Week Three: Observations

Previous to working at the Sierra Club I had it in my mind that big organizations took forever to do things purely out of laziness. I have come to realize that this is not entirely true, things just take a long time. Partly because meetings are impossible to coordinate. Everyone has their two times a week that work for them, but there is always something coming up so it’ll be two weeks until we can meet. That two hour meeting about project x is the one thing you need to do before you can finish project x unfortunately you have another meeting next week on the only day they can meet so the project that in theory could take a week, is now a month long odyssey. At the Sierra Club office in Detroit we’re working on three or four projects at a time, so if you look at one of them it seems like it is taking forever to finish. If you decided to talk to me a couple of months ago I would probably say that things are moving at a glacial pace at the Sierra Club. I am wrong and repent, each week it seems like something new is happening, it is both amazing and tiring. The pace of these weeks have been anything but glacial.

On a different note, this photo below. The QLine (M-1 rail) is in theory a great idea providing cheap transportation to people all up and down Woodward. That was until the federal government pulled support of it and now instead of providing cheap, eco-friendly transportation to people all up and down Woodward. The most heavily gentrified areas of Woodward are the main areas that benefit from the line. It seems like the people mover 2.0. The second part of this image is the Whole Foods. Rather than putting in a more affordable grocery store, a Whole Foods was put in which is very expensive. This and the development around it has only raised rent pushing poorer people out of the area. I just hope that this does not happen to the rest of Detroit, I hope that gentrification does not overrun the city.