Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:DC's beauty has been marred by gentrification and white privilege. Start there.
Wrong and racist.
Like it or not, gentrification leads to investment in homes and an uptick in small businesses including restaurants and stores of all kinds. It increases tax revenues for the city too.
Beauty is not hordes of wealthy people descending upon lower income communities, forcing out those who were there before with artificially inflated housing prices, and eradicating a community’s history, culture, and sense of place with bland “could be anywhere” businesses selling bland and overpriced “could be anywhere” food or products.
Beauty is also not money and tax revenues.
What do you think finances improvement projects like maintenance of parks, roads, public buildings, management of waste, pests, etc? All these things that affect quality of life and make city look beautiful have to be managed and maintained, and it's costly.
When you live somewhere that has an actual sense of community, people freely will beautify the public spaces in their neighborhoods without the government having to do it. But apparently not in DC, which says a lot about DC.
Clearly you don't understand how home rule works. Nearly all our park spaces, even tiny neighborhood parks, are controlled by the National Park Service. This means that neither local residents nor the city government can do much of anything to them. DC is a small part of NPS's mission, and they are very budget constrained, so many of the improvements that DC residents might want are just not possible. DC has been actively trying to take over the management of more of its parks, in fact.
Walk around Capitol Hill or any of our other rowhouse neighborhoods sometime. You'll see that DC residents do a fantastic job of beautifying the spaces that they control.