So, it appears that the chaos expected as shown through the title of my last post, on September 18, over four days ago, descended upon this website. And stayed there until website finally fixed. Giving me enough room and space to concentrate elsewhere. Appreciated the break, even if forced.
So here I am, and lots has shifted personally since September 18, mainly having to do with my recognition that I have been in a seemingly chronic despondent mood, driven personally by the seeming impossibility of a project a few of us in Green Acres Neighborhood (474 houses, with 80% now rentals) are trying to accomplish, with protection as provided by hoped for status as Conservation District. The Historic Commission gave us the go ahead (6 t0 1) on August 12. Our fate now to be decided at a City Council meeting on October 1.
Meanwhile, long story. Meetings every Sunday to plan what we need to do the next week (more paperwork, phone calls, creating flyers, canvassing neighborhood, etc.) Huge bureaucratic run-around, and seemingly bogged down permanent confusing mess.
This week, we have invited five of the nine City Council members to meet with us. The four who are undecided. And the fifth — our supposed district representative! — adamantly opposed. Two of the others (long time City Council people) are definitely with us. For more on the remaining two, see below.
We need 5 out of 9. Will we get that majority?
We are going to decide whether or not to go ahead with our application later this week. Should we wait, and try again next year with more “buy-in”? And meanwhile, rebuild the Green Acres Neighborhood Association, which I headed up with a friend (now dead) and then quit about a decade ago to begin Green Acres Permaculture Village as a living example of what I would like to see in the neighborhood? Big question. But if we do decide to wait, then we lose the seven houses to demolition that spurred this effort in the first place. If we do decide to go ahead, and lose, will that mean the City Council would be adamantly against us no matter what we tried in the future? Big questions.
BTW: the entire Council, newly elected, sits until December 31, 2027!
And we’ve decided to meet the Council members here, at the Green Acres Permaculture Village. No more than two at a time (regulations). For one hour each time, to learn actually where each one stands and why. To attempt to find common ground.
All of us on this committee are over 70 years old, interested in preserving the entirety of Green Acres — which has very clear boundaries, sits on the eastern edge of Indiana University, and is surrounded on the other three sides by commerce— as a precious, quiet, safe, tree-lined time capsule that reaches back to the end of World War II, when the G.I. Bill made it possible for returning soldiers to buy its newly constructed small homes, begin their families, and get a college education. Plus, as RFK Jr. has said recently, those small homes provided equity, for those men to get loans with which they could open their own small businesses — and thus begin to generate the entrepenurial Middle Class that ensured stability for the culture.
Over the past few decades, that small business, Middle Class stability has now been gradually and then profoundly eroding, the Middle Class disappearing, to be left with feudalism, as the short-lived Occupy Movement memorialized back in 2011-12: we are the 99%.
(Remember what happened during the covid op: small businesses shut down; Costco, Walmart, etc. remained open! We know the destruction of the Middle Class is happening by design.)
Green Acres Neighborhood then platted more streets east of the original, twice more through the 1950s, larger and larger, but still modest, homes on larger and larger lots — thus hinting at the purely materialistic value system that would come to overwhelm so many in this nation and beyond.
The two people on the City Council who are so adamantly opposed to our application that we aren’t even bothering to invite them to talk, BTW, are in their 20s. Their minds are made up: the only thing that matters is growth, multistory everything, at all costs. To hell with history.
Reminder: the other person who is adamantly opposed we DO want to speak with, since she supposedly represents our neighborhood!
BTW: All these people on the City Council are there until December 31, 2027! The only two who are totally with us were on the City Council before. And as one of them told me, “Had Green Acres come before the Council a few years ago, you would have been a shoe-in.”
On a larger level, my despondency is not just confined to the seemingly impossibility of the project we are involved in, but the purely profit-driven value system that has overtaken this culture. (Yes, with 80% rentals, you can imagine that some percentage of their owners who live elsewhere, would much rather NOT protect this place).
Yet might my current despondency have another root altogether?
This promises to be a contentious week.
I’m seeking to regain my equilibrium, no matter what.
Please send prayers and energies.
