Affordable Housing

 The answer to affordable housing for service workers may require much broader lateral thinking than we have attempted thus far. It may require cooperation from sources not engaged to date in our analysis, to wit:

The military: It must have hundreds of thousands of helicopters it doesn’t need due to the pressure from legislators representing areas where they make the darn things.

Government Archives: Surely there is some hidden corner of some warehouse where one can find the plans for the internment camps and homes where displaced Japanese families were interned in 1941.

Employment Agencies; They should be able to standardize the shift times of entities employing service workers.

Famers: They will make more money with far less effort by renting plots of farmland to the government.

Highway Construction Departments: A dollar saved by not building commuter lanes is a dollar that can be used for transportation.

President Trump: He will certainly throw his political weight behind a program that will help his make good on his promise to protect the real estate investments of wealthy homeowners.

 By now, the hyper-astute among you can see where this is headed,

Yes.

1. Obtain large segments of vacant land downwind but near major employment centers.
2. Use archived plans to rebuilt exact replicas of the internment camps of WWII.
3. Move service worker families into the camps.
4. Construct multiple helicopter pads adjacent to the camps.
5. Standardize shift schedules at plants, service outlets, retail outlets, etc.
6. Build helicopter pads located within walking distance of major employment centers.
7.  Confiscate, say, 50 percent of the largest helicopters the military has but doesn’t need.
8. Confiscate funds wasted on building commuter lanes.
9. Obtain a couple of presidential executive orders.
10. Tear down any existing low-rent housing near suburban enclaves.
11. Schedule pickup and delivery times.

 Problem solved.

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.

I

 

 

 

 

Speech Crime as a Leading Indicator

I’ve been attempting to explain my fear of the fall of our society by using an analogy with the debasement of our language. Will crime against language presage crimes against societal norms? I worry that it is so.

For example, the term “parameter” is a mathematical one, referring to the attribute of a variable. It closely resembles the word “perimeter,” or a boundary. The terms were confused by careless writers and speakers for so long that “boundary” is now an accepted meaning of “parameter,” a linguistic crime against the glorious language of Shakespeare and Milton. It has so far gone unpunished.

I now know people with doctoral degrees from major universities who, unabashedly and without embarrassment, say “It is a secret between you and I.” In fact, I once heard, on Book TV, a woman with a graduate degree from the Columbia School of Journalism, thank the school for “inviting my sister and I here to speak.”

Let’s not even mention the misuse of “nauseous” to mean “nauseated.” Oh hell, let’s do. Ironically, it may have a ring of verisimilitude when a vapid speaker refers to himself as “nauseous,” meaning having the power to nauseate others. It sure does the trick for me.

Can societal communication survive the legitimization of such talk-crime? I, for one, don't see how.

My point? I think it may happen that this current presidential administration will burn itself out. Unless someone manages to push the wrong button, it will go the way of all sociological transgressions. I worry that, by then, we may find that our collective level of social decency may so debased that, like allowing our children to think that it is allowable to say, “would you please help he and I,” our ability to recognize the good and proper in our societal conduct may be forever lost.

"By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion." - Psalm 137