I spent last weekend looking for an apartment in Providence and I think I found one. Don't want to jinx it, but the Realtor said my application checked out and she would mail me the lease soon.
Here's the kitchen:
Common area: 
Bedroom: 
The location is great, it's on Broadway, just under a mile from New Urban Arts. It's also near some great casual restaurants, within a few blocks of the place are Seven Star Bakery, Julians and Nicks, all of which are local hits. I'm also a healthy mile walk from Federal Hill if I need my meatball fix. Actually, I will want to get a "wimpy skippy" at Casertas. It's been awhile.I'm not looking forward to getting a car which I'm probably going to have to do. I also forgot that Providence doesn't allow on-street overnight parking which leads to atrocious shit like this:
Almost no one has backyards in Providence because everyone has to pave them over to make them into parking lots like this sad example I saw in the South Side. You can see the grass fighting through the pavement even in this picture. Sad. Really sad.
J-O-B
Why does a city that strives to be much more cosmopolitan stubbornly have a law that makes it look so second-rate (especially late at night when you see all those empty streets)? My guess is tax revenue. Combine ongoing job loss, high unemployment and a city where you're losing a lot of property taxes because of higher education (Brown, RISD, Johnson and Wales, Providence College are probably some of the biggest property owners in the city) and they probably need every buck they can get. I'm seeing how much the foreclosure crisis is affecting property tax revenue in cash-rich New York City, I can't imagine how having so many non-profit property owners affects the taxes of a city like Providence that doesn't have as near as much industry as NYC (RI Hospital and Brown are the city's two biggest employers according to good old Wikepedia).
Driving around the different neighborhoods really hit home for me how economically depressed the city is. While it's been getting a lot of national press for being a "renaissance city" just looking around you can see the employment problem in the city (well, if you look in neighborhoods other than fancy downtown). Boarded-up houses and shuttered stores and people just hanging out during business hours. There are some serious challenges economically that the state and the city are going to have to deal with. RI has been losing manufacturing jobs at a really fast rate and apparently population too (net losses of population even after immigration is pretty scary when you think about it):
They said they watched as lifelong friends moved away in search of better conditions; census officials estimate that Michigan lost 30,500 people in the year starting July 2006, one of only two states (along with Rhode Island) to lose population in that time.It ends up being a self-perpetuating problem. The lack of jobs leads to an ongoing brain drain of the entrepreneurial talent most likely to start new innovative businesses locally. I asked one of the realtors about all the new development I was seeing downtown; a few luxury high-rise condominiums. His firm had actually sold about half of the new condos in one of the new buildings. I asked him if there was some kind of common profile of the condo buyers thinking that Providence might be attracting some other youngish professionals like myself and this might be a good for sign for its struggling economy. He told me that most of the buyers were Brown University parents who wanted a place for their kids to live off campus and/or a place for them to stay when they visit their children. Not exactly the kind of thing your city wants to stake its whole economic future on.
Art Saves! Or Something Like That...
What does this all mean for me as an outsider, a creative person, a community-oriented individual, an educator and now, the pending Executive Director of a small funky-after school arts studio that bring together artists and teenagers in this very city?
I'm not sure, but I'm excited to see what our community comes up with and facilitating that conversation. I'm not naive enough to believe to think that the arts alone, is some magic panacea that will solve deeply entrenched urban problems with global roots (in a class I took on arts and urban revitalization at Wagner, Professor Ruth Ann Stewart talked about arts cultural districts being most effective they were part of a holistic plan aiming various urban problems e.g. education, workforce development, public transportation, tax incentives etc.). But at the same time, my mantra is that the artist and art must be part of their community(ies). Shit, that's what my graduation speech was about. Job creation is hard. Better men and women have wrestled with this question than me. In the early nineties I remember reading one of George Bush's (the first) aide's anonymously ask a reporter "how DO you create a job?" It's not exactly a science, but I think you focus on creating conditions that make innovation most likely to occur and that's where unlocking creativity comes in. Any good career counselor will tell you not to choose an educational path based on what industries are hot because industries change fast.
I think that's where we come in, giving kids and artists the space and belief in themselves, to experiment, to fail and succeed, creates the kind of people with a far less limited sense of what's possible. If you ask me, that's what's really going to fuel development. Shirley Brice Heath (one of my heroes) writes some really great stuff about how community arts spaces instill entrepreneurial instincts in kids' language and sense of what they can achieve.
That's the beauty of this work, we can't predict what's going to happen, where or how the next big innovation will come from, but we can create conditions that make it more likely to happen.
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