Page 89 of Damian & Jun: Episodes 5-8
“A grand decay.”
“Yes. That.” Collin paused, clearly rolling thoughts around in his head. He gestured with his fork. “It’s not sterile or untouched. It’s so touched. This is what happens. This is the result of what was done and not done. This is how we come apart. And this is what comes after. I want there to be trees inside, growing up out of the roof. I think that’s important.”
“I visited a house once that had trees growing in these sealed-in spaces inside the house. I think it was in Japan somewhere. Yohei would remember.”
Collin nodded. “I’ve studied Japanese architecture that included interior gardens. We could do that, put glass shafts in. Though I don’t know what that would do to the acoustics.”
“What about the location?” Jun gestured inclusively in a circle with his free hand. “Will people come to a concert there?”
“For the right concert.” Collin frowned and stabbed a bean with his fork. “The area needs new blood, or it needs to be given back to nature. Maybe both. When you study neighborhood revival, at a certain point, you can’t bring back what isn’t there.”
“But there are people there.”
“Yes, and that’s a million-dollar problem.” Collin sighed and leaned back against the wall, meeting Jun’s gaze. “Revitalizing a neighborhood is all well and good. It looks nice, it’s more comfortable to live in, policing can be handled better. But on the other hand, you’ve now priced out those who had been living there. But if you don’t revitalize an area and continue to let it degrade because it can’t produce enough tax revenue to repave streets, repair water pipes, etcetera, well, then, you end up with a ruin, more of a ruin.”
Jun mirrored Collin’s frown. “So putting a concert venue here is a bad thing for the people already there?”
“Yes and no. The property value will go up for those who own their property, but they’ll eventually sell because they’ll get pushed to or offered so much money they can’t afford not to. But renters will get pushed out, and’s how communities get broken up. They’ll scatter, trying to find other areas cheap enough to live in. Their support networks fracture, if they had them.”
Jun rubbed the back of his head, thinking of Bak. “That sounds like a cycle that never stops.”
“Not as long as someone else can make money off of it, no, it doesn’t stop.”
Jun grimaced.
Collin shrugged, matching Jun’s expression. “Have you seen this in Korea or other places?”
Jun shrugged. “You say that like I spent much time doing anything but my job. I lived there, but I know I only know a small portion of it. Sound stages, studios, BBB3 headquarters, places I was paid to appear at. Everything else I only saw in bits and pieces. Except for when I was in the military. I saw a lot of the base and the mountains.”
“Didn’t you have to know enough to interact with your fans, though?”
“I know things, but I don’t think I’ve been able to really watch neighborhoods change. My education is weird. Solid in some areas and missing in others. Like I know young people’s frustrations. And I follow fashion and music, well, when Bak let me. Sometimes he’d cut me off, like at the end. It got bad. I was reading really old novels in paperbacks for inspiration for a while. He wasn’t worried about me reading the entire Dream of a Red Chamber in Chinese, Or Dante’s Inferno in English. He couldn’t read those languages anyway.”
“I’ve heard of that Dream of the Red Chamber. It’s really long, isn’t it? Kinda like War and Peace?”
Jun nodded. “Twice as long, at least the English versions, by pages. I’ve read both.”
Collin glanced at Jun and looked away. “Do you want a better education?”
Jun nodded. “I need to know more about business. If I wasn’t so out of the loop, I probably wouldn’t have let it go on so long.”
“There are free classes online. You could study now when you’re not busy doing other things. Harvard and some other schools post so many classes for free.” Collin took a bite of food.
Jun nodded, almost to himself. The idea of studying something he wasn’t good at was both exciting and terrifying. “I’m interested.”
Collin nodded, his mouth full of dinner, so they sat in silence while he chewed.
Jun stroked Artemis’s back. The cat really liked the heated seat. “Are more people going to hate Damian if he fixes up the church?”
Collin pulled his shoulders up to his ears and let them drop. He swallowed. “Yes. Probably? But if he doesn’t do it, someone will. Damian can’t keep paying the taxes on all that property forever.”
“So he can’t win.”
“People don’t like change. And people don’t like things out of their control. But most things are outside of our control.” Collin shrugged again. “Then again, most people don’t like it when things crumble and fall apart either.”
“Some people like change.” Jun pulled a stress ball he’d found on a bookshelf out of his pocket and squeezed it in his hand. “I like change.”
“When you’re in enough pain, change is a good thing. When you’re in a lukewarm amount of pain but you feel like you can deal, change is often just an annoyance.”
