will now have the last laugh. Just as our fragile neighborhood was getting over the violence, drug trafficking, high crime and unsafe streets of yesteryear, it looks like it`s headed back. This is progress.``

--
Hugh Youngblood
ANC, SMD 5C03
240 then 925 then 1079

a neighbor responds: "I am saddened by our community's rejection of the LAYC/YB proposal"

See this message from a resident of S Street NW:

Dear Neighbors,

I am deeply saddened by our community`s rejection of the LAYC/YouthBuild proposal for Cook School and can no longer remain quiet.

I moved to this neighborhood 5 years ago because of the diversity and the location. I stayed and love living here because of our warm and welcoming neighbors. I feel at home here in a way I never experienced before. I am part of this community and honored to be so.

I fear that the very core of what I love about this neighborhood is in jeopardy. I love that this is a neighborhood where people can feel welcomed and at home regardless of race or class. That people are able to be themselves here and enjoy living beside people that are different from them. That we all are neighbors and that we treat each other with respect.

For me this welcome extends to our neighbors that are only here during the day. The people who come here to eat meals at S.O.M.E. and have no other place to call home are also my neighbors. These folks need a welcoming place to call home even more than I did. I feel that the homeless are often targets of attack especially when talking about crime reduction and ``cleaning-up`` the neighborhood. These conversations are important, but I hope they can happen in a context of respect. We cannot improve this neighborhood on the backs of the most vulnerable. It`s not just their dignity that is at stake, it`s our identity as a welcoming, diverse community.

Similarly, I feel that our response to LAYC/YouthBuild proposal for Cook School was narrow minded and exclusive. We had the opportunity to welcome families and youth who need a home and we turned our backs on them. I love this neighborhood because of how welcoming we are, but these recent events make me wonder who we welcome. Do I only think we`re a welcoming neighborhood because I am privileged?

I hope to work with you all in fostering the diversity and generosity that makes our neighborhood so great.

Housing Complex's analysis of & solutions for the Florida & North Capitol intersection

See Lydia DePilllis' Housing Complex post from earlier this morning.

The post has a map image, so you may wish to click on the blog link to take a look at it.

You might wish to clidk on the link below in order to read the long list of follow-up comments.

Florida Panhandle: Does the Layout at Florida Avenue and North Capitol Street Cause Crime?

Posted by Lydia DePillis on Feb. 3, 2011 at 7:57 am

[http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/housingcomplex/2011/02/03/florida-panhandle-does-the-layout-at-florida-avenue-and-north-capitol-street-cause-crime/]

The lay of the land. (Brooke Hatfield)

Just after 11 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 18, Bill Mitchell was walking home from the New York Avenue-Florida Avenue-Gallaudet University Metrorail station. He hopped over busy Florida Avenue to a little triangle of land where a woman had been approached by a man on a mountain bike. According to the woman, the man on the bike asked her for sex. When she declined, he went up to Mitchell at the bus stop and asked him for money. The woman told him to lay off, and as the two got into an argument, Mitchell jumped on the man`s back.

Bad decision.

``This is what I been waiting for,`` the man said, as the police report tells it. He pulled out a gun and fired two shots at Mitchell, who died in a hospital two hours later.

What followed was the kind of outpouring of shock and outrage usually generated by the killing of community-minded young white people like Mitchell. There was a vigil, an emergency public safety meeting, a walk-through of the neighborhood with Councilmember Harry Thomas Jr., Mayor Vince Gray, Metropolitan Police Department Chief Cathy Lanier—one of several several similar visits since she was appointed—and a handful of other agency directors. Calls for more police on the corner were issued.

But this time, it`s not just a matter of having more cops come through and bang heads. Neighbors think the physical shape of the immediate area and the buildings nearby might have helped cause the crime.

Here`s the lay of the land: Florida Avenue cuts across the busy six lanes of North Capitol Street in a chaotic basket of stoplights and signals. There`s a bus stop right next to a liquor store on the southwest corner, and another across the street on the traffic island, which allows sauced loiterers to claim they`re waiting for the bus when police come by to move them along. A few blocks away, So Others Might Eat feeds two meals a day to more than 400 homeless people at its headquarters on O Street NW. There`s an outpatient substance abuse treatment center a few blocks south on First Street NE, a medical clinic for the homeless up on Lincoln Road, and a needle exchange van that occasionally sits on Florida Avenue.

Tom Usselman, who`s lived in the neighborhood for nine years and serves on the board of North Capitol Main Street, says he would never wait for a bus at the intersection, which he sees as a maelstrom of disorderly activity.

``We come in, we hit the meth clinic, we grab breakfast over at SOME, we sell our methadone to drug users, and then they don`t need to purchase as much cocaine or whatever it is they`re on—because they`ve got the methadone, it was just a big feeding circle,`` he says, sitting at a folding table in NCMS` storefront office. ``The police have to be extra vigilant to know who is where and what they`re doing. There`s so much activity that it allows the drug dealers and the other guys that are doing bad things to slide under the radar, as long as they keep below that noise.``

Lonna Hooks, NCMS` executive director, thinks things have gotten worse recently. ``The situation is escalating,`` she says, of street harassment and panhandling. ``There is a large amount of people who are clearly not residents, and they have become extremely aggressive.``

Except crime isn`t escalating, at least not the kind that shows up in the city`s CapStat system. The last three years show no consistent trend of incidents taking place within a quarter-mile radius around the intersection (and the average crime rate is actually lower than the same radius around M Street NW and Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown). Plus, there are fewer social services in the neighborhood than there used to be—at least one meth clinic has relocated, and police say the needle exchange truck rarely comes by anymore.

To understand Usselman`s perspective, I spent quite a bit of time ``waiting for a bus`` at the intersection. It`s a fairly affable atmosphere; people stand around, a little aimlessly, chatting about getting off drugs, getting out of jail. The line for cigarettes and singles inside the liquor store is polite. The most uncomfortable thing was having to stand the whole time: The spiked treeboxes meant to keep homeless people from sitting on them make the little traffic island inhospitable to everyone. At no point did I feel threatened, but I did notice that people who looked like me hustled past quickly, as if the intersection were made out of quicksand.

After a while it occurred to me: This isn`t so much about crime, as it is about the perception of crime. What if more people had been on that traffic island when Mitchell was killed? Would the gunman have been so willing to shoot and run?

The problems at Florida Avenue and North Capitol Street go back long before the killing of Bill Mitchell, or even the demographic changes now sweeping the neighborhood. They began in 1947, when the city demolished Truxton Circle and plowed the streets right on through, creating an open sore in the street grid and disrupting the protected feeling that you get from having properties ringing an interior space.

Though some businesses have clung to the street, like crustaceans in a jetstream, not much can really bloom in such a harsh environment. Saeed Momenian has owned a sports store on the corner for 21 years, and says crime is now pretty low—but he`s lost his lower-income clientele, and is having difficulty attracting the newer, wealthier residents who are afraid to walk by the shop.

The school of crime prevention that focuses on environmental design as opposed to police suppression is by now fairly well established. Its principles are basic: You need good visibility from many angles, which requires excellent lighting and low shrubbery. You need to make sure the neighborhood seems cared for, by keeping it clean and well-painted. But most importantly, says the National Institute for Crime Prevention`s Art Hushen, you need to get people to take ownership of their spaces and watch over each other—homeless people or not.

``When you rehabilitate the neighborhood, the offender can no longer survive,`` Hushen says. ``The more social interaction you have amongst people, the less opportunity for crime you have, because people are responsible for each other.``

This is just as true for places like the pocket park on Florida Avenue and 1st Street NW, which has long been known as a drug-infested homeless hangout. It`s getting a $1.4 million facelift, but Bates Area Civic Association President Geovani Bonilla knows it`ll still require a willingness on the part of the community to spend time there. ``If we as a community don`t do events and coordinate things, then we`ll never be able to take that park back,`` he says.

Neighbors are right to focus on improving the area`s cleanliness and function. Narrowing North Capitol Street and turning the intersection back into a circle might do the most to make the space usable again, but mustering the political will is likely too big a lift. Still, there are more realistic options: As the Urban Land Institute recommended in a 2009 study, the traffic island should be merged back into the northwest corner—which is empty and fenced-off, waiting for a stalled condo development—to create a real public plaza, while southbound cars take a wider turn right onto Florida. Public restrooms would give people a place to relieve themselves other than the sidewalk, and perhaps there should be an activity center for homeless people to spend time productively instead of on the street. Vacant properties nearby must be put into productive use—like the decaying Slater, Cook, and Langston schools on P Street, where neighbors have resisted transitional housing for young people.

Other design changes, like moving bus stops to make it easier for cops to crack down on loiterers, just seem like a way of pushing out people who have nowhere else to go. That might make residents feel more comfortable using the space, but the more important step is for them to stop being afraid in the first place. At one point in my loitering, a guy—not evidently homeless—offered me a piece of his pizza from Subway, which I declined. He regarded me for a second. ``Not all black people are bad, you know,`` he said, seemingly concerned about what I might make of the cluster of vagrants, before rushing off to catch a bus.

question as a Bloomingdale resident in support of the wishes of the residents of Shaw/Bates/Truxton Circle neighborhood (and community as a whole)

See this comment from a Bloomingdale resident:

Would the answer to the problem in a community of too many liquor stores be to take an abandoned building in the area, build a shiny new liquor store, provide on-site security and dedicate a ``space`` for an arts use somewhere in the liquor store?

It`s a rhetorical question and ridiculous on its face as a solution. But that`s precisely what I believe in spirit LAYC is proposing, including the so-called compromises they have offered. They don`t seem to get the point. The community is opposed to the social service component of the project – read: Section 8 housing for troubled youth or whomever – not the charter school.

In fact, the neighborhood went on record in support of another charter school proposal (KIPP, I believe) which included arts uses as a significant part of its design and redevelopment not some corner room use and, most importantly, did not have a social service component to its proposal. Just making use of an abandoned building – which continues to be the recurring theme in LAYC`s argument – in and of itself, is not something the community ought to accept as a good thing.

If you still don`t get it, just ask the resident homeowners who now live (or used to live) on O Street NW what a great use S.O.M.E. has made of those once-abandoned/vacant buildings, and then ask any resident within a 10 block radius what they see every day as an outcome .