When I think about what kind of final projects we might do in this class - whether Documentation, Exhibit, Digital, or a Performance - I am starting to see some emerging ideas for telling the story.
1. A project on the overpass - which houses it will affect and how it will affect the neighborhood. I have an email address for someone in the neighborhood who gave me the maps. What is the neighborhood doing about it? Are they concerned? Would they like to stop it?
2. A project around deterioration of the houses and why - is it because there are so many rental houses in the neighborhood and the landlords don't want to restore the houses because it costs too much? Are there a few landlords that own a lot of the houses? Would they respond to neighborhood pressure to fix them up? Could you find out who the landlords are and even talk to them about historic preservation? What about the privately owned houses? Is there any "gentrification" going on in the neighborhood? Why did the wealthy leave in the first place and when? When were they broken up into rental properties? One could talk to LaCasa about the restoration work they are doing with home owners in this neighborhood and others and how they interpret the deterioration.
3. A project around the Latino population of the neighborhood. Could you find out in the census what percentage of the neighborhood are people with Latino surnames? Are they clustered in certain areas of the neighborhood or is it all mixed? Do they tend to rent or buy their homes? When did that transition happen? How has this changed the neighborhood? Are they able to pressure the landlords at all for repairs? How does their legal status affect this?
Those are just some of the things that I am curious about and I think would make nice projects for the class, each of which would be helped by the collective house histories that we are doing.
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