You can't gentrify and drill at the same time...

Where do people hear these things?
From a handful of decent (and at least one trustworthy) sources, it has become my knowledge that Lawrenceville's sublayers will soon be hosting a fracking party, as some of Pennsylvania's finest groups of Life and those Who Like to Live It offenders come in with their drilling equipment, chemicals, and money.
Money to Lawrenceville? Why do we need chemical and energy money when the neighborhood is already making slave cash off of robots and boutique-goods purveyors?
As a lurker in the Lawrenceville Stakeholders google group, I see concerned citizens who are looking to set up a watching party for Josh Fox's Gasland, but not much beyond that.
If we didn't have the documentary, we wouldn't have the concern. So I thank this man, Mr. Fox. But if we didn't have his documentary, we wouldn't be able to seek out the expected fear and dread that comes from viewing disaster documentaries. These emotions can be sought out and evoked so easily in front of a screen, and in a dark room full of thrill-seekers, the shared emotions fill the air like charred hot dog smell from using too thin a pan to pop popcorn. And the smell sticks around; yes it does.
In Lawrenceville, we have many options for making easy cash, some of which I will hand out to you, now, for free, because I don't feel like making money; I'm not sure what I want to do within myself, so you can take my suggestions and do what you will with them.
1. Open a coffee shop on 10th Ward Butler Street! We still don't have one, and while I won't drink there, I will take an interest in the quirky owner and or fashionable barista, but only a passing interest. A shit-talking interest.
2. Garden legally, and then go to sell it at the farmer's stand beside the kids selling organic produce grown in Allegheny Cemetery.
3. Garden Illegally, and then eat the food that you won't have to pay for, so that you can spend the money you were going to spend on fruit and veg to buy coffee from some asshole who judges people for doing the same things he did at one point in his life (and still probably does).
This is
where
a picture
of City Cafe Guy
Would Go.

4. Open a Boutique.
5. Open a Second Boutique next door after your 100th customer at the first Boutique.
6. Work for Wylie Holdings. They're probably the ones leasing out their storefronts for Gas Drilling, as they own every storefront on Butler Street, most of which are empty and not generating any income.
7. Have a yard sale and block traffic.
8. Sell dope from the ice cream truck that plays 8-bit Nintendo theme music.
9. Open a bakery that never bakes bread, or anything at all.
10. Tear down houses and use pieces of the old houses to restore houses that dumb people fucked up years ago, who are probably related to the people who left our neighborhood in a fucked up condition when they decided that White Flight was Hip and Green and Sustainable and Grass Fed (or whatever the buzzwords were in 1978) and who are probably related, at least in a self-serving sense, to the people who have accepted offers of $5,000 per acre for gas drilling within the city.
Why within the city? If you're looking to assist, with malevolent intent, the gas companies that expect you to take the money and rent a Uhaul to move to the South Hills (where land owners probably won't let this happen) when your water is flammable and your moustache hair is falling out (if it was ironic in the first place, isn't it still ironic on the floor? [The further implications of this line infer that hipsters own property. Do they?]); then the city is the best place, at least as far as chemically-assisted efficiency, to do the most harm.
Despite the guaranteed (no scientific studies necessary!) damage to our entire living being, there are some patriotic advantages to selling the fuck out and allowing gas companies to tell us that fracking is a clean, Local, sustainable way of powering our hungry little lives until we run out of such fuels and die, horribly, painfully, hungrily. Jingoists love that; they'll sacrifice good of country for good of country, as long as they make money from it that they'll later have to use for a cleanup, potable water supply, or all-out relocation. But the part about not being dependent on foreign oil, that's the line that matters.
Slum lords won't even have to replace the copper and throw down a coat of white paint--they'll just lease their abandoned properties to GasGassed, or whatever company is willing to put up their Warning! No smoking in Public! signs, which should be an obvious offense to smokers' rights and a paradoxical conundrum: with smokers limited to the Point Downtown and a 12 foot by 12 foot square in Frick Park after all the drilling has been done, and has contaminated every source of flowing water in the city by penetrating PWSA's Trademarked 100-year-old perforated water pipes, we'll side with the smokers and encourage them and their right to infringe upon our rights to clean air.
After all, the vampire knocks on the window and asks for an invite before coming into your home, but even if you don't sign the papers to allow for drilling on your own land, the whole hillside of slumlord property (and city-owned wilderness) will still play host.
It would be really easy to say, Hey, let's all get together and die of secondhand smoke-caused lung cancer AND sell our souls (aka property) to the gas companies so we can finish up the rest of those storefronts on Butler Street before we have to deal with the after effects of chemical inoculation of the land around us; but I'd rather take a more optimistic approach to our impending doom.

But I won't, so let's just all kill ourselves right now.