Dear Editor:
Our family lives in a nice house. It looks out on a pond. Our friends live in nice houses, too, as do most folk around here. Even many unpleasant people live in nice houses. That’s just the way it is in Connecticut.
All these nice houses make for some very nice neighborhoods, and some very nice towns. Naturally we all want to keep them nice, so we alertly raise a ruckus when a developer wants to squeeze in still more nice houses, which would destroy a lovely pasture or woodland. We ruckus still louder if he proposes nice condos rather than nice houses. And if, under state law, he suggests including nice affordable units in with the nice condos, we ruckus really loud. This watchfulness is what keeps our neighborhoods so nice.
At the same time, we worry about our downtowns. Along with their nice houses, many cities harbor both public housing and private tenements. They’re not so nice. But the tenements often cure themselves. They’re given to fires and to urban renewal. Thus their numbers dwindle and their tenants are often set free to look for better quarters elsewhere. Good luck.
It’s getting that way with public housing too. Conscience-stricken citizens who live in nice houses feel terrible that so many hapless folk live in crowded, dirty, dangerous government apartments. As a result, in some cities whose projects have been torn down, replaced by nice new units amounting to about a third of the number removed. Thus a lot of these tenants, too, are set free to look for better quarters elsewhere. Again, good luck. In the last seven years, 27,000 HUD units have been demolished, while only 5,500 have been rebuilt. Another 33,000 are waiting to be torn down.
The results of all this gentrification (some call it ethnic cleansing) are plain. Newspapers often report it. Many families now spend half their income on rent. Homeless shelters are overflowing. There aren’t enough foster homes to care for all the kids from these disrupted families. Some families double up.Some leave their kids home alone. Schools teaching these rental refugees watch their performance sag, for want of a home.
Many cities have become especially adept at this sort of demolition. And most suburbs have become equally adept as keeping new housing out altogether. That skill tends to raise their property values.
The problem is, from a public police standpoint, that housing failure is even harder to correct than school failure. With bad schools, we’re all in it together, rich and poor. Big classes, weak counseling and low test scores taint everyone. We’ll all lobby and march shoulder to shoulder for relief.
With housing it’s the opposite. It’s every family for itself. If I have a nice place to live, then others can look out for themselves. In fact, it’s worse than that. If too many people in my town live in inferior housing, it’s bad for me too. They’ll erode my property values, raise my taxes, weaken my schools and increase my crime rate. So while I may join with them in muscling the mayor and governor for better schools, I’d just as soon they’d move away. Least of all, do we want any more moving in.
This behavior is known as The American Way. It’s as American as say, the West Nile virus. And it’s about as healthy. In truth, it’s self-destructive. Our schools will actually be cured faster with more apartments than with more teachers, with better nutrition than with better lighting, and with more health care than with more computers. It sounds crazy, but providing housing is in our own enlightened self-interest. It’s much easier to teach kids who come to school ready to learn, than to try to jam knowledge down their throats when their lives are centered on not having a nice place to live.
Williams A.Collins
Former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Connecticut