Why can't
my neighborhood be one of the best places to live?
by Rodolpho
Carrasco
July 13, 2000
in the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group
Rodolpho Carrasco is associate director of Harambee Christian Family Center in Pasadena. Email him at rudy@qvo.cc
Soon after the birth of my first child, I picked up two books and a magazine touting "The Best Places to Live America." Having just spent nine months wondering how to raise my child and cringing at the ways I might mess him up, I thought that these guides could at least help me pick the right place to mess him up in.
The heftier of the two books, Places Rated Almanac, is the quality-of-life equivalent to the Guinness Book of World Records. It's packed with arcane details. The average roundtrip commute in Bellingham, Washington, is 36.1 minutes. Tulsa, Oklahoma, suffers 818 auto thefts per year. Virginia Beach, Virginia, is bulging with 588 general doctors, 470 specialists, and 428 surgeons. Fifty Fabulous Places To Raise Your Family, meanwhile, contains interesting profiles of selected cities, glossing over the sort of stats that Places Rated revels in.
But piles of information and opinionated editors do little to answer the question of the best place for my family to live.
"We don't see cities as they are; we see them as we are," postmodernizes Money magazine's Jon Gertner, introducing their "Best Places to Live 2000 Guide": "We know a culture hound delighted by New York City might find a small town limiting, and that a sun devil at ease in Phoenix could find a Minnesota winter rough. Great places to live? Sure. It just depends on what you want." Indeed.
A single female friend of mine has lived in a refurbished skid row apartment building, yards from downtown L.A.'s overflow of homeless people, for five years. That's the best place for her to live. I, personally, spent my junior high and high school years in a quiet, prosperous suburb, and felt displaced the entire time. Neighbors rarely spoke across fences and shrubbery, making me long for the density and boisterous atmosphere of the East Los Angeles neighborhood I was born into. Another friend of mine lives on the block with the highest per capita number of police calls in the entire city of Pasadena, and he's looking to purchase a house right there. The best place to live is relative, indeed.
Not that these guides aren't helpful if, say, you are voluntarily transferred by your job to Lawrence, Kansas, and want to know as much as you can about your new digs. And if you are a Cisco employee with a choice of many different relocation spots, well, hot diggity. Money says San Francisco is the best large city and Rochester, Minnesota, is the best small city. Places Rated calls Salt Lake City the best big city and gives Portland, Maine, the small division honors. True to its more selective mission, Fifty Fabulous Places cops out, insisting that choosing the cream of the crop is like asking a parent, "Which of your children is best?"
However varied their conclusions, these guides share an implicit magic formula -- as in, a strong economy plus good schools times cultural and recreational opportunities cubed by safety ("on the streets, in the air and in the drinking water," emphasizes Money) equals the place where you should move. Now.
Fine and dandy. These guides are products of a free market that responds to consumer demand. Since I prefer free markets to totalitarianism, statism, communism, socialism, and assorted other -isms, I'm down with that.
However, as I read page after page appealing to our very natural desires for comfort and the best life possible, I began to wonder how good a father I will be if I choose to raise my child next to an inner-city mini-market that sells liquor.
That's not a hypothetical question. My wife and I own and live in a house that actually shares a fence with said store. Our son was born in May. Nowhere in the Money report, nor within Places Rated, nor in the pages of Fifty Fabulous Cities, is such a choice endorsed -- or, frankly, even imagined.
As I mull over the morality of raising a child in this environment, I remember the curious biblical character Jonah. Jonah's story is that God commands him to go and preach to the city of Ninevah, which is so wicked that God will destroy it unless the Ninevites listen to Jonah and change their ways. But Jonah does not want go. One hundred times out of a hundred he would have chosen a city out of Fifty Fabulous Places instead. But after a dramatic and disgusting episode with a boat, a storm, and whale vomit, Jonah relocates to this non-fabulous place and fulfills his mission.
Like Jonah, I have a mission in my life. This mission involves restoration of broken communities as well as people. My family lives here because we understand one basic thing about America's inner cities: they are deforested places. By deforestation I do not mean trees. I mean leaders.
When federal desegregation laws were passed in the late 1960s, blacks, Latinos, and other minorities were "free to move about the country" (to borrow from Southwest Airlines). The strongest and the wealthiest, the leadership class, vacated first. But that vacancy left a vacuum. In that vacuum gangs and drug dealers flourished. The year that Harambee Center started, 1984, the city of Pasadena reported that there were more than 30 independent drug houses within a quarter-mile radius of the Howard and Navarro intersection.
At Harambee, one of our weapons for fighting for this community is where we live. Our entire staff lives within a few blocks of that Howard and Navarro intersection. When you live somewhere you are more likely to stand up to negative forces, because you have a personal stake in the outcome. By living here I don't imagine that I am putting my son, baby Samuel, on the chopping block because of my deluded altruism, though some may see it that way. No, I plan to fight for the quality of life in this neighborhood, and see it change for the better.
I want Samuel to make it. I also want Brandon, Ernie, Ramiro and Donte to make it. I don't want them to merely survive and escape this community. I want them to flourish in it, and perhaps one day own homes here. This is where they are from. Why can't it be a great place to live?
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