Things are somewhat depressing right now. With high unemployment, a nagging recession cutting basic government services like swimming pools, government bailouts, our president beset on every side and a Black community feeling hopeless, leaderless and adrift.
Yet in this malaise we can feel good about a Black family and their neighborhood’s good fortune.
I rarely watch “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” on ABC/WRTV/Channel 6 Sunday nights. I’m usually putting the finishing touches on this column. But I’m aware of the show’s premise; a deserving soul gets a chance for a better life in a brand new house, built in a week on the rubble of their current home.
This week, Ty Pennington, and that Big Bus, comes into the heart of America’s 16th largest African-American community, remaking a home, a life and a neighborhood in the 2300 block of North Oxford.
The family is truly deserving. Bernard McFarland is a 37-year-old lifelong neighborhood resident, a veteran, employed at John Marshall High School. He’s an African-American single dad raising three teenaged sons who found time to create a mentoring program on his own to help youth in his Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood.
McFarland helped others and this week some 4,000 volunteers and tradespeople, led by local homebuilder Paul Estridge, will help McFarland’s family and neighborhood. And be just the tenth African-American and African-American neighborhood profiled in “Extreme Makeover’s” six seasons.
Standing just outside McFarland’s old home, Paul Estridge, Indianapolis’ premiere homebuilder, told me he’s not just building a new home. But other homes in the area will get some needed repairs, including new landscaping. A bit of the Estridge touch in Martindale-Brightwood.
McFarland’s Oxford Street is typical of many blocks in Martindale-Brightwood and other older Indianapolis Black neighborhoods. There’s some well-kept homes on the block. There’s also a bunch of vacant lots and some ugly eyesores, too.
Including a derelict house just North of McFarland’s that’s been cited numerous times for code violations. A city inspector told me Saturday the abandoned home’s absentee owner flatly refuses to repair or tear down the horrid structure.
Martindale-Brightwood was dissed by Ballard Administration officials who refused to include the neighborhood in the $29 million in Community Development Block Grant funds. Now the spotlight of prime time TV shines on an area our mayor refused to uplift.
Mayor Ballard’s dysfunctional neighborhood policies are on sharp display on this showcased street. While city employees and cops flooded the area (to make the “Extreme Makeover” folks safe), the city was slow getting the necessary permits together.
And like many Black neighborhoods, the “Extreme Makeover” street has crumbling sidewalks and curbs. But despite the worldwide media attention Indianapolis and Oxford Street will receive, the city doesn’t plan to repair the sidewalks and curbs.
But you know if this was the Super Bowl or Final Four, and not a makeover show, they would be.
But the publicity and the efforts will benefit a Black family trying to do right. And a great neighborhood trying, despite a severe lack of city government help, to revitalize itself.
Congrats to the McFarland family and all who helped them and their hood.
What I’m Hearing
in the Streets
It will be reprehensible if State Senate Republicans saddle just Indianapolis’ taxpayers with bailing out the Capital Improvement Board’s deficit. A deficit caused by the state’s builders of the stadium using up cash meant for the stadium’s first year operating costs.
Indianapolis’ Black and Democratic lawmakers should stand firm and insist that metro area taxpayers, who helped pay for the stadium, bear part of its operational costs.
I have the greatest respect for my friend, former Deputy Mayor and Urban League President Joe Slash. And I respect Concerned Clergy head Rev. Richard Willoughby. But both have a tiger by the tail co-chairing Mayor Greg Ballard’s commission to find ways of promoting and hiring minorities and women to the police and fire departments, without taking race and gender in the equation.
Historically, Indianapolis has never invested the resources – money and person power – to be serious about adding more women and minorities to the police and fire departments. Unless that commitment is truly made, fueled by serious cash the city doesn’t have, I fear that Slash and Willoughby’s efforts will be in vain.
New Superintendent of Public Instruction Dr. Tony Bennett, interviewed on “Afternoons with Amos,” came across as a hyperkinetic educational booster.
Bennett says his department’s priority will be getting all Indiana third graders reading “at grade level.” He says we may be putting too much of emphasis on everyone going to college, saying that vocational training has a place in today’s education.
Bennett defended those controversial spring ISTEP tests, but admitted scores from the new Algebra tests will be much lower than expected.
Bennett has been blasted because of the many former Department of Education employees fired when he took office. Bennett couldn’t tell me how many Blacks were fired, but did admit, without waffling, that he had no Blacks in senior management or decision making positions.
Also on our program last week, John Clark, the new head of the Indianapolis Airport Authority, exuded confidence and competence. Clark said his goals will be to improve service to the airport, but he acknowledged that the worldwide recession makes that difficult in the short term.
The 2010 Census begins in 52 weeks. And already the Ballard Administration is behind the curve in getting the city/county ready. Last Friday, at the opening of the Census’ Indianapolis Office, Mayor Ballard admitted that he won’t have a Complete Census Count committee named for a couple of months.
The Census Complete Count Committee, composed of a wide spectrum of organizations and groups dedicated to get every resident counted in the 2010 Census should have been formed and ready to go by now. Ballard’s delay is disconcerting.
Also, someone needs to educate Mayor Ballard’s speechwriter on how the census works. In his scripted remarks at the census office opening, Mayor Ballard urged every Indianapolis “citizen” to answer the census.
One problem. The census counts every human being living in Indianapolis and America. Citizen or non-citizen. That’s what the constitution says. It’s frightening the mayor’s speechwriter (or the mayor himself) think the census is just for citizens.
See ‘ya next week!
Amos Brown’s opinions are not necessarily those of the Indianapolis Recorder Newspaper. You can contact him at (317) 221-0915 or by e-mail at ACBROWN@AOL.COM.
