Blessed are the poor

Please pardon the length but my heart is too burdened today for brevity. The profession I chose, and still dabble in, has suffered a horrible blow, perhaps a fatal one. Urban planners must deal with countless factors that determine how a city functions. Some challenges appear new and full blown. Solar panels please some and infuriate others. How does a city balance those feelings for the common good? Outside interests buy homes in a quiet neighborhood and covert them into mini-motels. What could possibly go wrong? Digitally active billboards appear that could, some believe, distract already anxiety-burdened motorists. Actually though, it turned out that nobody looked at the darn things. Problem solved.

Throughout recent history, however, the profession sought one goal that would surely have pleased the Galilean. Everyone should have a home—a decent, safe, and sanitary place to come home to after a day’s work. In recent history, a share of the population believes that the worker at a plant should deserve the same domestic solace, albeit not as opulent, as its corporate owner. Others believe that the poor, yes, the ones that Luke mentioned, can contaminated “decent” folks like some unmanageable virus. They advocate having the service workers, teachers, and tradesmen motor into their city, service the needs of the rich, and leave by sundown, to hell with the traffic it requires.

It forms a struggle based as much on religious strictures as fact-based ones. That’s why it weighs so heavy on my heart to read where the president of the United States of American told families in the suburbs that they would “no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low-income housing in their neighborhood” if he remains in office. 

If that vow crushed my heart, think how the Galilean must feel.

The poor will find a place to live.

Old Days. Old Ways.

For some reason yesterday, I began thinking of my fifth-grade elementary school teacher. Her name was Edith Rupe and she enjoyed the reputation of being one of the most popular teachers at Lakeside Elementary in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, an all-white institution of learning at the time.

I know little of her private life. I know she was unmarried and lived in a boarding house that I think was located on Sixth Street, at the edge of Downtown. The school was on 15^th Street so she walked or rode the bus to and fro. A bus ran within a block of the school.

I can’t determine what her salary would have been. Some records indicate teachers were paid an average of $3,000 per year but I can’t imagine that they were paid half that in my hometown. The African-American teachers probably received less than half that of white teachers.

At any rate, it was a lonely and minimal experience that she must have led as she trained young minds to face the future. Her only companion was a parakeet who died when I was in her class. She squashed our offer to take up collection for a replacement, choosing more loneliness over more heartbreak. Televisions wouldn’t become common for several years, so it is a bit comforting to know that she lived only a few blocks from the (white) city library.

Boarding houses, rooming houses, or resident hotels, as they were called, afforded a common source of housing for American workers who could not afford the $9,000 average cost of a new home or the $80 per month average rent of a full apartment. Rooms at a boarding house included meals. Patrons relied primarily on public transit or walking for access to jobs. Boarding houses existed well into the 1970s and began to fade from the urban landscape. Here is the last one I remember.

It stood in Little Rock a few blocks from our state’s Capitol and the building exists to this day. It has been recycled as a commercial use for decades.

What caused the demise of boarding houses? They once served as entry-level abodes for newcomers moving to the city for their first job. Safety made them popular with young females. Low price made them popular with students. Racial conditions made them segregated.

Some scholars blame local zoning and building codes for the passing of this type of dwelling. I’m sure that played its part, although most zoning ordinances in our state still list them as an allowable use in certain districts, as long as those districts are far away from the rich folks.

At the same time, building codes portray the audacity of requiring that buildings have adequate structural components, safe electrical systems, and meet the nebulous social designation of being “decent, safe, and sanitary.”

Also, most areas of our state lack public transit systems, and despite the urging of planners, walking to work in temperatures of 90-plus degrees and 100-percent humidity isn’t nearly as socially soothing as it might seem.

That brings up the matter of the automobile as the default system of conveyance. Even a modest requirement of one parking space per unit might require more space for the automobile than for the tenants.

Some murmuring is circulating that boarding houses might represent at least a partial solution to the present crisis in affordable housing and its tragic offspring: homelessness. As with many elements of the urban landscape, most people would consider that a fine idea, as long as the results didn’t end up anywhere near their own backyard.

And so it goes.

Modern Living

Lately, I’ve been reading and thinking about affordable housing. Everyone seems obsessed with it. Nobody seems to be doing anything about it. One of the problems is that the places needing it most urgently are the places where the market, and many times other forces, resist it most fervently. Some of those cities that I call “Modern Boom Towns,” try to encourage construction of housing for the working class. They find though, that, upon construction, the market pushes rents or selling prices far out of the reach of those most in need. They must find transportation from places where affordable housing exists. The distances they must travel grow greater with each year of local regional prosperity.

One type of housing upon which the poor depended in years gone by exists largely in photographs of yesteryear, for example: 

These once dotted the rural landscape of the agricultural South. They provided homes for farm laborers and sharecroppers. I’m told that my parents lived in one of these after their marriage while sharecropping near the Ladd community south of Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

 The homes consisted of three rooms in a row with a straight shot from the front door to the rear door, hence the name “shotgun houses,” as a weapon fired through the front door would go straight through the rear door.

 In certain areas, such homes consisted of an addition story or half-story. In cities they were lined side by side. As neighbors began to escape the bitterest of poverty, two of the homes might be connected to make one. This earned them the local moniker of “double-barreled shotgun houses.”

Photographer/writer Rian Dundon wrote in an essay in Timeline of the location of such home in urban areas: "The precise origins of the shotgun house are up for debate. Some scholars trace the style back to West Africa, where an early 19th century boom in New Orleans’ Afro-Haitian population introduced the distinctive structures. But the ubiquity of shotgun houses throughout the urban south can also be viewed as a variation on the typical one-room farm house—rotated 90 degrees for a better fit in the city’s narrow lots."

 In one of those cases of irony that tend to confuse us, the archetypal “shotgun house” has been adopted by a new and different breed of owner. The one below represents a head-turning case. The owner obtained it for free just before demolition, moved it, and “fixed it up” for $140,000 as a part time lodging place and part-time short-term rental ($350 per night). He then listed it for sale for just under a million dollars. No sharecroppers or service workers need apply.

Most examples in our state  have disappeared. One of the last stood for years just outside the Delta city of Marvell, Arkansas, a fixer-upper for certain had it been saved.

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