Naked City
Like a Good Neighbor
By Mike Clark-Madison, Fri., May 26, 2000
The hot spot on the neighborhood scene last weekend was the cafeteria at Martin Junior High School, which had been declared a no-whining zone by organizers of the first Neighbor to Neighbor Workshop. "The idea is that this won't be a city-bashing session where we hear everyone's individual frustrations and perceptions about how the city is ignoring and abusing the neighborhoods," said Cherrywood NA and Mueller Neighborhoods Coalition leader Jim Walker, one of the workshop's organizers. "It's about finding ways to change that."
Well, you can't really expect that 60 or so neighborhood activists will get together in a room and not complain about their misuse and abuse at official hands. In the background behind Walker, one could hear a loud male voice, at one of the small-group tables, bitching about how his neighborhood had planned and studied and made recommendations, "and we were completely ignored by the city." Of course, the fact that there wasn't anybody present from the city to respond defensively, at least not officially, made such venting more likely.
That was the idea behind the Neighbor to Neighbor effort -- a grassroots attempt to deal with Smart Growth, redevelopment, neighborhood empowerment, and all the rest without the polarizing presence of city staff. (Or, for that matter, of the Austin Neighborhoods Council, whose leadership was well-represented but which did not officially sponsor the event.) "It's essential that neighbors are in an environment where they're not just reacting to what the city tells them," said Northfield NA's Sabrina Burmeister, of Triangle fame, who co-organized the workshop with Walker and Hyde Park NA's Cathy Echols.
"At this time, an event like this is more conducive to getting new ideas on how to solve these problems," Burmeister continued. "Hopefully, we'll get to the point where the city can be part of this kind of discussion. And one of the intangible things we're trying to promote is these informal conversations and coalition-building between the neighborhoods themselves."
So, at this (in Echols' words) "not a city event, but not an anti-city event," neighbors in their small groups came up with short-term solutions that could be brought off either by the city or by the NAs. Some major themes:
(Those are all things the city could do. Things that neighborhoods could do were less specific, though attendees seemed to feel that their NAs could do a better job informing and involving their neighbors.)
Despite the officially non-official character of the event, plenty of current (Beverly Griffith), outgoing (Bill Spelman), incoming (Will Wynn), and prospective (Rafael Quintanilla and Raul Alvarez) City Council eyes and ears were on the scene to see and hear what makes the natives restless. The workshop's summarized recommendations will soon be on their way to council and city staff desks, just in time for the first city budget of the new millennium to pour some sugar on the neighborhoods.
The Neighbor to Neighbor findings will be sharing desk space with a lot of other current explorations of what the neighbors want. There's the recently presented report of Spelman's yearlong LBJ School seminar on neighborhood service delivery; there's the getting-into-high-gear neighborhood planning program, currently working in East Austin; and there's the city's new Office of Neighborhood Services, which recently opened its Neighborhood Academy, the officially sponsored analogue of the Neighbor to Neighbor Workshop.
So is there no limit to how much time and effort Austin can devote to handling and managing neighborhood issues? Probably not. "We're certainly not trying to take the place of anything else that's happening out there," says Walker. "We're big fans of the Neighborhood Academy and of neighborhood planning. But the fact that there are so many places where people are talking about this issue proves that it is a big issue."
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