radcrim's textdump.

So coming from someone who is an undergrad who has been here for merely… 4 months (excluding that excruciating long near-2 month quarter break), These types of posts are going to be something akin to my personal-esque reports on… what really rocks the boat at this college. They are going to be a bit more information heavy rather than my.. usual stream of thought so just look at these as my “research notes.” I guess…

quick background

Before I am going to just dump on my experience with this college, I want to write first on how I even got here in the first place. I think there is a myriad of reasons how I could even be able to step foot into one of the more obvious cases of for-profit wallet-leeching schools that practically owns it’s whole city. Well, for the first reason: I wasn’t supposed to be here. Most of my targeted schools that are less.. for profit but are more selective, unfortunately rejected my application, as it was rather reasonable for them to do so. I would not consider myself, on a technical level to have much “talent”.. or rather, at the time at least if I try to further feed myself excess self-pity, or self-gratification. My portfolio that I submitted to most of the schools I wanted to go into, in the more coherence sense wasn’t really good. I didn’t exactly had much in mind to communicate to them with those artworks itself so looking back at the artworks… they didn’t have any artistic intention me, myself right now would consider to be interesting. Though it was only barely a year ago, I feel like I was… in an artist sense, ignorant. I didn’t really know what I was doing… so i ended up being in a college, for kids who don’t know what the fuck they are doing so they end up in a school that will potentially shove them in the cell of lifelong student debt.

“Colonizing” Savannah

It has been a common theme of discourse between the fellow Savannah locals, particularly the working class on how the college has played a major role in the gradual gentrification and, or rather colonization of Savannah. Consider this: similarly to the school’s skewed statistics of alumni employments, this city apparently was renowned to be a rather… “up-and-coming neighborhood”, with “cheap rents”. Housing trends has shown, from September of 2016 to the end of last year (2014), the median price for the Savannah housing market has come close to tripling from $150k to $320k. As tax values also rise rapidly, more and more people who do not come from the impoverished class, unfortunately get driven out. I can confirm a personal anecdote of mine that solidified the state of Savannah in my mind, when a rather famous punk/alternative DIY venue, that I had the fortunate opportunity to attend a couple shows at, called the “ Lodge of Sorrows “ unfortunately closed down around 2~ish months of me moving into Savannah to study. As stated by it’s venue owner, Ryan Graveface (owner of Graveface Records, an alternative/external record label and is also likely the primary one in Savannah.), “This city is becoming increasingly difficult for small businesses and working-class individuals who don’t come from wealth,” whilst claiming that the reason for the venue’s closing down was that “rising rent costs and the financial burden of not serving alcohol have made it impossible to continue.” Lodge of Sorrows was a particularly unique little phenomenon in the “booze-infested town”, as said by Ryan was one of the only venues.. if not the only venue that hosted exclusively all-ages no alcohol shows. Considering that Savannah’s cultural image mainly revolves around pubs and adult-oriented drinking spaces (clubs, raves… I went to a disco rave once here. It wasn’t a pleasant..experience i’d say. People looked rather sick, I saw a rather drunk woman sit on the sofa next to me and she proceeded to vomit all over the place.) So, anyone who isn’t interested in drinking or partying or being the traditional rich extrovert archetype has little place to make a living in this city.

The city also has a history of neglecting buildings for years on end until they can find an outsider who can inject excess profit into the property for.. external purposes. You can already guess where this is going: Starland District and SCAD. If you visit the official site of starlanddistrict.com and read on it’s history, you will see it starts off rather abruptly, with a clear preceding narrative completely missing from the site. Well, Starland Diary used to be the main source of milk products to fuel the city of Savannah, yet as a result of the White Flight, (see the race and ethnicity chart in the savannah demographic) most of the wealthier White residents moved to wealthier developing suburbs such as Ardsley Park (you can see the difference between the two neighborhoods), which lead to the gradual decline due to residential attrition, and its eventual closure in 1980. The byproduct of this fact is that, the neighborhood that surrounded Starland District became a run-down neglected area, with many buildings left abandoned. This fact could have been prevented with adequate management (e.g, providing low-income housing for those said residences, and also smaller businesses opportunities), but the restoration of this area came as a form of gentrifying this area for the likely petite-bourgeoisie pro-free-market demographic of college students. Which is exactly what has happened… in 1999, two SCAD alumni purchased the remnants of Starland Diary and more business have started around that area, (Graveface Records is one of them), which essentially marks SCAD’s major role in the city’s gentrified landscape. Now, with values in that area increasing significantly, the area has been drenched with excess business with with has of little interest in solving the issues of the less-wealthy class. The city continues to be increasingly hostile towards the people with financial issues, such as increasing tax values towards residence to drive them out, in exchange for more wealthy tourist-friendly businesses (particularly alcohol). This city is becoming an increasingly hostile place towards people, who aren’t wealthy enough, or are rich SCAD students who shove down liters of alcohol down your throat every night as a conventional way of socializing. (This is a jab at someone I know. If you love drinking, good for you.) Though even the incentive to profit from alcohol aside, there also seems to be an attempt to completely take over the marginalized, in a cultural and “business” sense (specifically people of colour) where SCAD is purchasing areas that contains major cultural significance to the indigenous people of Savannah.. (Mickey’s liquor store’s closing as a result of SCAD buying a plot of land at montgomery/victory drive…). If this isn’t an example of modern-day gentrification, then it sure is an example of colonization… a city taken over by a bunch of for-profit art students.

Considering a lot of the student tuitions here revolves around shitting awful looking buildings all over the city (SCAD owns a total of 98 parcels of property, [savannahagenda] or “nearly 80 buildings” according to their 2024-25 “Scad Facts” document). Seemingly a pattern for a lot of SCAD properties is that they were mostly purchased from historical buildings ( as a case for starland dairy ) instead of building their own infrastructure.

Occupation of Lacoste

Just like Israel and Lebanon/Syria, SCAD also planned to expand their free-market-art empire. So they begin to attach their eyes on the small French village of Lacoste and established their colony there as well. With the Lacoste School of the Arts, founded by artist Bernard Pfriem. With SCAD’s acquisition and merging of the school after Pfriem’s death in 1996, the original Provencal village has “became an Americanized vision of medieval Europe”, said Alan Judd from AJC news, who has wrote a more run down narrative than I could of SCAD’s eventual takeover of the village and the excessive spending in exchange for driving out all locals via rising prices and completely replacing their language into english. Another relic of working-class history, seemingly going to be taken apart by Paula Wallace and company.