The Solitarian #2
taken from anokchan.com
The Solitarian
an anarchist gamer’s take on the world.
An Anarchist World
What’s going on at Anarchist News Dot Org?
First off, an interesting comment on what is an otherwise sort of interesting story on activists and homeless people occupying a building. Here’s a comment by frenzy:
I still don’t agree. Breaking windows is neither symbolic nor propaganda of any sort. Rather, it is a revolt in and of itself. I also disagree with illegalism as propaganda of the deed. Illegalism was another self-fulfilling act, but to make it a phenomenon with a label is disgusting. In their day, as today, there were anarchists and socialists who frowned on criminal elements within their milieu. I don’t think crime needs an ideological justification such as “illegalism”; I think you’re either appreciative of it or you’re bourgeois. But I don’t remember a lot of those Parisians doing it to spread a message and incite rebellion. Instead, they were experiencing hard times, the state had recently shut down the Paris Commune in a brutal way, and many poor people went that route out of necessity.
Next, Suzy Subway and friends wanted to make a statement to anarchists after a falling out over the direction of student occupations. She follows it up with a list of who’s who among left anarcho douche bags as if the feel good sentiment for “democracy” were supposed to cover up the hyperbolic claims from the authors. It reads like an appeal for real anarchists to be more like the leftists that invite them to be less aggressive, but also are insulted by accusations of sexism and threats of rape. Those that signed this statement chose the wrong way to express their discontent, perhaps hoping sympathy could be found on an anarchist news site. However, the response was almost completely negative. It went in several directions, some feeling it is a fake document, others (like myself) telling off the signers and still others using the anarchist snitch list as the new signers onto this condescending report back/proposal.
Lastly, another reportback/proposal, this time from Olympia, Washington. “What happened in Olympia — Some notes on opacity” reports the failure of the Olympian anarchists to seize the day and how they think they could approach it next time. Also a fan of lists (lists are awesome, am I right?) this proposal for strategic thinking goes in the opposite direction that Suzy Subway and friends went and rather than denounce their fellows as potential rapists, they decided more militancy might be needed. The strategy doesn’t break away from protests, but I anticipate more thinking that wants more than what’s offered as well. Best of luck to y’all and play safe.
The Infamous JZ
John took a number of calls throughout the country, including one from Portland discussing protests and jail solidarity. The jail solidarity created a near riot situation inside the jail even. There was an attack on the Portland Police Union as well. For the April 6th 2010 show, I watched Anarchy Radio instead of listened because the audio sound isn’t as strong on the audio download. Crank that volume up Mr. Techie dude!
Q&A @ Anarchy101.org
This week’s question:What are anarchist alternatives to the police?
Question by rocinate:
1.) Instead of calling the police…
2.) How an “anarchist society” may “police” itself?
3.) Examples throughout history?
Answer by dot:
once again, the question presumes the answer.
once you get to the question of police (as a term that means anything), then the answer already sucks.i watched a very intense movie one time that was about a small band of people living in a remote area, dealing with the fact that two men hated each other, couldn’t get away from each other, and couldn’t resolve their differences. other people couldn’t help them work it out, they had been living with it for years and it just got worse. this is what i think of when the saccharine talk of community gets too much for me, but even this claustrophobic and miserable situation was better than having a specialized group of people who are authorized to use force, alienated from the rest of the people they live around, given too much power, etc.
but to more clearly address the question — community control, people being in each other’s business and intervening in problems, getting better at knowing when to be invasive and when not to be. learning how to have more permeable boundaries between ourselves and the people we care about.
skills that are next to impossible to learn in the atomized and isolated situations we mostly live in.
About Posters
The point is to make every aspect of poster creation a game. From the first images to the text to the placement of the poster, each can be enjoyed on various levels. The images can either be found, stolen, created or altered, but once an image has been chosen for the poster, one can share the image on an imageboard like anokchan.com. This gives the image out to the world at least temporarily for any “anonymous person” to use (no one is really anonymous on the internet, but many do try).
The comments on imageboards will probably suck, mock the OP (original poster) or be derogatory in some way and may also share space with images that can be of any quality, given that most anyone can upload images to an imageboard. The imageboard can often be the plaything of internet trolls, who might also be the perfect audience for poster images. A troll is bored and looking for lulz, so there are many responses they could give to the image. It could be a comment, an alteration of the image, an image in response or maybe they could also find a way to use the image in their own way outside the forum and/or be inspired by the image (inspired to poop on!).
The Solitarian #1
taken from anokchan.com
The Solitarian
an anarchist gamer’s take on the world.
An Anarchist World
What’s going on at Anarchist News Dot Org?
15-Year-Old Dies In Athens Bombing, Fascists and Anarchists Both Blamed
As many of you have heard, a bombing that occured in Athens, Greece on Sunday resulted in the death of a 15-year-old Afghani immigrant and seriously injured his 10-year old sister. Most news sources indicate that the two children were rummaging through trash cans with their mother when the boy picked up bag found in a trash can. That bag contained a bomb that exploded seconds later.
Initially, no group claimed responsibility for the action, with the clandestine group Conspiracy Cells of Fire going so far as to clearly state that they had nothing to do with the attack. Yesterday, Greek news sources received 2 claims of responsibility, one supposedly from a fascist group and one supposedly from an anarchist group. The authenticity of the claims is questionable, to say the least. While it is conceivable that fascists are responsible and that their communique is genuine, it seems as though whatever party is actually responsible for the bombing has no desire to admit fault (understandably), creating a situation where different political factions are attempting to frame each other for the tragedy.
As always the comments are amazing. Most of them are a back and forth about the Greek tragedy, but some are insightful. Here is an interesting one:
Its obvious that this is a false flag event orchestrated by para-state elements to discredit the conspiracy of cells of fire. The lack of evacuation calls and the statement released by the conspiracy disavowing this action are enough to convince me. It is very tragic that these young people were maimed, and I hope the global anti-authoritarian community does everything it can to help the survivors.
There are two points which I feel bear repeating within this context. One is that 4-6 people in the united states die because of police everyday. This is only one of countless manifestations of the violence inherent in our social structure. Worker got it right, this tragedy is nothing compared to a day of the states operations.
Second, there’s nothing more despicable then some zealot hopping on a tragedy to serve their ideological ends. These trolls are a good example. If their crocodile tears were genuine, they wouldn’t be using such ignorant language. They’d recognize that life is a precious and fleeting thing, be thankful for theirs, and busy themselves at improving the world. These people only comprehend things through the mental lens which the spectacular-commodity society has implanted in them, and are incapable of rational analysis of facts. If they truly cared about people who suffer violence, there are plenty of perpetrators of atrocities far graver then we window-hating anarchists whom they could be calling dirty names.
It isn’t that I hate windows, I just love to see them break.
But seriously there is a lot that could be said about the Greek situation, but most of it is cheerleading, monday night quarterbacking, back seat driving or whatever nonsense word for the speculative solutions people come up with for things they have no control in affecting or altering. Best of luck to the Greeks.
The Infamous JZ
On his March 30th 2010 show he talked about societal meltdown and anarchists failing to notice, among many other topics. In this clip he mentions his visit to the Bay Area and gives an example of how anarchists are focused more on their identity as anarchists and not the context that society is moving in. Listen to the full show here.
Time for A-blogs
Modesto Anarcho interviewed a student on the large walkouts in Modesto City Schools on March 22nd 2010. Here is a video of the interview.
Bash Back News reports that a fishbowl caucus is going to happen in Denver. Apparently it is an attempt to create a decision making model that forces people to listen while others talk. Here is a further explanation from the horse’s mouth:
A fishbowl caucus is different from the caucus/auxiliary model that many of us have participated in in the past. In a fishbowl caucus, the caucus sits in a circle in a room and talks. Meanwhile, the ‘auxiliary’ (anyone who is not participating in the caucus) sits in the same room, in a circle around the caucus, and listens (without speaking). After the caucus is finished, the inside circle may turn around and ask questions, or answer questions.
We believe that fishbowls will be the best way for a caucus to actually have an impact on people with privilege, while hopefully still being a positive way to talk about power dynamics among people who have parallel experiences.
Letters Journal posted a diatribe on the pro-revolutionary which is a response to a response to something that was important enough to reply to. They should just say more openly that “pro-revolutionary” is a pejorative in the manner Letters Journal wants it to be used. Yes yes! the context! If people just knew what you really mean when you say “pro-revolutionary” versus what they think you are saying! If the only people talking about what pro-revolutionary means are pro-revolutionaries of course it is going to take a positive connotation. I don’t see how the expression was doomed to fail otherwise. Entropy is a bitch and even nihilists can’t predict how their shit will become more diarrhea and defending the word from misuse is pointless as long as the word is being used by the subject of the word. Outside of revolutionary circles the pro-revolutionary as pejorative may fly more easily. If not, it is a forced meme, time to move on to the next thing.
About Posters
Finding the time to poster is sometimes hard. I work and I play and I adventure. Before I became familiar with situationist theory and urban exploration jargon, I referred to my walks as “adventures”. I enjoy the term more than “drifting”, “urban exploration”, “infiltration” or “urban hiking”.
An adventure is sometimes a quest, a hunt for thrills. Other times it is a wander. And then there are times it is just a walk in between destinations, a fixed route with little variance or detour. Even with a fixed route though, there is an ability to run into things that seem out of place with the order that surrounds us.
Putting up posters can be part of this adventure. Instead of seeking typical routes of pedestrian traffic, posters can be placed in obscurely traveled areas. Those that think of postering as a chore don’t realize the potential of placing a few posters in various areas at a time along a long wander, some in heavily traveled areas and others along those paths sought by those that seek more interesting routes.
If one must weigh the advantages and disadvantages of placing posters along rarely traveled routes, the advantages are based on audience and time. The poster may stay up longer than usual because less people pass that may rip it down. Those that would walk the same routes may also share some desire for an interesting travel so placing posters along all paths can add to the general experience the area can present. It is fun to discover old graffiti, so finding a poster around the same areas draws more attention to it than if it were posted in the University District where posters and flyers are common and easily ignored.
While posters may take time in creation, the walk to put them up can be a voyage into the unknown rather than a mundane chore.
Post-Industrialism: Included and Excluded
I’m reading and pondering “From Riot to Insurrection” at the moment. One thing that struck me was the definition of “included” and “excluded” in the post-industrial age. By post-industrialism, FRtI explains that computers and technology handle major changes in industry that used to require huge investments of capital to do. In relation to this post-industrial society, FRtI posits:
Computer programming in some skyscraper in Milan, for example, will put production into effect in Melbourne, Detroit or anywhere else. What will this make possible? On the one hand, capital will be able to create a better world, one that is qualitatively different, a better life. But who for rrhat is the problem. Certainly not for everybody. If capital was really capable of achieving this qualitatively better world for everyone, then we could all go home — we would all be supporters of the capitalist ideology. The fact is that it can only be realised for some, and that this privileged strata will become more restricted in the future than it was in the past. The privileged of the future will find themselves in a similar situation to the Teutonic knights of mediaeval times, supporting an ideology aimed at founding a minority of “equals” — of “equally” privileged — inside the castle, surrounded by wall s and by the poor, who will obviously try continually to get inside.
Now this group of privileged will not just be the big capitalists, but a social strata that extends down to the upper middle cadres. A very broad strata, even if it is restricted when compared to the great number of the exploited. However, let’s not forget that we are speaking of a project that exists only in tendency.
This strata can be defined as the “included”, composed of those who will close themselves inside this castle. Do you think they will surround themselves with walls, barbed wire, armies, guards or police? I don’t think so.
Because the prison walls, the ghetto, the dormitory suburb and repression as a whole: police and torture — all of those things that are quite visible today, where comrades and proletarians all over the world continue to die under torture — well, all this could undergo considerable changes in the next few years. It is important to realise that five or ten years today corresponds to 100 years not long ago. The capitalist project is travelling at such speed that it has a geometric progression unequalled to anything that has happened before. The kind of change that took place between the beginning of the 60’s and 1968 takes place in only a few months today.
So what will the privileged try to do? They will try to cut the excluded off from the included. Cut off in what way? By cutting off communication.
This is a central concept of the repression of the future, a concept which, in my opinion, should be examined as deeply as possible. To cut off communication means two things. To construct a reduced language that is modest and has an absolutely elementary code to supply to the excluded so that they can use the computer terminals. Something extremely simple that will keep them quiet. And to provide the included, on the other hand, with a language of “the included”, so that their world will go towards that utopia of privilege and capital that is sought more or less everywhere. That will be the real wall: the lack of a common language. This will be the real prison wall, one that is not easily scaled.
This problem presents various interesting aspects. Above all there is the situation of the included themselves. Let us not forget that in this world of privilege there will be people who in the past have had a wide revolutionary-ideological experience, and they may not enjoy their situation of privilege tomorrow, feeling themselves asphyxiated inside the Teutonic castle. These will be the first thorn in the side of the capitalist project. The class homecomers, that is, those who abandon their class. Who were the homecomers of the class of yesterday? I, myself, once belonged to the class of the privileged. I abandoned it to become “a comrade among comrades”, from privileged of yesterday to revolutionary of today. But what have I brought with me? I have brought my Humanist culture, my ideological culture. I can only give you words. But the homecomer of tomorrow, the revolutionary who abandons tomorrow’s privileged class, will bring technology with him, because one of the characteristics of tomorrow’s capitalist project and one of the essential conditions for it to remain standing, will be a distribution of knowledge that is no longer pyramidal but horizontal. Capital will need to distribute knowledge in a more reasonable and equal way — but always with in the class of the included. Therefore the deserters of tomorrow will bring with them a considerable number of usable elements from a revolutionary point of view.
This seems to suggest an alliance of interests with the (upper)middle class and the capitalist, which in a early industrial and pre-industrial era were reflected by an alliance of the small capitalist and the artisan with the big capitalist and nobility. The Teutonic knights are brought up, which is a pretty significant comparison as well. The Templars, the Hospitalers and the Teutonic knights all created micro states where they were often exempt from the rule of law in the local area. In the early stages of this privilege, it was given for the purposes of acting as the vanguard of the crusades and in the later stages (after the Holy Land was largely lost) it was to find purpose within Catholic and greater Christiandom: Fighting pirates, establishing hospitals, seeking sponsorship or creating their own mini-states.
While the Templars were suppressed, which eliminated the early banking practices throughout Europe, their remaining numbers fell inside of sympathetic states (like Scotland) or sympathetic knight orders, like the Hospitallers. The Hospitallers were not bankers, but they did focus a great deal of attention to the creation of hospitals. Like the very early stages for all knight orders, the Hospitallers relied heavily on the donations from wealthy sponsors. After the crusades were lost, the Hospitallers battled piracy and gained great amounts of wealth, but were sometimes resented for this. The Teutonic Knights after the crusades moved into Europe and became conquerors, even creating a mini-state within Prussia to launch these campaigns.
What I think is important in the comparison is how the knights were privileged with training and skills that those outside their orders did not receive. Instead of building giant physical structures to include the knights, technology builds a privilege of skills and language, backed by higher education and access to computers. In today’s age (not in the middle of the 80s) the door to these higher skills, specializations and forms of communication has attempted to provide some level of meritocracy to pull individuals in the lower strata up. This would be like the knight orders who were always open to the nobility for entrance, but would also accept members from the lower classes within their orders. These lower classed knights would receive the benefits of the order as in training and skills, but would not be allowed as much wealth in weapons, armor, horses, attendants and more difficulty in accessing higher ranks within the order.
The included and excluded are defined differently than exploiter and exploited, capitalist and proletariat. To me it is the cross class definition, which would be the included is more about middle class privilege, which includes groups of people that could be defined as “exploited” in relation to the capitalist, thus are actually proletarian, but the amount of privilege they receive puts them more in allegiance with the capitalist, which is also “included”. I do have problems with the class definitions offered within FRtI. My concepts surrounding “social war” puts greater weight of power on the institution as more important to the web of power than the class.
In discussions surrounding gentrification, it would seem that perhaps there is room to make several notes involving the mixing of two interpretations of class (the tiers of upper, middle and lower class versus the tiers of capitalist and proletariat) and how these classed tiers interact with the institutional web of the social order. The identity based tiers surrounding oppressor and oppressed also mix the social strata in ways that further confuse or blur the distinctions within society. To me, this seems like a school yard where the kids that own/control the kickball become the team captains and must choose who is going to be on their teams. Sometimes those chosen will be the most athletic, but just as often, those that the captain favors for a variety of reasons are also chosen ahead of those that may be more apt that playing kickball. Once the teams are chosen, the game begins and the sport is to manipulate the playing field to ones advantage with the given team chosen.
The game would be the institutions of the social order, the team is the classes chosen. The capitalist can be quite sexist, racist, homophobic and can manipulate the game to suit their identity biases, but the politics revolving around this can be manipulated so that the game doesn’t reflect the bias of a team to be more neutral. This manipulation of the game may change the attitudes of the team, giving greater privilege to those more skilled in playing the game, but the game still must be played, so changing the rules of the game to favor those that are less competitive is less likely than changing the rules to favor less bias within how teams are chosen. In many cases, just because the rules of the game have virtually neutralized identity bias, the bias still exists and the de facto bias of the team makers (the team captains and the insiders within the team) still attempt to manipulate the game based on the bias, though much less overtly else the rules of the game punish them.
Perhaps I’m abusing metaphor a little here, but I think there is space to discuss how capitalism defines us versus how the capitalist defines us and how the difference creates several ways of examining society which blurs the lines of how society is interpreted into several schools of interpretation. None of these schools are completely true or false, but all of these interpretations mix the definition of how the players are defined, how the game is defined, how the game defines the players and how the players define the game.
A Brief History of Columbus RAAN
One of my long standing projects has been participating in the Red and Anarchist Action Network (RAAN), but has had several manifestations in town as I’ve aged. In late 2002, I started first with “Liberatory Projects” which made a text archive cd and distributed it around town with a few friends. This was followed with a small loose group called “Columbus Anti-Authoritarian Media” (CAAM), a group that made a few short films and went to protests as part of the black bloc. We began collaborating with Columbus Anti-Racist Action, affiliated regionally with the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Network (RAIN) and slowly made friends. At this time I was an individual affiliate of both FRAC (Federation of Revolutionary Anarchist Collectives) and RAAN. CAAM, as a group, was also RAAN affiliated.
Sometime in 2003 some friends and I helped found a group called the “Arawak City Brain Trust” which gathered a large number of anarchists, activists and anti-authoritarians and sought to experiment in just about anything. Both CAAM and ARA dissolved into the Brain Trust along with a large section of people that were in Citizens for Justice in Palestine. We discussed affiliating with FRAC and RAAN at one point. FRAC was largely rejected because of the dues request. However, the majority agreed to join RAAN without much a problem, with only a couple opposing voices. Because the Brain Trust used consensus as the model and because affiliation was not seen as necessary, it was decided that the group did not have to join. Instead, inside the Brain Trust, the RAAN Fraction was created, which shared decision making with the Brain Trust for much of the Brain Trust’s existence.
The Arawak City Brain Trust survived for a few months with regular meetings to discuss the potential of what we could do with over a dozen people (and growing). The main activities of the Brain Trust were discussion, graffiti, Food not Bombs and a few attempts at tabling events. As the group continued, the RAAN Fraction felt it was being held back by remaining within the Brain Trust due to being constantly derailed by certain individuals that would attend meetings. So in order to move forward, the RAAN Fraction rejected Brain Trust meetings, kicked out several members of Fraction and began a discussion group and graffiti campaign throughout town. Without the RAAN Fraction, the Brain Trust dissolved. While the RAAN Fraction never official dissolved, after several months of activity several of the members were no longer able to participate due to personal problems and became inactive sometime in 2004.
This was not the end of RAAN activity for me though. While the end of my participation in the Fraction was largely due to my vehicle breaking down and living on the other side of town away from everyone, I continued operating as a RAAN affiliate in workplace agitation. The workplace was a retail store. By this time, I was already familiar with agitation in the workplace from several previous attempts. Throughout 2002 to 2004, the workplace saw RAAN graffiti and a large amount of damage, but it was played off as normal negligence and had little effect on the workplace. Around Christmas 2003 I, along with many of my co-workers in the stockroom formed a work council and decided to encourage a slowdown and voluntary call offs.
The slowdown was done for two reasons: One, the boss was pushing us all too hard and we had enough of it. Two, I informed most of the workers that like the year before, most of the people after the holiday season would be released so we needed to stretch work out enough so that we could make it through winter, which many felt was a necessity to cover bills. At the height of the slowdown, we had seized extended breaks, turning 15 minute smoke breaks into a 1/2 hour and our 1/2 lunches sometimes into an hour. After the boss got frustrated and yelled at us about how slow we were working, we decided to all go on break at the same time for an hour, though we were eventually convinced to return to work. By the time Christmas had hit and passed, sure enough we had enough work to make it til the middle of February instead of the middle of January, winning a month before the inevitable mass layoffs began. By the end of 2004, discouraged and without much more success in agitation and also for personal reasons, I left.
Sometime in 2005 I stopped considering myself affiliated with anyone and toured around with green anarchists and later in 2006 I spent some time working primarily on Indymedia projects and I began a freestyle mixed martial arts sparring group. At the end of 2006 I went to the Great Lakes Anarchist Gathering and participated in trying to get the Midwest Action Network off the ground. In March 2007 I organized a RAAN “Warrior Night” which held several workshops around the armed and unarmed combat tactics, the history of ninjas and DIY armor and weapons. I decided sometime later in 2007 to begin a work abolitionist group called “Revolt Against Work” (RAW) which concentrated on discussion, geographic analysis, posters, graffiti and a locally produced bulletin which was “narrowcasted” throughout the West side of Columbus. We went on two campaigns during this time. One was a work abolitionist poster campaign on the far West side of Columbus, the other was a graffiti campaign in response to the city dislocating the homeless along the river downtown.
Working with others in early 2008, we formed the Subvertical Action Netwerk, which brought together groups like Anarchist Black Cross, Copwatch, Anti-Racist Action, Revolt Against Work and Radio Subvertista. It was a small network that dissolved shortly after its creation and reverted back into the Revolt Against Work project once we realized that most of the other groups were largely inactive outside our collaborations to do was RAW was already doing.
Currently Revolt Against Work still continues to operate and still continues to remain a RAAN affiliate, though without a RAAN hub, we’ve lost much contact with the network and so we’ve operated autonomously. Though RAW remains a collaboration between Lord Rambler and I, we still occasionally organize walks and do graffiti and posters throughout town, primarily on the Westside of Columbus.
My new project is working with groups and individuals around development in Columbus, though this time I am going to concentrate on the Eastside of Columbus. Looking at what exists as far as an analysis of gentrification and development that others have created, I’m left to feel unsatisfied that anti-authoritarians have a grasp on how such things actually operate, so I’m looking to expand my knowledge of this and other aspects of Columbus that have largely received a simplistic examination. It is my hope that by getting more into detail here that others will see how power operates and perhaps how resistance can be taken on without simplicity, hype and rhetoric that often comes from groups that seek to present themselves as an oppositional force.
Bronzeville Neighborhood Association
This is an old entry from the Bronzeville Neighborhood Association blog. The article was originally published by the “Columbus Post”. The reason I’m re-posting it is to highlight some of the players in the area that are of interest to my analysis of development on the Eastside of Columbus.
—
Brown blasts city on Long-Hamilton project
By GILBERT PRICE
A $6.2 million office building that is designed to help revitalize
the near east side is being challenged by one of the groups the city
said it is trying to help.
Willis Brown, president of the King-Lincoln Bronzeville Association,
said that his group is vigorously opposing the plan to put an office
building at the corner of Long and Hamilton avenues. The new
building, approved for tax abatement and city subsidies at city
council last week, will become the new home of the police
department’s Internal Affairs Bureau.
“It’s wrong,” Brown said. “They can coat it and flavor it however
they want it, but it’s wrong.”
The onetime home of the Novelty Food Bar, which has sat vacant for
about 30 years, is the linchpin of a plan by Mayor Michael Coleman
and city officials to create a business and entertainment district
on the near-east side. The building, proposed by Gideon Development,
would house commercial tenants in addition to the Internal Affairs
Bureau.
The King-Lincoln Bronzeville Association had proposed a different
strategy.
According to Brown, they had endorsed a plan for 50 condominiums on
the site.
“Above all, we want to bring people back to our community.
Specifically, the middle class, Black or White. The middle-class
have disposable income,” Brown said. “You have the people fueling
the retail, and bringing life to the community.”
The city’s effort, pressing for commercial development as a means to
bring more people into the neighborhood, is “putting the cart before
the horse,” Brown said.
Council voted 7-0 to approve the proposal, which includes tax
abatement for the property and funding for improvements on the
property.
The vote on a lease for the Internal Affairs Bureau was 6-1, with
council member Charleta Tavares voting no.
She voted against the lease for IAB because she said that reflected
the sentiment of the community. “I had heard it when IAB was looked
at to go into the Model Neighborhoods Building,” Tavares said.
Tavares said that, in addition to the IAB offices, the city was
planning to build a new police substation on Taylor to go along with
a new facility on E. Main Street.
“I didn’t believe three units of the police department in a half a
mile radius was necessary. I don’t believe it’s going to bring the
kind of traffic to that retail establishment,” Tavares said.
Brown said that he was also opposed to the IAB unit being housed in
the new building.
“We don’t want to create a police state,” Brown said. “Why is it
that, in order to make a neighborhood safe, you’ve got to barricade
it with police substations?”
Tavares said she was not opposed to the city’s lease of 27,000
square feet of office space in the new building, only with the
client.
“We should put a unit of government that’s going to bring people
into the community, like Building Services,” Tavares said. That unit
of the Department of Development, which works with contractors and
residents for building permits, would add traffic to the
neighborhood.
“I’m looking at not only the businesses right there in the Gideon
Project, but I’m also looking at the rest of Long and Mt Vernon, to
bring people there so you have outside people coming to the
neighborhood that wouldn’t otherwise be there,” Tavares said.
“That’s part of what we want for that kind of a catalyst: we want
people who are going to draw people to it to the neighborhood.”
Tavares said that she found the King-Lincoln Bronzeville
Association’s plan for the site to be “a nice idea”. She wasn’t sure
the plan could work.
“You have to make sure that the numbers work,” Tavares said. “I
didn’t see the financial portfolio to see whether the numbers
worked. We had some people to say that wouldn’t work.”
Mike Brown, spokesperson for Mayor Michael Coleman, rejected
allegations that the city entered into a plan without sufficient
community input.
“We had more than 28 meetings on the whole project,” Brown said. “We
had multiple meetings on the IAB. We have the support of the Near
East Area Commission, the Long Street Business Association. This has
significant support from across the community.”
Brown said that the project would bring job growth to the near-east
side neighborhood, even beyond the Internal Affairs jobs.
We’ve had multiple conversations on the future of this area. We have
a private sector developer spending several million dollars on a
site that has been vacant for more than 30 years,” Brown said.
Brown said that he is not buying it.
“Every time you hear the mayor, and the city council, and Gideon
Group talk, they say, `it’s going to spark development’,” he said.
Brown likened their analogy to a car’s spark plugs.
“Spark plugs are good, but fuel is better,” Brown said. “They’re
going around the neighborhood creating sparks, but there’s no fuel.
The fuel is people; that drives the engine of commerce and
appropriate sustainable development.”
Brown said that the city’s record of creating strong communities is
poor, and points to the mayor’s much-touted “Four Corners” project
as a failure in that regard. The project, at the corner of Cleveland
and 11th Ave., included several businesses, including a restaurant,
a bank, and a transportation hub for the Central Ohio Transit
Authority.
According to Brown, the restaurant closes at 3 p.m., and there has
been little development around the site.
“If you go ask the people at Milo-Grogan, Rosewind or Southwind what
impact the [Four Corners] development had on their community, they
would tell you, `none,’” Brown said.
For Brown, the battle over the Long and Hamilton site is not
finished.
“We’re going to fight it with all the ability we have within the
law,” Brown said.
He said that the King-Lincoln Bronzeville Association was planning
to file suit over the project.
“We’re not going to let any steel come out of that ground for a
police building,” Brown said.
