Bloggers vs. Blight

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The blog’s guiding force and principal writer is Michael Happy, a News online editor who grew up in the City Airport neighborhood but moved away in 1976, when he was 12. Though the neighborhood Happy remembers—mostly blue-collar factory workers, mostly Polish-Catholic—was a rough one even “back in the day,” it was home, he says. When he and his family left their house on Dobel Street, part of the mass exodus to the suburbs, the departure was, he says, “heartbreaking.”

Happy speaks and writes with a sincerity that is almost anachronistic. He commonly refers, without irony, to miracles. His sleeve bears not only his heart, but also his humor, joy, and anger. Happy came of age in a place where Elks Clubs and Cub Scouts were the norm, in a time when a neighborhood was distinguished by more than just geography. Community, to him, is not a goal, but an assumption.

For Happy, writing and maintaining Going Home, which he does in addition to his full-time News beat, is equal parts personal catharsis, reportorial documentation, and moral crusade. The blog’s evolving narrative starts with the writer himself. In an early post, Happy describes his emotional return to the neighborhood. His old house, he writes,

was completely gone and the lot was littered with debris—old tires, hubcaps, furniture, clothes. Of the 30 or so houses that made up our end of the block back in the ’70s, about a quarter of them were gone and another quarter of them were boarded up.

Witnessing the area’s blight firsthand, and meeting the people who live with it, it’s impossible not to feel outrage—even if it’s not your childhood home. Yet outrage in isolation is impotent, and over a tumult of introductory posts rolled out in August 2007, the blog found a narrative arc that transcends atomized emotion. Happy realized that there are other former residents of the City Airport area who love and miss “the old neighborhood” as much as he does, and that those people might be enlisted to work on the neighborhood’s behalf.

He was right, and as more people discovered Going Home, it shifted its focus, becoming less about Happy and more about community. Happy enlisted a friend and colleague, editor Jonathan Morgan, to write the blog with him. He met a community leader named Edith Floyd—“Captain Edith,” he calls her—who became both a friend and someone who is instrumental to his work in the neighborhood. He introduced readers to other residents. The process was haphazard, as many things blog-related often are, but by September 2007, narrative building had evolved into coalition building. Telling the neighborhood’s story had become working to give that story a happier ending. Happy and Morgan had begun advocating for the neighborhood. Loudly. Passionately. And their audience, mostly suburbanites, shouted back.

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