Saturday, May 8, 2010

Neighborhood Organizations

On December 24th, 2009 there was a drive-by shooting at a duplex half a block away on my street. Eric and I jumped out of bed onto the floor, and I called 911. No one was harmed, the shooter just hit a car and the duplex a few houses away. The shooter was apprehended a few days later, but the whole event was a big wake up call to the entire neighborhood. We had noticed what looked like drug dealing involving two of the young men who lived or hung out at the duplex, but didn’t really want to get involved, but after the shooting we went to our Neighborhood Association meeting to see what we could do.
We are part of the Brentwood-Darlington Neighborhood, which has a fairly active Neighborhood Association that meets every first Thursday of the month. Our Association was a great place to start, everyone was very supportive and we met more neighbors who lived near our street and were also very concerned.
The house that was shot up (the “drug house”) was a rental, so we decided to write the owner and plead with them to evict their tenants (the drug dealing ones, not the tenants on the other side of the duplex). We looked up the owner using PortlandMaps, wrote a letter with our neighbor, then took it to most of our neighbors on our block for their signatures as well.
Some of our neighbors hadn’t heard about the shooting, but still had a lot to say about what they wanted to see change on our block (and at times I had to stop them, not wanting to hear more accusations, gossip, or rumors about various groups of “those people”). All in all, it was a great opportunity to meet my community and come together on an issue we were all concerned about (or became concerned about once they heard about it).
We worked with the owner of the property that was shot at (she didn’t even know about the shooting, her Management Company didn’t tell her and she lived out of the city), and there are now new tenants in the duplex. We also formed a Neighborhood Watch for longer term community building and increasing public safety (I’m the block captain). That’s been a little slow to move forward, but there was a great first meeting. Again, it was great just to meet neighbors and start to build more community. Here are some projects the Neighborhood Watch is probably going to work on in the near future:
  • Foot Patrol, in the evenings around Woodmere Elementary (to increase community presence and discourage drug & alcohol use in the park and school grounds)
  • Increased street lighting on the south side of the Woodmere park
  • Neighborhood Watch signs
  • Graffiti removal (especially at Duke and 78th on the fence and on traffic light posts)
  • Bus Shelter at Duke and 78th, Westbound
  • Recruiting and welcoming more / new neighbors to the Neighborhood Watch
We’ve already seen more of a police presence around the school, which is nice to see. Growing up I was very anti-police, it seems like they had nothing better to do than harass us kids when we weren’t doing anything against the law (being an unschooler out on the town during school hours probably didn’t help, but still), or trying to give kids their police-baseball-card things (message: Cops are cool when they harass people!). But in this case, I’m really happy to see the police, and all interactions I’ve had with them (or witnessed) has been good. This is not to say I’m completely pro-police in Portland, I know there’s a lot of issues people have, but I think near our school, it’s nice to have the police around to discourage vandalism, drugs and alcohol, in addition to our community safety efforts.
I plan on going to the Neighborhood Association meetings as much as possible, and staying engaged in my very local community, it feels great to know more of my neighbors and increase my social sense of place!
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