Affordable Housing Institute : US

Ever since I started in affordable housing thirty-plus years ago, knowing nothing about it but what I observed and deduced, I’ve been confronted with prejudice against ‘those’ people:

 

·         Those people aren’t like us.

·         Those people are lazy and just don’t want to work.

·         Those people are just out to beat the system.

·         Those people have too many children.

 

Pots for sale, Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya

 

I got hit with a cold splash of ‘those people’ thinking early, in my first sustained post-college office job (temporary typist, later secretary).  I typed confidential offering memoranda for Section 236 properties in places like Harlem, and then fielded telephone calls from over-strung securities brokers trying to sell their clients on the benefits of subsidized housing as a tax shelter.  In their encounters with me, they had one burning obsession — could I or anyone else reassure them that, no matter how awful the residents might be, how shiftless and indolent, the subsidy would flow? 

 

Securities brokers are nothing if not impatient, and nothing if not blunt to underlings.  I learned very quickly that it was a counterproductive waste of breath to talk them out of their bigotry; it was better simply to accept it and sell through it.  Yes, yes, the subsidy pays 80% of the rent on a vacancy, yes, yes you’ll be safe no matter how much damage they do to it.

 

Yet, in point of fact, I’ve very seldom met those people in person.   All I’ve ever met has been people, as voiced by Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain in Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, made into the fantastic history film Gettysburg:

 

 

Kilrain: “The thing is, you cannot judge a race. Any man who judges by the group is a peawit. You take men … one at a time.”
Chamberlain: “To me there was never any difference.”
Kilrain: “None at all?”
Chamberlain: “None. Of course, I didn’t know that many. But those I knew … well, you looked in the eye and there was a man.  There was a divine spark, as my mother used to say.”

 

Mavoko, Kenya

 

Just about everybody I’ve ever met in a low-income property or a tough neighborhood has all his or her mental lights on, and is making rational choices in response to the rules and realities he or she perceives.

 

Very shortly after I started AHI (reasons why Parts 1, 2, and 3), I was in South Africa giving a few talks about how we do it (or don’t) in the USA (and how it works and how it doesn’t) and I realized I need to start with something, so I got up and began, “Affordable housing is where those people live.”  I recited all the charges against those people.  “And you all know who those people are, don’t you?”

 

Hesitant chuckles, discreet sidelong glances.  Everybody does know who their local ‘those people’ are.  Who are the local those people is always unique to each place.  It’s not always race, nor even always visible ethnicity.  Sometimes it’s tribe, or accent, or dress, or education.  But there’s always a group of those people who demonstrate their unfitness by their poverty and their tolerance of deplorable housing conditions, darling, how could anyone live that way?

 

Playing checkers with bottle caps, Kibera

 

Class-based elitism stretches back across the centuries.  Eighteenth-century phrenologists claimed to be able to distinguish the criminal skull from the normal; half a century earlier, they transported those people to Australia — where, surprise or surprises, many of them suddenly ‘reformed’ and became upstanding citizens.  In truth, we are all self-governed creatures in a highly observant herd; we do what is in our self-interest, given the choices we think we have. 

 

It’s easier to demand performance here in America, the land of opportunity, where people have many ways of getting help in bettering themselves.  But what do you say to someone living in the world’s slums like Kibera,

 

Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya

 

or Soweto, or the Brazilian favelas? 

 

Favela, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

 

Work hard, and have faith in the system?  What system?

 

I’m sure that solved the problem.

 

Yet everywhere I have been, people want to work.  On a street corner in South Africa, I saw a man selling jokes, one rand apiece.  He had to live somewhere — probably in a spontaneous community at best, a slum most likely, or a squatter camp at worst — and wherever that was, he got himself up in the morning and walked himself to work.  Sub-Saharan Africa is a land of walkers, and on any road you see people walking, walking from here to there, and on most rural roads in South Africa, some time in mid-afternoon, you see scenes like this:

 

South Africa, Mooi River township

 

Kids in uniforms, walking home from school.  The world’s future, learning about the world.

 

People tell me I’m passionate about affordable housing.  I hope so, and not just because of its intellectual and other challenges.  I cannot pass these school kids, cannot walk a slum, without seeing someone in whose eyes I see myself, someone who I could be but for grace and luck.  And at such moments I think that, If we are to do some good in the world and for its housing, we must see that however many bad things and individuals our world contains, it is brimming also full of people, and none of them are those people. 

 

They’re people.

 

Send post as PDF to