Distrust me just this once? Part 2, the enemies of trust
By: David A. Smith
[Continued from yesterday's Part 1].
“Who are you going to believe: me or your lying eyes?”
– Groucho Marx, Duck Soup
To redevelop Jordan Downs, one of Los Angeles’s largest and worst public housing properties, requires gargantuan capital – the figure $1,000,000,000 has been bandied about – and that, in turn, requires massive political capital, including the legitimizing vote of confidence from Jordan Downs’ current residents. In yesterday’s Part 1 we discovered, as shown in this Los Angeles Times article, that many earnest well-educated folks are trying to persuade the residents not merely to endorse but also to engage. All this takes trust, and trust is a commodity sorely lacking at Jordan Downs.
Trying to survive. Some residents are just too busy trying to survive to worry about the rebuilding project. Only about a dozen of Jordan Downs’ 700 families turn out consistently at architects’ planning sessions.
Many have spent their whole lives in the projects — long enough to remember when a similar renewal proposal 20 years ago crumbled –
More significantly, long enough to have forgotten any other world.
– amid political resistance and tenants’ complaints.
Change and slum redevelopment always have two powerful and self-reinforcing enemies: residents and politicians. The reasons are complicated, and not always noble.
As I’ve written before, many groups ‘win’ from a slum:
Slums are economically rational, they are a wealth-extraction machine, and they are places where private investment (usually in housing) has outpaced municipal infrastructure. They cannot be bulldozed out of existence, much though some try. That they are durable proves that not only are they rational, they also have a systemic robustness, which means they self-repair, and that means there are people who want the slum to endure – those who are slums’ winners.
We don’t like to think that slums have winners, but they do, and like the circles of Dante’s Inferno, they come in varying shades of need, desperation, and culpability.
Though I wrote all this about informal settlements in the global south, it applies equally well to decrepit public housing.
People who believe they are winning tend to resist changing the status quo. Some of them use the slum, or the public housing property, as a place to hide:
2. People who cannot live formally. Some people live in the shadows. They are illegal immigrants, fugitives from the law, those whose income is not merely informal but also illicit. They cannot take the risk of living legally, so they find the shadow apartments, the slums inside. They will rationally pay a surcharge (in terms of too much rent for the quality of housing received) to a landlord who won’t turn them in to the authorities.
Alaye Ba, a 46-year-old Senegalese immigrant shows stacks of dried wood in the basement of his building, filled with African families waiting to be placed in public housing, in
Some demagogues see these places as vote banks:
Plenty of votes down here … if you’ll grub for them
9. Politicians seeking vote banks. Slum dwellers are people too, and in genuine democracies, they get to vote, and their votes matter. Rich or poor, all votes are equal, so elected officials doing their political calculus realize that slums represent vote banks.
Our votes can dig your political grave
Though many a populist has arisen from the slums, slum dwellers get used to disappointment. [Snip] Slum dwellers are often disempowered, and deceived by political vaporware: promises made with no intention of their being kept, or even the best of intentions and the worst of commitments.
The residents of Jordan Downs – that is, those brave enough to come out to task force discussions and community meetings – are justifiably skeptical. They’ve heard promises before.
Many suspect that this project is an excuse to kick them out of their subsidized apartments, where rents are based on family income; some say they pay less than $100 a month.
Utterly nonsensical, I wrote in the margin when first I read this, yet now I’m rethinking it, because of this:
1. City-dwellers who have minimal rent-paying power. People move to cities to earn cash money (because city economies run on cash, not barter). Because urban land’s value rises with the city’s median income, the population’s bottom decile can never afford anything remotely like market quality.
Those who can pay the least move to slums.
(This also suggests that the most hideous slums will occur in the richest cities, because the gap between median income and bottom income will be the largest.)
The cynical affordability of slums has a flip side: the economic unaffordability of market housing. Because of the cost-value gap, ‘voluntary market eviction’ is a genuine phenomenon, whether in new-construction mid-rises of Sao Paulo’s Cingapura properties or rebuilt post-redevelopment HOPE VI.
After HOPE VI:
If urban land is valuable, perhaps it is too valuable for the poorest?
But we are promising you’ll have the right to return, said those in power. Look at all the evidence of our commitment.
What evidence is proof if you doubt all evidence?
Conspiracy theories. A crackdown on lease violators has fueled conspiracy theories, particularly among blacks, who have watched the population in the project shift from virtually all-black 40 years ago to more than two-thirds Latino today.
Others are weary of broken commitments, among them the city’s promise three years ago to install Internet access if tenants dropped objections to security cameras.
This bizarre dynamic – the offering to give one benefit if the residents stop objecting to another benefit – only makes sense when you deduce the existence of people who cannot live formally. It’s easy enough for them to rouse their neighbors into voicing what they will not – political shields, if you will.
And some are just too busy trying to survive to worry about abstractions like “landscape typologies,” or choose between rooftop decks and community courtyards. Only about a dozen of Jordan Downs’ 700 families turn out consistently at architects’ planning sessions.
The only thing worse than having community participation, said Oscar Wilde, is not having community participation.
“Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much.”
“The projects ain’t feeling this right now,” explained longtime resident Fred “Scorpio” Smith.
Aside from 13 years in the penitentiary, Smith, 37, has lived in Jordan Downs his whole life.
The community voice? Fred Smith, ex-convict and spokesperson
Telling, isn’t it, that Mr. Smith has spent one-third of his life incarcerated? Perhaps Mr. Smith has friends who’d prefer the absence of change.
He ticked off a string of tenants evicted for penny-ante transgressions, like elderly “Miss Lewis,” kicked out after 53 years, Smith said, when a project employee saw a set of clothes belonging to her 47-year-old son.
Oral histories are always melodramas. Good is represented by the teller and his friends; bad by those both powerful and evil. Inconvenient facts are conveniently omitted.
Somehow, I find myself certain that this 47-year-old son is serious bad news.
“He lives in
Then perhaps Miss Lewis’s apartment is his place of business. Perhaps that business is illegal. Perhaps he terrorizes his mother, or perhaps she is too old to know what is going on. Using an innocent as a rental front, hiding behind the elderly, behind women, behind children, is a preferred technique in houses of crime.
Still, Lewis was accused of violating her lease by harboring a tenant not on the lease, Smith said. “It’s like they got a secret list. You blink twice and you’re out.”
Not possible. Not with legal aid. Not in Los Angeles, America’s homelessness magnet.
Such stories fuel conspiracy theories, particularly among blacks who have watched the population in the project shift from virtually all-black 40 years ago to more than two-thirds Latino today.
Garage Sell. Many residents suspect that the renewal plan is an excuse to kick them out of their subsidized apartments, where rents are based on family income; some say they pay less than $100 a month.
When people do not know, they imagine. When fearful people imagine, what they imagine increases their fear.
I don’t feel good about what they’re conjuring up
King concedes that there has been a crackdown on lease violators by a new staff installed to remedy years of mismanagement.
‘Concedes’? I’d be touting it. Rules you don’t enforce are worse than useless. Living in public housing is not a birthright; it demands lease compliance.
Evictions are up, he said, but blacks are not being targeted.
“We’re just holding families accountable for what they should have been doing all along,” he said.
Is that proof good enough for you, reader? Or are you skeptical?
Every tenant “in good standing” will be allowed to remain and return when the new homes are done, he added.
Experience in other HOPE VI properties suggests that only a minority of public housing residents who relocate off-site during HOPE VI actually move back. Some find new lives elsewhere, and shake off their public-housing mentality as if it were a bad dream. Others are, in fact, not lease compliant, a condition tolerated in the shadows of pre-renovation operations, but intolerable in the bright light of a comprehensive redevelopment.
King, who grew up a few miles away, understands why Jordan Downs tenants don’t fully trust planners and public officials.
And what it will take to win them over.
I’m from the projects: show me
[Continued tomorrow in Part 3].
Write a comment