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PPDC’s Windshield Tour offers look at Richmond’s most challenged neighborhoods
08/17/2011 1:37 PM by John M
Rev. Lynne Washington, executive director of the Peter Paul Development Center, leads a bus tour of the public housing in the East End:
In this bleak city island, poor means an average income of $8,900, says Rev. Lynne Washington, executive director of the Peter Paul Development Center (PPDC).
Rev. Washington is our guide on the Windshield Tour, which safely carries us into areas of town many will never visit; to witness landscapes many of us would never forget were we to see them.
The Windshield Tour is about a 90 minute event. Aboard the bus, participants learn interesting and shocking facts about the neighborhoods served by the PPDC.
TAGGED: PPDC
Can anyone take the tour? How do you get tickets?
It’s not just education that’ll help… changing attitudes will too. Public housing was not supposed to be a way of life. Plus these are NOT neighborhoods and people in the public housing areas do not treat them as a person would a legitimate neighborhood. Because they do not own it, they don’t care about the trash they dump in the streets while walking. They don’t care if they stomp out the grass every time RRHA tries to spruce up the places to make them look nice. They abuse the system. Now, not everyone abuses the system; however, you hardly hear of or see these people. The rest make them all look bad. You also need to inspire people to get out the rut. You can focus on the children but the parents and grandparents need work as well. There needs to be motivation to get up and get out. I would love to see the projects demolished and mixed-use and mixed-income rebuilt neighborhoods take their place where they can be invited back and be helped to own their homes and have pride in upkeep etc. The projects themselves are depressing and are an eyesore to our city. We’d all be better without them.
The usually have it on Wednesdays, and it’s free. You just have to call the PPDC and confirm so they can prepare a lunch for you. Full article is actually here.
The fact that a lot of bad people. Make a lot of money, in federal grants.Supposed To maintain the buildings.and landscaping.. They just fill out the right paperwork.Sign off on work never done. Keep that money flowing… Doing as little as possible. … Until the powers that be find an alternative to lining those pockets..this will not change. And nobody including myself is gonna do shit about it.
Excuse my french
until any of you have spent even a second with anyone that lives in any of those housing developments, you have no right to speak about them or for them.
the vast majority of the people who live in these communities are not bad people. there are plenty of people, white, black and purple who abuse the system, and you can find these people at every level of the caste system. think the rich don’t benefit from their cushy tax breaks? think they don’t abuse them? please. and at a much higer cost, I would imagine.
it just doesn’t offend your senses in the same way.
education in these neighborhoods IS the answer. but it can not be done paternalistically. you can’t go in with the holier then thou attitude and expect people to jump on board with all your plans for a “new” church hill and you can’t just eradicate people from your neighborhood becauase you consider them an eye sore. they are people for goodness sake.
i love the PPDC for “re-humanizing” the people who live in these neighborhoods. i hope the people who take the tour can see past their stereotypes of church hill and the housing developments that are here. i hope that more people take that tour and begin to see the effects on the PEOPLE who live there.
i hope some of you take a look at yourselves and our attitutdes towards these nieghborhoods. imagine if you found yourself so down and out, that public housing was your only option. what it would be like to live in those four cinderblock walls day in and day out. what that would do to your psyche. how would you pull your self out of that situation? you can’t assume that everyone has the education or resources to “pull themselves up”
almost all of the children I work with come from these neighborhoods or similar ones all over the city. i can’t even begin to tell you how many parents say “don’t judge me by where i live” because “i’m doing my best to get us out of here” but that is increasingly difficult with out a fair wage and rising rents.
take a step back from your stereotypes and get to know your neighbors. you may be suprised.
Thanks #6 for your great comments, you hit the nail right on the head.
I used to know someone named Lucille who climbed out of the projects. She grew up there, but managed to get an education, at least through high school; had kids too young, with a guy who ended up in prison, but somehow she got a job running the office at St John’s Realty (this was some years ago). She died, sadly of an asthma attack, but she was a real gem when she was at St John’s and I went out of my way at times to help her by giving her rides and such. She was living proof that it CAN be done!
i am certainly NOT saying it can’t be done, I’m just saying, it isn’t as easy as the “boot strap” folks would have you believe.
poverty is a vicious cycle that isn’t easily escapable for a reason. how would those on the top benefit if everyone was actually able to obtain wealth?