Quote:
Originally Posted by 33girl
Restaurants and hipster doofus pizza places (with below minimum wage jobs) do NOT = "bringing a neighborhood back from the brink." They = "places where the annoyingly trendy will go for a year or two until they get tired of them, then they'll fall into decay."
If you build a sandcastle, all it takes is one rain shower to ruin it.
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Well, its' the city's only really hipster doofus pizza place, so it has a great niche. And the area is anything but a sand castle.
The storefronts have been around since 1929 (which is a long time when you consider Oklahoma has only been a state since 1907). They hold some of OKC's best independent art galleries, and have since the gentrification really started in the mid to late 90s. There are some truly nice restaurants there, a hipster bar, a hipster pizza place, lots of events. It's a really neat area on my short list of places to bring out-of-towners to. Definitely unexpected in OKC.
This particular area was gentrified not really by the force of large corporations, or really any corporations. It was mainly property owners who got together and cooperated with the OKC Police to get rid of all the crime in the area. Citizens would constantly patrol the neighborhood with video cameras, calling the cops and turning over excellent video evidence. It didn't take long at all to clean the place up.
On the south side of 23rd street (which is an arterial street), sits Heritage Hills/Mesta Park, the city's original luxury addition where houses are named after the city fathers who used to reside there followed by the word "mansion." My office is on the southern border of that touching mid-town, an area which was once pretty bad, crime ridden, etc., but is mostly torn down and vacant due to a failed urban renewal effort in the late 70s, but recently, small developers have been doing very well in that area as well.
As far as schools, I can't speak for Baltimore Public Schools and their overcrowdedness. That's a city/state issue for those of you in Baltimore.
My experience is that gentrification has been great for my city, it's improved it in all aspects and charter schools here are excellent.
That may not be the case in Philadelphia or Baltimore.
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