Hilltop.. of Tacoma

In My perspective On Service class we have had a few field trips and a variety of guest speakers. Yesterday we had a guest speaker named Jean and she talked about the change that resulted in her area. The area was was a drug selling place. There were 33 houses and 3 of them were drug houses that ruined the whole appeal of the neighborhood. A nice Victorian house whose value is half a million dollars was selling for 33,000. Now that is very very bad. The neighborhood was filled with shootings all the time... but no one actually got shot... LOL.. cause the gangsters didnt know how to shoot...

When she moved into that neighborhood for financial and housing reasons.. No one was standing up for the neighborhood.. to the druggies that meant that no one cared... Neighbors didn't know their neighbors... so how could they stand up... Some of the druggies lived with their parents and those either denied that their children were doing drugs or ignored it because of fear...

Jean coming from a small city in Montana decided to bake bread and get to know her neighbors... They probably thought she was wacky... but that's not the point.. LOl... The point is that she got to know her neighbors and they helped her and she helped them.

Getting rid of drug dealers is not easy...Especially the Crips.The Crips are one of the largest and most violent associations of street gangs in the United states. They believed that they have power because they had oozies- M16 or AK47. Calling the cops did not help much either cause at that time they had guns that were small and uneffective. There were 32 gangsters and 2 cops would show up.. not a fair fight.

The thing that causes neighboor hoods to be run over with drug users- in this case crack users, a different form of cockaine is that the neighborhood was run down and in some ways neglected. There were abondoned houses that the drug dealers could use.Hilltop was a center for lawlessness thanks in no small part to absentee landlords who had neglected their properties. But all that started to change.Business leaders, residents and the city organized and launched a project to buy property, renovate rundown homes and build new ones, selling them to low-income people interested in becoming first-time homeowners.

This created change that propelled more change and finally kicked out most of the druggies.
The reason why this was effective is kind of explained by the " broken window theory-if the first broken window in a building is not repaired, then people who like breaking windows will assume that no one cares about the building and more windows will be broken. Soon the building will have no windows...."

The moral of this story is take care of your neighborhood. When everything will be in its proper place drug addicts will have no place there. Community is also very important. Know your neighbors. Become a mentor to a child. =)