Life In The West Ward: Lynne Holden’s Holistic Approach

Lynne Holden, Project Director of the West Ward Neighborhood Partnership gets the last word as our series on the West Ward   draws to a close.
 
“When you hear everyone talk about the problems here, it’s the overcrowding in this part of the neighborhood and that’s the high rental, and what used to be single family homes are now two, three, four units.  So, we have a lot of people compacted into small areas and sometimes with less than great landlords, and so you don’t have great living conditions. It just feeds itself, that kind of thing: it breeds crime, it breeds lower participation. There are more transients, and the homeowners give more structure to the blocks. Like those who have been here for like fifty years. ‘Oh, I’ve been in my house for 66 years,’ somebody tells me and I’m like, ‘Yeah! That’s fabulous!’ And they do give that stability. One thing that’s sad is you look around at a block that I did last year this past spring, with volunteers we took one block on Washington Street, the Ten-Hundred block. We tried to do something on every single building, whether it’s planter boxes or fixing the stoops or just painting the porches, we did something. We power-washed everything. And I stopped there today, and one of the neighbors called me over. I said, ‘Oh my God, look at that: you’re living next to a condemned property! When did that happen?’ She said, ‘Oh, that just happened. And that’s not all—look two doors down. There’s another.’ So, now, in a block that we worked hard on, with maybe 30 volunteers from Community Builders, it went bad that quickly. I’m not saying those five properties were highly maintained, but we tried to put value into a block. You have that many blighted properties in the block, the property values are very bad. And I feel sorry for the homeowners; it just seems like such a difficult problem to tackle. And I try to think of creative ways to solve the problem, you know, ‘Sell them all for a dollar!’ If people who don’t have good intentions go through a neighborhood and see a lot of abandoned properties, they say, ‘Oh, this is up for grabs. This is a neighborhood that no one cares about anymore.’ It doesn’t matter that people in that block still do. It’s how it looks. It just keeps feeding into each other. We have to find a holistic approach, and that’s a very hard thing to do.” 

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