Tooting My Own Horn

I am using this post to take a short break in my narrative about decline, subsidized housing and related subjects to promote a much older, more basic, form of communication.  I will in future posts return to these subjects, and introduce others, so stay tuned.  Meanwhile:

I will be returning to the Norristown area for a number of events during the week of June 16 – 23.  I would love to see you who are in the area at any of them.  I will be discussing my book, and thus history.  However, as I have begun to employ both history and this blog to link together individuals and community groups in municipalities in the Schuylkill Valley, I will be speaking about the past, but always with an eye on bettering the future.

Here’s the schedule:

Tuesday, June 18, 7:30 PM:  Norristown Municipal Building, 235 East Airy Street, Norristown.

Norristown’s “Ambassador,” Hank Cisco, will perform a reversal of his usual function by introducing me to the members of the Norristown Municipal Council.  I will present a signed copy of my book What Killed Downtown? Norristown, Pennsylvania From Main Street to the Malls to each member of Council, and to the Municipal Administrator and Solicitor.  I will then (briefly) pitch my mantra that “knowledge of the past better equips us to live in the present and plan for the future.”  The individuals who will hear me that night are central to that future.

Thursday, June 20:  At noon I will address the Norristown Rotary Club.  Sorry, but this one is “members only.”  The fact that I will be addressing Norristown businessmen at their regular venue in West Norriton Towship pretty much says it all, don't you think?

Saturday, June 22;  Selma Mansion, 1301 West Airy Street, Norristown. 

The Norristown Preservation Society is presenting its annual “History Day” event at the historic Selma Mansion.  Doors open at 11:00 AM.

I will speak not just about What Killed Downtown?, but about the decline of Norristown in general.  Unfortunately, the exact time has not been determined as this newsletter is being prepared.  The day will include fashion shows as well as displays by local history and preservation organizations, and will definitely offer a good time for all!  I will be present for the entire event, available to sell and sign my book.

Saturday, June 22, 7:00 PM: Coffee Talk Artists Co-Op, 507 West Marshall Street, Norristown.

“Meet Author Michael Tolle” 

The plan here is not to speak, but to just talk (and maybe sell my book, of course).  The folks at Coffee Talk are leaders in the effort for a better Norristown, and their efforts deserve to be supported.  So stop by, and let’s learn from each other.

Sunday, June 23, 1:00 – 2:30 PM:  Towne Book Center & Café, 220 Plaza Drive, Providence Town Center, Collegeville (at the intersection of Rt. 422 and Rt. 29).

I will speak and be available to sign copies of my book.  The Towne Book Center is one of the independent bookstores leading the fight against Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and the like.  You can buy my book at any of those familiar sites, but here would be my first choice.  If you live anywhere near Collegeville, you should patronize this store; if you don’t, you should patronize an independent bookstore near you (and ask for my book, if you haven’t already).

It is going to be a very interesting week!  In between events, I will be researching possible future subjects for my Schuylkill Valley-centered blog, “The More Things Change…” (themorethingschange.michaeltolle.com).  In the following weeks, my travels on the east coast may also produce subjects for my wide-ranging blog “…”The More They Stay The Same” (themoretheystaythesame.michaeltolle.com).  Become a follower of both!

Recommended Reading: Community Blogs

It’s time I followed up on my blog’s description, and try to link together the many people in the Schuylkill Valley striving to help their local communities improve the quality of life.  I begin by recommending four websites in the text that follows. This is only a start; I hope to discover more such sites and would appreciate hearing of any you know.  We need to spread the word about the eternal truth I quote at the conclusion of this post.

First, not just a specific site, but a specific post.  Katie Bambi Kohler, who blogs as “cheesesteak princess,” posted an entry that everyone interested in the future of Norristown should read.  It is entitled “Hard Look at My Hometown.”  Its goal is to stimulate a conversation about Norristown, and I fully endorse the sentiment behind it.  I wanted to republish the entire post, but her editor at the Times Herald webpage asked that I only publish a link.  This is odd, as this blog also appears in the Times Herald, but I will comply.  Here it is:

http://www.timesherald.com/article/20130326/OPINION03/130329622/kohler-hard-look-at-my-hometown

Three locally oriented websites have also caught my eye, at least so far.  Each focuses solely on its own community, but even a casual search of their articles produces familiar terms and concerns.  Their concerns should be more widely understood, because they issues they address are shared across the Delaware Valley, each in relation to the status of the community under scrutiny.  Thus I recommend that local community activists, regardless of their specific location, peruse these sites regularly, and use them to learn more about the nature and complexity of our shared issues.

Two sites focus on Pottstown.  Even a brief glance at either will make a Norristown resident feel right at home, if uncomfortably so.  Consider:

Save Pottstown!! (http://savepottstown.com/)  has a mission statement that reads as follows:

We abhor injustice and Pottstown has, unfortunately, more than its fair share.  The goal of the site is to expose the corruption that has overtaken our fair town.  Whether that corruption be from elected officials, paid Borough employees, or business owners [sic].”

Consider a question the site wishes to pose to the County Commissioners:  “Why does Pottstown have so much subsidized housing and what is proactively being done to distribute subsidized housing more uniformly throughout the county?” (2/7/2013).  If more evidence is needed, almost every article on the site’s home page contains the word “crime.”

If you are searching for local cause-oriented websites, one entitled “goldencockroach” might not immediately catch your attention, at least not as a possibility.  I know I initially overlooked it.  The site (http://goldencockroach.wordpress.com/), has an equally specific Pottstown focus, as its mission statement explains:

We are citizens of Pottstown, Pa working together to achieve accountability for the Future of Pottstown by holding slumlords responsible for the blight, crime and destruction they contribute to our community.  We encourage our Elected Officials, Municipal Employees, Montgomery County and the State of Pennsylvania to embrace an expansive, borough-wide approach to planning and regulation through education, communication and transparency.

In considerable contrast is a site devoted to Conshohocken, entitled Conshy.org (http://www.conshy.org/).  It mission statement is much more general, and its attitude more optimistic: 

I wanted to talk about Conshohocken. I wanted a place to express my observations, my complaints and my thoughts.

My immediate impression was that the tone of the three sites listed above is directly related to how each borough is currently faring in today’s economic climate.  I would like to explore that thought further, and hope to.  I recommend you all add all these sites to your periodic reading list, although I neither endorse nor echo any specific statement they might contain.  We simply need more voices added to the conversation, and for residents of the Schuylkill Valley, these should be included.

So, until next time, let me echo the words of Red Green, that wise man of the Canadian north woods:  “Remember, we’re all in this together.”

Did Conshohocken Revitalization begin with Section 8 Housing?

I was doing some research for future blog posts on the local impact of the federal Urban Renewal program when I encountered a website with the wonky name of “Redevelopment in Conshohocken Online Information” (http://www.conshohockens.com/).  In the section on the history of redevelopment’s progress in the borough the website makes a claim that is worth noting and discussing.  I have trouble accepting it at face value, but I have done no specific research on Conshohocken’s post-WWII history.  So I am asking you for help.

The website’s home page briefly covers the early history of Conshohocken.  More recent times dominate the narrative, beginning with the crises of both the Alan Wood Steel and Lee Tire companies by the 1970s.  The page focuses on a 25-acre site designated as Conshohocken’s Urban Renewal Area, the core of old downtown.  Demolition of this area began after receipt of a federal grant in 1974.  The site relates the first faltering steps of proposed projects, through the failure of the (second) borough redevelopment program in 1981, allegedly due to high interest rates. 

Then things changed.  The article argues that Conshohocken’s revival truly began in 1981 with a change in developers.  The crucial paragraph is quoted here in full:

“When interest rates started to turn around in 1981, the Borough turned

to Meehan-Weinmann to develop a 40-unit Section 8 Housing development

in the redevelopment area. Within a year the revitalization efforts of

Conshohocken came to fruition with the start of construction on the

Pleasant Valley Apartments.  Based on their performance Meehan-Weinmann

was then selected by the Borough and the Montgomery County

Redevelopment Bureau to sign a contract on October 3, 1983 as the

exclusive Redeveloper of the 25-acre Urban Renewal Area.”

Can this be true?  Was Conshohocken’s first real step toward revival the construction of Section 8 Housing?  Doesn’t this fly in the face of all that is accepted about types of residences, that apartment dwellers contribute less to a community than homeowners, and that Section 8 dwellers contribute the least of all? 

The chronological sequence of construction is indisputable, and the claim that the developer’s success with the Pleasant Valley Apartments led to its being selected for further development rings true.  Does this make a Section 8 Housing project the first actual achievement of borough revival?  The website claims this to be so, but is there another interpretation?  What is the general perception of those who lived through this time?  Did they share this view, and welcomed the Pleasant Valley Apartments?

This is a subjective question for sure, and one that can be best answered by Conshohocken residents, particularly the “old Conshy” hands.  I want to hear from you!  This is an opportunity to be heard on a subject on the lips of many right now, your neighbors just upriver in particular.  Your knowledge can only help, and better inform the controversy.

Please, before you comment, check out the site to see what it actually says; don’t just take my word for it.  Then tell me—and by extension, a steadily increasing number of people—what you think about this well, interesting observation.

Before Section 8 and “Half-Way Houses”…a reminder

My previous blog located both Section 8 and “half-way houses” as issues that would bedevil Norristown after the mid-70s, and reminded readers that Norristown’s decline had begun much earlier than that.  My book, What Killed Downtown? identified the collapse of Main Street as virtually complete by 1975, making it perhaps the first component of decline to fully manifest itself.  I concluded the blog with a reminder that Norristown police were forced to institute a K-9 patrol on Main Street in 1972 to assure a public grown nervous over crime, years before anyone had even heard of “Section 8.”

If we can’t blame Section 8 or “half-way houses” for problems that had surfaced earlier, then perhaps we can accept that Norristown’s problems—and, by extension, those of so many other municipalities—were both broader and grew from deeper roots than can be explained by any simple reference to one or two specific actions.  Those of you who cannot accept this had best cease reading here, as the discovery of facts can have a disturbing effect on one’s preconceptions, and I would not wish to be held responsible.

By the mid-1970s Norristown, in company with countless other urban communities of all sizes, had already seen a substantial number of its more affluent and more connected residents flee to suburban lifestyles of varying economic wealth.  The buzzword for this migration is “white flight.”  An interviewee in my book summed it up by saying “We all eventually sold to black people.” In Norristown’s case, the image is incomplete.  While middle and even working class families were leaving in the 50s and 60s, their more affluent neighbors had already left.  By 1950, the borough’s traditional economic and political elite, the descendants of those who had arrived the earliest, had already exited the mansions on DeKalb and West Main Streets, often for the “Main Line.”  There is a substantial argument to be made that they did not leave because black people were moving into the neighborhood, but because Italians were.

Norristown’s history, like that of so many other municipalities, is the story of successive waves of immigrants arriving, exhibiting their strange languages and customs and disconcerting the existing population, even when the municipal services we take for granted today barely existed, and those that did hardly constituted a tax burden.  But to focus on ethnicity or race with the perspective we now have is to miss the fundamental point.  That point is economic:  each wave of arrivals was of a lower economic standing; a better life was their common reason for coming in the first place.

In the 20^th century, Norristown’s population changes, while producing a statistically stable overall population (the number of those arriving was very close to the number of those leaving), had an enormous cumulative financial impact.  Very broadly phrased, the 20th century saw the steady departure of those residents whose economic contribution to the borough exceeded their need for services, to be replaced by those whose need for services exceeded their economic contributions.  Within this context, the most valid one in a worldwide market economy and local tax-based services, race or ethnicity become the irrelevancies they are.  In fact, to blame an ethnicity or race is to serve those groups whose economic power do the actual manipulating, to their own profit.

Today’s call to properly understand how “the more things change” is this:  the occupation of “slumlord” has proven to be historically profitable long before Columbus ever saw the Atlantic Ocean.  Here in America all that has ever been required is identifying a community with depressed property values (although an inattentive or corrupt municipal administration is always desirable).  Local slumlords profited by cramming poor immigrant Italians into the East End in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and the process has continued, shifting to African-Americans, and more recently, Hispanics.  

I will end this brief introduction to an enormously complicated issue by offering a thesis that is likely to raise the hackles of many:

Section 8 housing and half-way houses were a SYMPTOM, not a CAUSE, of Norristown’s decline.  They would both enlarge and accelerate that decline, but to focus on them (and explicitly or implicitly, their inhabitants) is to blame the victim, not the perpetrator.

Let’s hear what you think of that thought (I can’t wait!), and in future posts I will elaborate and explain why I believe it to be true.

“Section 8 Housing and Half-way Houses": A primer

I’m going to jump right in and lead off this blog with the subject so intimately connected with Norristown, as the title indicates.  But be warned, you may not like what you read.

The quote above appeared quickly after Gary Puleo’s article on my new book What Killed Downtown? (January 17), and was endorsed by others who castigated me for not mentioning either subject in my analysis of downtown’s collapse.*  This allows me to offer a perhaps unwelcome lesson in historical complexity.

My book declares downtown Norristown “dead” by 1975, and arguably earlier.  "Section 8," an amendment to the Housing Act of 1937 which established the housing subsidy program, was passed in August of 1974,  “Half-way houses” may have several specific meanings, but the seminal one was a result of the “Broderick Decision” of 1974 that began the “deinstitutionalization” of Norristown State Hospital.  Thus Norristown only began to experience the results of these events from the mid-to-late 1970s.  As the narrative of my book ended in early 1975, then neither Section 8 nor “half-way houses” had anything to do with the collapse of downtown.  Equally, the fundamental reason I identified for the collapse of downtown may well have contributed to the broad decline of Norristown, but it was by no means as fundamental.

Here then is my basic thesis:  First: there were several causes for Norristown’s overall decline. Second: They had to interact to achieve the effect they did.

Am I saying that all was well with Norristown neighborhoods before Section 8 and “half-way houses”?  Of course not.  Anyone who has actually read my book will know that.

A question to ponder until next time: 

If Section 8 and “half-way houses” date no earlier than the mid-to-late 70s, then why did the Norristown police institute K-9 patrols on Main Street to combat crime as early as 1972?

Hint:  The more things change….

Let me know what you think!

Here's the link: www.whatkilleddowntown.com