Foote Homes doesn't need to be torn down. It needs rain gardens, trees, individual porches, a new drainage system, updated lighting, and walkways. That's according to the Vance Avenue Collaborative, a community group trying to save the public housing complex from demolition.

The group held a meeting last week to discuss how Foote Homes can be saved.

City officials will submit an application in September to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to raze Foote Homes' 57 buildings. HUD denied the city the $30 million grant for the project last year. But that did not deter Robert Lipscomb, the city's director of Housing and Community Development, who said the process is competitive and that the city would simply try again in 2015.

Should the city be selected for the $30 million Hope VI grant this year, the project would require $12.7 million from city taxpayers and $60 million from a private developer. In all, the project would cost $102.7 million, according to a Memphis Housing Authority document.

The city's plan calls for replacing the aging project with a mixed-income housing development like Legends Park, Cleaborne Pointe, University Place, and others.

The Vance Avenue Collaborative unveiled their alternative plan (called the Vance Avenue Community Transformation Plan) to renovate the Foote Homes complex during a meeting last week at the St. Patrick Center.They believe their plan to save the complex will cost less than the city's estimates for demolition and building new homes.

The plan would remove the large fence surrounding Foote Homes to increase pedestrian access to the site and diminish its reputation as a "ghetto," collaborative members said. New sidewalks would be installed around the campus, which would be rich with new green spaces, according to the plan.

Rain gardens would catch storm water and hold it to feed community gardens. Residents could eat or sell the produce grown in the gardens, the plan said. More trees would improve the "micro-climate" at Foote Homes. All of this would reduce litter because "the more beautiful the place is, the more we'll take care of it," said a voiceover in a 15-minute video describing the plan last week.

Backyards would be made semi-private. Each residential unit would get its own front porch, and they would be made larger than the existing shared porches. Walls would be painted. Mold would be scraped. Windows and screens and doors would be replaced. And it all comes with a price tag of $63 million.

"Our plan starts with the assumption that Foote Homes is not a problem to be eliminated but an incredible asset that could be even more positive and more uplifting with a little bit of work," said Kenneth Reardon, a collaborative member and University of Memphis planning professor who has been working on the alternative project for years.

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Group Devises Plan to Save Foote Homes from Destruction

Groria Hevia en Los Porches 2015
Vdeo grabado durante la realizacin del Concurso de Salto en Los Porches (Arteixo). Compitiendo Groria Hevia para la Escuela de Hpica de Belelle (Ferrol). ...

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GTA5 - Fun with Porches
Just fooling around GRAND THEFT AUTO V https://store.sonyentertainmentnetwork.com/#!/tid=CUSA00419_00.

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Five Porches Pastor Gary Coates 02 15 2015 John 5 1 18
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Jon Ronson's forthcoming book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, can't reach front porches soon enough, assuming it resembles the adaptation published in The New York Times. The journalist and humorist revisits the stories of mostly obscure people who showed bad judgment (as every Internet user has done at one time or another) but were unlucky enough to become the focus of an angry digital mob. The nature of their transgressions varies. But in each case, the punishments arbitrarily urged or meted out by callous strangers on social media affected their lives for years, costing them jobs, causing them to flee from their homes, stressing their loved ones, and sending them into states of existential despair.

Those subjected to death threats, harassment, termination, and mass outpourings of digital hate were not examined and found to be particularly malign or odious individuals. They just made a mistake that happened to go viral, often in ways that would've been extremely difficult to anticipate beforehand, and they were judged as if their transgressions alone defined them. Sometimes whole controversies unfolded on Twitter or Facebook. Other times, a digital journalist directed the ire of the Internet at a given target. Sam Biddle reflected on playing the instigator's role in an apology he posted on the one-year anniversary of helping to shame someone into unemployment, writing that when his target contacted him, "I realized suddenly that I felt very guilty about havingI assumeddestroyed another person on what was basically a professional whim."

Many people participate in digital mobs, and yet, they have few public defenders. Indeed, many who engage in digital pile-ons hardly realize what they're doing or contemplate the consequences of their actions. Take two instances of shaming that Ronson describes in his book excerpt:

One person I met was Lindsey Stone, a 32-year-old Massachusetts woman who posed for a photograph while mocking a sign at Arlington National Cemeterys Tomb of the Unknowns. Stone had stood next to the sign, which asks for Silence and Respect, pretending to scream and flip the bird. She and her co-worker Jamie, who posted the picture on Facebook, had a running joke about disobeying signssmoking in front of No Smoking signs, for exampleand documenting it. But shorn of this context, her picture appeared to be a joke not about a sign but about the war dead. Worse, Jamie didnt realize that her mobile uploads were visible to the public.

Four weeks later, Stone and Jamie were out celebrating Jamies birthday when their phones started vibrating repeatedly. Someone had found the photo and brought it to the attention of hordes of online strangers. Soon there was a wildly popular Fire Lindsey Stone Facebook page. The next morning, there were news cameras outside her home; when she showed up to her job, at a program for developmentally disabled adults, she was told to hand over her keys. (After they fire her, maybe she needs to sign up as a client, read one of the thousands of Facebook messages denouncing her. Woman needs help.) She barely left home for the year that followed, racked by PTSD, depression and insomnia. I didnt want to be seen by anyone, she told me last March at her home in Plymouth, Mass. I didnt want people looking at me.

Instead, Stone spent her days online, watching others just like her get turned upon. In particular she felt for that girl at Halloween who dressed as a Boston Marathon victim. I felt so terrible for her. She meant Alicia Ann Lynch, 22, who posted a photo of herself in her Halloween costume on Twitter. Lynch wore a running outfit and had smeared her face, arms and legs with fake blood. After an actual victim of the Boston Marathon bombing tweeted at her, You should be ashamed, my mother lost both her legs and I almost died, people unearthed Lynchs personal information and sent her and her friends threatening messages. Lynch was reportedly let go from her job as well.

Many of the individuals who shamed and harassed these women likely thought of themselves as doing something like telling a stranger, at a military cemetery or a Halloween party, "Hey, that's messed up, you jerk." In fact, they were helping to mete out a much more severe punishment, akin to thousands of angry people gathering around a person at a military cemetery or Halloween party to aggressively menace them. As a mob, their effect was to terrify and traumatize people. The punishments they imposed did not fit the crimes.

With more exposure to stories like these, I hope that more people will refrain from participating in what they'll now recognize as digital pile-ons-in-the-making.

Meanwhile, I propose a new social norm. My strong suspicion is that we'd all be better off if Americans developed a broad aversion to people being fired for public missteps that have nothing to do with their jobs. That norm would do more good than bad even if you think some people deserve to be fired. Sure, I'd advise against taking flip photographs at a military cemetery. But whatever one thinks of that error in judgment, there's no reason it should cause a woman to lose her job helping developmentally disabled adults.

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A Social-Media Mistake Is No Reason to Be Fired

February 17, 2015 3:36 PM

(The group Able Bodied Christian Men shovels snow from in front of a Philadelphia home. Photo by Cherri Gregg)

Cherri Gregg is the community affairs reporter for KYW Newsr...

By Cherri Gregg

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) Three volunteers from Southwest Philadelphia were traveling around the city today to shovel the sidewalks, driveways, and porches of people in need.

Jackie Wleh (wearing white t-shirt in photo) is founder of the nonprofit group, Able Body Christian Men (ABC Men), Inc. Today, he and two youth volunteers packed into a small car packed with shovels and salt, heading for jobs in Southwest Philadelphia, Drexel Hill, Upper Darby, and elsewhere, to remove snow from the sidewalks and steps of senior citizens, the disabled, and others who need help.

This is our best way to show love, Wleh says. This is the best way we know to show how much we care for our seniors.

Beverly, who lives near 60th and Christian in West Philadelphia, called ABC to help her 82-year-old mother, Dorothy. Beverly says she fell the last time she tried to clear her mothers property of snow.

Its nice, she said afterward. And look we didnt ask for the car, and they did the car!

Fifteen-year-old Varney (wearing tan jacket at right) is an ABC Men volunteer and says the experience is teaching him respect for my neighbors.

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For One Phila. Volunteer Group, Snowfall Means a Chance To Serve Those In Need

Porches. - Mood (Live In The Crane Room)
Porches. performs a song from their new record "Mood" live at the Applejam show on Feb. 5.

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Zep Tepi - Front Porches
In solidarity with belt-ditchers everywhere, Zep Tepi, has cooked up the ultimate lo-fi snack for the front porch swingers everywhere. Limited run cassette a...

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Valentine's Day mean lots of surprise deliveries - but with the ice and snow on the ground - that could mean injuries.

"I was looking at that house," said William Boyd. "Lucky I don't have to go over there."

You are hearing the true confessions of a flower delivery driver forced to deal with snow and icy covered sidewalks, porches and steps as he delivers flowers.

"I got my boots on, but you know, I look like I could fall down going up these steps," said Boyd from Livernois-Davison Florist.

He has been delivering flowers for nearly 20 years and this Valentine's Day weekend he knows he will be busy, but he also wants to be safe.

"You just have to watch out," he said.

"A lot of times we go to big businesses so it's shoveled but for residential areas it's a little more sticky," said Titania Askew of Front Page Deli.

When Askew has to make a delivery in snowy conditions she scopes out the area first.

"When it comes to snow and ice I try to find a level ground so I can walk and I'm not slipping," she said.

But she says one of her coworkers wasn't so lucky

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Ice and snow a tough go for delivery workers

Porches. - Headsgiving (Live In The Crane Room)
Applejam put on a killer show featuring gggghosts, Peaer, and Porches. Here #39;s Porches. doing "Headsgiving" featuring Mulan.

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