The Northwest is an amazing place but the city of Tacoma is even more interesting. Even though it it is not known by many it is beloved by all. The citizens of Tacoma love their city and they have put it on the global map with Seattle and many other technological cities. How have they managed to do this? By blogging about it. The city has many bloggers that are unique to it. They have exit 133, they have Kevin Freitas and Feed Tacoma, they have Andrew Fry, TacomaMama and many others.

These people care about their city and their community. Kevin Freitas, a former student of PLU and a programmer has been blogging about his life since 1998... Now thats a lot of blogs!. He visited our Technology class and we had a wonderful time. He has also created a new blog center for the Tacomians ( my new word... LOl) it is called FeedTacoma. His blog is non-profit. It is for people that blog in Tacoma and it uses analog so that it does not consume the time of its developer and does not cost much to run besides the dedication of Kevin.

Feed Tacoma is a very clean and gleaming website because of the uniqueness of Tacomians. Tacomians are very close community wise, the people you see online, you will probably meet them in real life sooner or later. This website, contains events, discussions, shops, photos, video's. Shops? Did u say shops? Yes, in fact I did. The shops are virtual and store owners are allowed to advertise themselves and their products without a fee. Very awesome.

Tacomians are very resourceful and creative people as we can see in Kevin Freitas. So what will come next from these very resourceful, unique people? We can only guess.. :)

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. =)