#challenge18

For yesterday's challenge, I had interviewed a developer last weekend and was surprised by his point of view so I had wanted to share it. We tend to look at the developers coming in as money-hungry, greedy people who don't care about the communities they are displacing, but Eric (my interviewee) was actually very nice and has lived in the community for a long time so he really wanted to make as many improvements while causing as little pain as possible. He was upset that gentrification is being vilified so much, to the extent that nobody in the community wanted to make suggestions for positive changes that could be brought. The piece of land he is working with is already vacant and it's big enough to include a small park, some high-density residences, and a community gathering place, but he's only gotten negative feedback towards putting anything in at all. It made me think about whether we are fighting too hard against gentrification, and that maybe both sides need to get a little better at talking to each other.

Throughout this process I have come to recognize that I had been viewing all the changes going on in Seattle from inside my own little bubble. The discussions both within our group and especially outside the group have sort of broken me out of that bubble. I am still upset about a lot of what is going on in my neighborhood, but I am starting to filter between what is natural and inevitable change and what is truly gentrification. I am a little more balanced about my feelings, but I still care and do what I can to save what is important to me. As I have been researching this subject I keep coming a sort of apathetic acceptance coming from people who should care. I just don't understand how you can know something that upsets you is going on and do nothing but complain after the fact. It's like it's too much to deal with right now, but if you don't deal with it right now what you care about will be gone and you will never get it back.

I spoke with someone who said that gentrification excited them. Like a race. The city is racing towards something new and he found that thrilling. Very opposite from how I've been thinking about things. I spoke to a man who talked about how our concept of time is changing- that it's shrinking. As things happen more quickly, the way we relate to time is getting chopped down.

Answer to Let's write Sherlock challenge 18

Title: disaster Author: Roy/ flappergirl Responding to challenge #: 18 Word Count: 50 (this was more difficult than I thought ha) Characters: Niall Horan Rating:k Warnings: Summary: she may cause the disasters, but this time, she's the worst hit.

Title: unexpectedly Author: brianne/abejas-fic Responding to challenge #: 18 Word Count: 50 Characters: -- Rating: k Warnings: -- Summary: she realized.