The Twenty-Four Necessities

I'm compiling a list of twelve businesses and twelve non-profits every neighborhood needs to have a high quality of life, strong sense of community and accountability and control. I'll use it to create an economic development model focuses on the needs of households.

Business Suggestions

1. grocery store
2. bank/credit union
3. minutemen temp agency
4. day care
5. hospital
6. laundry mat
7. hardware store
8. office space
9. furniture store
10. diner
11. barbershop
12. book store
13. theater
14. coffee shop
15. clothing store
16. spa/bath house
17. office supply store
18. dentist
19. gym
20. hotel

Non-Profit Suggestions

1. library
2. elementary school
3. middle school
4. high school
5. community center
6. temple
7. gallery
8. park
9. post office
10. fire station
11. police station
12. head-start
13. museum/historical society
14. political party headquarters
15. government representatives offices
16. free clinic
17. settlement house

need more! How are all these different from each other? How do they connect?
What industries surround them? How can we use them to agglomerate more business and industry?

What Keeps Me from My Dreams

I am not focused enough on my work to really get it done. I spend more time wishing to talk to someone so that I don't feel like a freak for obsessing over my work.

Now I am starting to understand that most entrepreneurs don't have someone to talk to--at first. They spend more time working than talking. More time listening to need than talking. More time researching where they fit into the present framework and how they want to change the way the world see's their object of obsession. I'm okay that my mom still doesn't get urban planning.

If I spent half the time researching and listening more to insight than explaining what I think, I would be farther along in building my cities than I am now. Plus, I would actually graduate from college on time.

Here's to a semester of study.

Create Cities, Whole Cities.

Most people don't think their government is accountable to them. Some people don't trust their city government, let alone Ohio or the Feds.

But the point of the police still stands, to ensure safety. You don't think they do that in East Cleveland? Sure, they don't. The people have a high concentration of murders every year. What combats that?

I understand that you may not like how government does things, but the issues they fight are still issues we must fight if we take their power.

I want to create some new cities in Ohio. But, first, I want to create networks of citizen participation. That means citizens deterring crime, citizens creating new businesses, citizens creating new non-profits. And, once I've done that, I'll build a government around financing and legitimizing those choices.

I want to create whole cities.

What I am Focused On

It is my prevailing view that the tension in today's world is caused by pulling between two forces: the dispiriting shrinkage personal control people have and the growing resentment of being denied this entitlement.

These are opposites, so you would think that they naturally collide, but considering that America is the first true republic-- free of monarchy--, a country less than 250 years old, entitlement to personal control has never been a prevailing worldveiw. Not even during the beginnings of America, when democracy wasn't yet enacted.

Nowadays, people want to be in control of themselves, but they have been lied to by a system that isn't ready to give them that control. The system has led them to believe that radical individualization is the key to that control. The old school wants us to believe that everyone should focus on themselves and if you got yours then I should get mine. In this, we loose all control we have by ignoring why people migrate to cities in the first place: to work together.

By choosing to believe that we are best left to ignoring the needs of others, we loose all control of ourselves and our personal fields because of the chaos of no responsibility. No one feels that anyone is held accountable to anyone. No one can effect anything because everyone is thinking about sustaining themselves. This is pervasive in law enforcement, in government, in business, in banking, in marriage. This is the same reason men abandon their pregnant girlfriends as employers ignore the careers of their employees.

A man has been talking to me about crime. No, he has been talking to me about why he hates police, and I have been talking about crime. Police need to exist. Government needs to exist. But if we can't hold a government accountable, than it is bound to be corrupt. If there are only ten men on a police force and two abuse citizens, than we should be able to fire them and replace them with upstanding men from the neighborhood. On the opposite end are criminals. If in a neighborhood of 100 households, 5 are headed by drug dealers, pimps and mafia. The neighborhood should be able to kick them out. They work the same way, yet this man was mad at me. To him, if a police officer abuses his power, than he's a pig. If a man sells cocaine, he just needs help (because he was obviously only doing this to feed his starving family) and should be rehabilitated. Right.

Either way, a justice system that doesn't respond to real crime and a criminal base that infests the neighborhood have the same root cause, somewhere. My focus is to find that cause and hit its nerve, effecting both problems at the same time. If a person doesn't like the police, understandable, but that doesn't stop criminals from preying on the neighborhood. I spent an hour asking this man what he would do to have citizens deter crime, rehabilitate offenders and punish criminals without prison, when needed. He couldn't give me any answers because all he wanted to talk about was how much he hated police. Fine, than be the police and stop crime.

Do average citizens in crime-infested neighborhoods feel they can tell these people to leave? No! Is it easy? Is it possible? When people feel that the only way they can succeed is by ignoring each other, than they can't work together against people who certainly aren't so unorganized. Turn this on the cops, and you have citizens keeping police accountable for deterring crime in their cities. Can we fire off police as easily as this? Can we fire off cheifs and staff as easily as this? Do our opinions on rehabilitation and sentencing matter? They won't as long as we are so quiet about this as to think we only need to blast open when a dramatic case comes along.

If accountability amongst law enforcement and morality amongst citizens are both important, we must make mechanisms around their importance. They are systems that should already be in place. We need to put them in place. But before that, we need a serious amount of courage to take back the fact that we are all accountable for each other, or else, why live in a city at all?

Four Ways for a Police Force

Let's say you had a town of 50,000 people who all agreed to live by once complete system.

What would a police force look like in each of these four systems?

Commune: Complete public ownership, average citizen contributes greatly to management
Social-democracy: Mostly public ownership, large professional government
Conservative-republic: Mostly private ownership, small delegating government
Syndicate: Complete private ownership, average citizen is expected to self-manage

Questions:

1)Privatization of police, anarcho-capitalists? Who would pay for it?

2) How much should the general public and police work together? Block clubs, neighborhood watch?

3) Last month in Cleveland, 11 women were discovered, carved up, in a Black man's house. People were quick to blame the police and call racism. Nine of the women's families never filed missing person's reports. Where does the responsibility lie for the public to enforce the law and look out for each other? How do you cultivate that sense of shared responsibility?

4) How do you mitigate youth violence?

5) How do you mitigate rape and domestic abuse?

6) What drugs are really "victimless". Which are not?