The phrase, “Park Place – the Heart of Norfolk,” popped into my mind last night as I sat in the Park Place branch library listening to Rodney Jordon, the well-spoken vice president of the Park Place Civic League.

Surrounded by a roomful of engaged faces, black and white, I was struck by the commitment and the energy that I felt in that room. I’m not a resident of Park Place, but I’m a fan, and it seemed to me that the passion of the people, coupled with the geographic location of Park Place, ought to earn it the moniker The Heart of Norfolk.

Turns out I picked a good night to be there. Mr. Jordan was presenting a new neighborhood plan for Park Place. The plan represents the culmination of two years of research and analysis in partnership between the civic league and a paid consultant. In a few weeks, the league will present the plan to the Norfolk City Council as a declaration of the Park Place community’s intention to address its failings, build on its strengths, and eventually, it is hoped, transform itself into a more desirable neighborhood.

1917 Street view of Park Place | historichamptonroads.com

The core idea of the plan is to designate the area bounded by 29th St and 38th St, Debree and Omohundro, as a “stabilization zone.” In this zone, which was selected because it already represents one of the “least disordered” areas of the community, the community and the city will cooperate to assist residents with addressing city code violations, increase police patrols, pick up garbage, and spend some resources on beautification projects. Around this zone, in a buffer area a few blocks deep, they will also strictly enforce codes and increase patrols. They’ll take this initial zone and gradually grow it outwards, literally imposing order on the community as the zone expands.

The plan is more or less an application of the broken windows theory, a social and criminological theory that states that monitoring disorder, such as trash, broken windows, peeling paint, unmowed lawns, etc., and maintaining urban environments in a well-ordered condition (fixing the broken windows as soon as they happen), can reduce further vandalism and prevent other crimes. Not a bad choice for a theory. I saw the same practices work to transform the lower east side of New York City from a trashy ‘hood to a desirable, even trendy, destination during the time that I lived there. Such a plan might well work to get Park Place moving in the right direction and improve the quality of life for its residents.

Of course, as anyone who follows these pages knows, change is already happening in Park Place. I sat in the meeting a few chairs over from Cory Evans, Jennifer Lynn Nott-Martin and Nathan Lie­bold, three of the partners of Kerouac Cafe, the new business they are opening on 35th St with Phil Odango. The cafe and The Venue, another 35th St business, were cited as evidence that the rest of Norfolk may be waking up to the potential of Park Place and may be more willing to invest there. It’s already happening: The Landmark Foundation has pledged $4 million to support a new YMCA to be built on Granby St in Park Place.

Park Place, at least according to its Civic League leadership, isn’t looking for more handouts. It’s taking responsibility for itself. They’ve chosen not to seek charity, not to petition for more subsidies, but to ask the city to support their plan for imposing greater order on their community. They’re going to fix their broken windows and seek to lift their community by exercising collective and cooperative will. And that takes heart, which Park Place has in abundance.

The new, slimmer, less expensive JFCOM

In a press conference yesterday, General Ray Odierno talked about the proposed plan to shut down JFCOM. The command, with facilities in Suffolk but headquartered in Norfolk, employs roughly 3,800 people in the region, and 5,8000 total. Instead of total elimination, which had been threatened, the command will be trimmed to 1,900 employees, saving the military $400 million a year, and the key functions of joint training and modeling and simulation will be maintained. It won’t be called the Joint Forces Command any more, although Odierno says the remaining functions will likely report to the Joints Chiefs of Staff. Of course, all this still has to be approved by Defense Secretary Gates, but the plan seems to present a compromise that ought to be acceptable to the military, and better for Hampton Roads than total elimination.

Dougherty says it’s not her fault

You’ll all be glad to hear that Kerry Dougherty has absolved herself of any feelings of guilt that she or fellow conservatives might have felt about the Giffords assassination attempt. She’s not concerned that incendiary, violence-themed rhetoric might have done anything to wind up killer Jared Loughner. It was probably, she explains, heavy metal music that did it. And so progressive pundits, such as Paul Krugman (who warned about a Climate of Hate), are really just “blamers” who are fundamentally insane for suggesting that making political maps with gun sights (Palin) on your opponents, or calling on people to be “armed and dangerous” (Bachmann) might motivate the crazier folks to actually pick up a gun and kill someone.

So, if you, like Giffords’ Republican opponent, want to hold a political rally at which people shoot M16s, go right ahead. The message you’re sending is clearly that you are a 2nd Amendment loving patriot, not that you want to shoot anyone for political reasons. It’s totally and utterly and unarguably clear.

Not pro-farming, but anti-clean water

The Virginia Farm Bureau is not happy with the new regulations proposed by the state and accepted by the EPA intended to reduce nutrient pollution into the Chesapeake Bay. They have filed a suit against the EPA to ask them to start over in analyzing the pollution cuts that will be needed to save the Bay. This request comes despite the 15 years of analysis that have already gone into the issue, and in spite of the fact that Virginia was allowed to craft its own state-specific plan to meet the EPA requirements.

No one is saying that reducing runoff from fertilizer and agricultural waste is going to be a trivial exercise for farmers. The EPA, the state, and environmental groups are just saying that not doing so would mean the eventual, inevitable death of the largest fresh water estuary in the United States.