Neighborliness is a powerful thing.
A few years ago, when Whitman area resident Pat McGregor started noticing his neighborhood declining around him, he knew that stopping the degradation would require cutting off the supply of cheap booze that keeps street drunks plastered.
He also knew that his success could come at others’ expense, driving chronic alcoholics farther into the South End and East Side. “I couldn’t do that,” McGregor says. “Those people are my neighbors too.”
And so began an arduous three-year exercise in community mobilization that became a textbook case of neighborhoods empowering themselves.
That effort ended Wednesday with the state Liquor Control Board’s vote to designate a huge swath of Tacoma as an alcohol impact zone. Businesses east and south of Interstate 5 have until Oct. 1 to clear their shelves of high-octane alcohol.
The decision is a huge win for the neighborhood activists who spent untold hours attending meetings, inventorying convenience store products, collecting cans and bottles beneath bridges, and photographing street drunks passed out in front of their homes.
Creating an AIA isn’t easy. It’s not enough for citizens to suspect that public drunkenness is a result of high-alcohol wine and beer sales; they must document the connection.
The grassroots effort, capitalizing on the experience of the state’s first alcohol impact area in the Hilltop and downtown, started in the Whitman area but eventually drew in neighborhood and activist organizations from all across the East Side and South End.
Groups that had been working on cleaning up their own little corner of Tacoma discovered power in their collective voice. As their effort gained momentum, city and police officials lent a hand. But the campaign was always citizen-driven; without their dedication and persistence, it would have quickly fizzled.
Neighbors gained something bigger than an alcohol impact area. They have built deep community ties, and that bodes well for the future of the South End and East Side. There is no better crime-fighting tool than neighbors who know each other and are willing to work.
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