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Archive for September 23rd, 2007

Sep 23

The Bourgeois Blues

At CenLamar, we often champion a renewed focus on Alexandria’s Downtown and inner-core neighborhoods. We believe that the national trend towards the suburbanization of the city’s outlying areas represents an unhealthy and unsustainable scenario for Alexandria. As the city’s footprint expands, citizens run the double risk of stretched public services and a greater number of people living outside of city limits, taking advantage of Alexandria’s infrastructure but avoiding the city’s taxes. By looking inwards, Alexandrians can not only invigorate the city’s existing tax base, but promote the walk-ability and attractiveness of areas like the Historic Garden District and Downtown, which originally relied on other transit means before the car became king.

Government officials of the City of Alexandria have in recent years voiced their commitment to invigorating in the inner core of our city. Our leaders have already begun to explore plentiful opportunities for joint public-private investment and grants for historical preservation, transit projects, and community development covering the area from Lower 3rd and Bayou Rapides to MacArthur Drive. Given the significant investment in our city’s western suburbs, represented most visibly by Operation Fast Track to connect Versailles Boulevard to Highway 28-W, it is consensus that much should and can be done to balance development on both the inner and outer areas of Alexandria.

There exists another reason beyond fiscal responsibility and historic preservation for Alexandria to become involved in inner-core revitalization: social justice. The term justice suggests that a wrong has occurred, and though the civil rights victories of the previous generation gave everyone an equal legal opportunity to pursue the American Dream, the structural and systemic legacy of history remains. Placing blame is counterproductive. Fortunately, the City of Alexandria is currently led by a racially-balanced government and administration that know to celebrate the richest aspects of our past without forgetting its most egregious misdeeds, to focus on the present, and to use the lessons of history to prepare for a prosperous future.

Many of the most economically depressed neighborhoods in our city exist within or near our inner-core. The current poverty of these areas is related directly to the history of the way in which our city developed. Lower 3rd is, as the name suggests, located downriver of Downtown. Lower 3rd and the Sonia Quarters flank old spurs of the railroad. Old heavy industries such as the Ruston Foundry and a steel mill were built adjacent to the neighborhoods, which existed to house these industry’s workers and their families. These areas have been facing population declines since the expansion of middle-class neighborhoods across MacArthur Drive began four decades ago, when Charles Park was first planned.  Moreover, the construction of the Alexandria Mall and Jackson Street Extension diluted the economic significance of the corridors between downtown and the Garden District.

As previously discussed on CenLamar, the construction of I-49 served an increasingly suburbanized city but isolated many inner-core neighborhoods physically from Downtown Alexandria. Numerous streets were dead-ended, facilitating economic stagnation in the area. Examine the proximity of the Sonia Quarters (below) to downtown (just north) and the Ruston Foundry (due east), and the way it is completely blocked on its east side by the interstate.

Alexandria currently has the vision to make significant progress with these areas of our town. It will require examining our current traffic strategy and ways to recenter investment not only in Downtown Alexandria but along the traditional commercial corridors of Bolton Avenue and Lee Street. It will also take something I learned while working with Tibetan nonprofits in Western China: stakeholders themselves must be involved as participants and managing leaders in order to make projects successful and sustainable, because no one understands and is committed to an area more than the people who live and grew up there.

And when people don’t fit into their native home, they sometimes get the Bourgeois Blues.

Sep 23

1 Comment

CenLamar Welcomes Newest Contributor, LAMediaWatch

CENLAMAR IS PROUD to welcome the newest member of our team of writers and our first anonymous contributor, LAMediaWatch. While a guest writer at The Daily Kingfish, LAMediaWatch wrote a series of sensational and thoroughly researched essays on the media, Bobby Jindal, David Vitter, and the upcoming election. Many of these essays have now been cross-posted right here on CenLamar, even the scandalous ones:

The Conservative Response(s) to the Vitter Scandal

Is Team Vitter Behind Operation Red November?

Vitter and the LA GOP Cover-up: “We Discussed That Exact Fact.”

The Question Mark: Louisiana Republicans Support Vitter?

Vitter’s Campaign Commercials and Why They Matter Now

Introducing Jeffrey Sadow: The LA GOP’s Favorite Professor

A Lesson for the Professor: Sadow Lies Again

LA-GOV: Jindal’s Website Payoff Scam

Bobby Jindal: The Story They Don’t Want You to Hear

LA-GOV: Jindal is Lying on His Record on Health Care

LA-GOV: Jindal’s Texas Gold: Who is Nancy Kinder?

LA-GOV: Jindal’s Texas Gold: The Texan Oil Lobby

Welcome to LAMediaWatch, an old friend and our newest contributor. To contact, grill, and/or harass LAMediaWatch, e-mail LAMediaWatch2007 at hotmail dot com.

Sep 23

2 Comments

Bobby Jindal and the “Freedom” of Assembly

SEE UPDATE: LSU STUDENT EXPLAINS WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED AT PUBLIC JINDAL EVENT 

LAST WEEK, MY COUSIN (and a good friend of mine) claims he was escorted out of a Bobby Jindal event by uniformed police officers. My cousin is a student at LSU and a well-known Democrat on campus, but he was not escorted out of the event for asking any questions or calling any attention to himself in order to distract Representative Jindal or his supporters. My cousin was well-dressed and had been invited to the event by a female friend who simply wanted to hear Jindal speak. One of Jindal’s campaign workers, a fellow LSU student, had identified my cousin in the crowd and apparently informed the Jindal campaign and police security, who then escorted him out of the building. My cousin is not a radical. He often reminds me that he considers himself to be more “centrist” than he considers me to be, and having known him for my entire life, I have no doubt whatsoever that he would never grandstand or disrespect a rally for any political candidate. Anyone who knows him knows that he is not capable of such a thing. He’s a dynamic and intelligent guy, and he has always been respectful of people regardless of their personal political beliefs. His only crime, it seems, was being an interested, engaged, and well-known LSU Democrat, a tall guy who is easily recognizable.

As a young college student who is deeply interested in the upcoming election and the political process, he attended the event to hear Bobby Jindal, an elected representative of Louisiana, speak about his views on the gubernatorial race. But instead, Jindal’s campaign staff ensured my cousin was humiliated and escorted out of the building, as if he were a criminal, by uniformed officers. But my cousin did not commit any crime or threaten anyone or disrespect or disturb the Jindal rally. He was simply, quietly, and respectfully accompanying a young woman.

Americans should not be used to this, but unfortunately, we are. President Bush and his team have been known to “filter” their audiences for rallies and so-called “town hall meetings,” ensuring that their is little room for productive discourse during events ostensibly billed as a part of the democratic process (“Quarantining dissent: How the Secret Service Protects Bush From Free Speech” by the San Francisco Gate). On August 17th, the federal government paid $80,000 as a settlement for arresting a couple who wore “Anti-Bush” t-shirts during a rally in South Carolina.

Jindal’s campaign, it seems, may be taking a page out of the President’s play book; however, my cousin was not sporting an anti-Jindal t-shirt or causing any type of dissension or disruption.

Republican apologists may question this, as if my cousin was a nuisance by virtue of his own personal political beliefs and therefore deserved to be humiliated and escorted out of an event sponsored by and featuring a man who would like to become our governor. But my cousin was not there to ask any questions or to voice or express any protest. He was simply accompanying a young woman who had invited him to hear a speech by a candidate for governor.

Representative Jindal has a history of avoiding debates and difficult questions, including questions about his close professional relationship with embattled US Senator David Vitter. If this man would like to be our governor, then he should allow for a free, open, and transparent exchange of ideas. Otherwise, he is attempting to subvert the healthy discourse and debate on issues and ideas to which we are all entitled as Louisiana voters.

If this was some type of colossal mistake or misunderstanding perpetrated by renegade members of the Jindal campaign, then Representative Jindal should immediately distance himself from and fire the campaign workers who ordered the use of our police force to engage in an act that of intolerance and discrimination against a college student who simply wanted to accompany a young Jindal-supporting woman to a campaign event.

I honestly hope Jindal and his campaign have the human decency to apologize. If this is cleared up, I will gladly publish Representative Jindal’s response. Please leave a comment with a legitimate e-mail address (or send an e-mail to lamarw at gmail dot com), and I will be happy to direct you to my cousin, a compassionate and understanding person who simply deserves an apology.