How to Save a City Through a Website

http://www.lennyletter.com/politics/interviews/a477/how-to-save-a-city-through-a-website/

by sonabinu • 10 years ago

38 12 10 years ago

mceoin• 10 years ago

Anyone know if there's somewhere we can donate to support Tiffani Bell herself? She's a definite force-multiplier for good.

daguar• 10 years ago

Ping her on Twitter. She might have a structure for accepting a donation to support project outside the direct to-user context.

Mz• 10 years ago

There was a make-a-payment button, and I thought, What if we collected the PDF full of account numbers? What if we built a website to find people who were having problems paying their bills and we get their account numbers and we say we'll log into their account and just pay some bills for them? That's pretty much how we've paid the bulk of the first early bills.

You go, girl.

jomamaxx3• 10 years ago

This article and SOJ propaganda are insufferable.

Detroit does not lack resources or technology.

They lack intelligent social organization and responsibility.

The lack of economic opportunity is not a cause for violence, otherwise every farming community in America 100 years ago would have been a bloodbath.

Corruption and stupidity all the way up and down are the problems. Enter into any Detroit social situation: personal, professional, civic - you will see tons of really bad behaviours all around.

Moroever, the terrible behaviour of residents compounds the economic problem: nobody wants to open shop there anymore. Making it a disaster.

People should move out of the worst neighbourhoods, have the bad homes destroyed, save the ones worth saving, and rebuild. It will gentrify quickly if there is security and the former residents will probably live much higher standard of living elsewhere.

jomamaxx3• 10 years ago

HuffPo has an entire section just for Detroit:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/detroit-corruption/

The culture is as rotted as the buildings.

tbihl2• 10 years ago

People have done what you're describing. They've moved into the city core. A lot of the outer stuff, at this point, should just be considered ruins. The problem is that it's hard to write people's long-term residences off as ruins.

jomamaxx3• 10 years ago

"The problem is that it's hard to write people's long-term residences off as ruins."

It takes leadership.

Not semi-corrupt status quo.

throwaway38466• 10 years ago

A really awesome article, however I found this part around the end upsetting:

The other angle is if I or another POC wants to be an engineer, will I have to worry about "culture fit" at different tech companies? I figure that's a term that's used to just keep people out at this point. "Oh, you're not a culture fit," where the culture-fit definition is "bearded white guy that wears flannel shirts," is a problem.

The political correctness using the word POC (Person Of Color I assume) is annoying. I work in a big tech company, and there's a lot of Asians and Indians (1st generation or not), definetely more than the national average. Are they not "POC"? Around me, white people are a minority. And in those white people, a lot of them are European. The culture fit is definetely not "bearded white guy that wears flannel shirts". What is not represented is Latino, Black. It surely is a problem, but propagating the "bearded white guy that wears flannel shirts" is definitely not going to help.

saurik• 10 years ago

I work in a big tech company...

This "culture fit" diversity issue is normally describing an issue endemic to the numerous smaller tech companies; if nothing else, big tech companies often have HR departments who have dealing with these kinds of problems as one of their goals, but they also don't have the same default expectation of "these people are my world so I need to not just work well together aoth them but also would have them as my best friends".

angrow• 10 years ago

She isn't talking about your company, so there's no need to leap to its defense.

saintwind• 10 years ago

I think it's worth noting that these people were not 'losing their fundamental right to water'; the government was not going to put the military around every super market or water source and deny people who hadn't paid their bills.

These people are losing a service they're no longer paying for, which is water delivered directly to their home.

tbihl2• 10 years ago

I don't think that the facts you point to are lost on anyone here, though certainly some have a different interpretation.

I sometimes agree with this interpretation of 'positive human rights.' But I'd encourage you, in this case, to think about what has happened in Detroit.

The bottom fell out from under that city. There were a lot of dumb decisions made in the development, especially in how much they focused on horizontal-only growth. But it seems unlikely that the citizens could recognize it. Have you/would you check on the long-term finances of a municipality before you moved there? Inspect the grants they've received, conduct traffic studies to see if the infrastructure is justified and supported, and inspect their costs and funding means of infrastructure maintenance? Those are deeply-hidden systemic problems; not intentionally hidden, but completely obscured from the public eye nonetheless. If you bought into Detroit a couple decades ago, you probably couldn't see those underlying issues; all you saw was a lot of high-speed roads that let you get a big place for cheap out on the edge of town.

Now, decades later, your city has collapsed under the weight of its own largesse, and the main industry has shrunken enormously. Granted, you don't have to be an economist to figure that unions will push large industry away, and that putting all your eggs in one basket is hugely risky, but it can be hard to be so pessimistic in what seems either far in the distant future, or maybe even unlikely to really happen.

Anyway, you moved into a city that made implicit guarantees of service, and that crumbled. You moved into a city with economic activity, and that's gone. There are a lot of people who got burnt doing exactly that, and it makes a lot of sense to help those people out. Even if there are some people who move in to take advantage, it still makes our society work better if we try to help out.

Detroit wasn't special except in that they were ahead of the times. As more and more municipalities in this country move from soft to hard defaults, we're going to have a lot of people on the hook for bills they were unlikely to see coming, and in the face of economic slumps they never could have imagined. Whether we disingenuously call it a human right, or if we prefer to acknowledge it as community assistance, we're going to need a lot more of it in the coming decades.

How to Save a City Through a Website

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