Equity

 Sundays I think of the Galilean, not from religious fervor, but because I was trained to do so as a youth and things stick. Lately, I’ve been concerned, since I don’t have to worry constantly about paying bills, with the theoretical aspects of urban planning. Now what would He (with a capital “h”) have to say about urban planning? I don’t know.

He did say, we are told, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.” According to another source, he just said, "Blessed are the poor." I sort of like the first since I've know some pretty rich people who were awfully poor in spirit, even people who have buildings named after them.

This hit home to me a number of years ago while working on a project involving a working-class neighborhood in decline. I had attended a workshop by the then current “guru of planning” who had assured the crowd that the type planning pioneered by him and his wife would cure everything from ugly neighborhoods to socio-economic inequity to the “low-down blues.” He was an engaging speaker, much in demand, and charismatic. He enthralled the crowd with his speech and all the slides, pictures, and pronouncements.

I was still hyped when an activist introduced me to a woman who lived in the neighborhood in question. She was talkative. That encouraged me. I just had to ask her about interaction with her neighbors. (The guru had assured us that was a sign of the righteousness of his planning model).

She turned stone cold when I asked. “Mr.,” she said, “I’m a single-mother of two boys whose father ran off with another woman and doesn’t provide a penny for support. I hold down two jobs so I can feed them and provide a place to live. When I’m at my second job, I lock my boys in the house so they don’t get killed by stray bullets. I don’t know who my neighbors are and, quite frankly, don’t care.”

Since then, I’ve not been so sure that streetscapes, bike paths, and inspired urban design are the answers to what our cities face.

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.

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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A Trip Back Home

We decided, my wife and I, to take a “spur of the moment” trip to my hometown of Pine Bluff, Arkansas today so I could mow some pasture land my brother owns, a part of the old home place. He’s not enjoying good health at present and isn’t even able to put diesel in his tractor. I took him some, fueled the tractor, and mowed the field while he and Brenda sat in the shade and talked. I can only hope that it wasn’t all about me.

I wasn’t bored. A portion of the field I was mowing once boasted the best homemade baseball backstop ever built by boys under the age of fourteen. It comprised sweet gum saplings sunk in the ground and backed by burlap feed sacks stitched together. Since the lads were better builders than batters, it held up to a lot of hard use. Each time I passed the spot, I could hear the sound of a ball pounding into burlap, oh, and, on rare occasion, the crack of a bat.

I mowed alongside an old stock pond that probably saw more youthful recreation per square foot than any patch of ground in America. It was partly filled with debris now. But the sight of a young boy sitting with his grandmother and begging to “pish” just a little more still shines through the dim past.

Across the field, I mowed along a dirt road that lead no place geographically but to amazing places in the minds of young boys: cowboy hideouts, Indian camps, unseen spots for smoking pilfered cigarettes, and a gathering spot for bemoaning the vicissitudes of childhood and the unfathomable allure of girls for older boys.

The family home and grocery disappeared long ago. To a person growing up there, though, key markings remain. There’s my dad’s favorite tree, still bearing the signs of white paint left from a trick my brother played on our nephew. There’s the road to nowhere, originally named “King’s Road,” after an African-American man who lived toward the end of it. That name didn’t suit the 9-11 addressing crew, so it’s now named after my family, over the strenuous protests of Sainted Mother at the time.

She was a stickler for tradition and truth. I still recall her “aghastness” when a group of yuppies moved onto a road near where she grew up and made the County change the name. To mother, it had always been “Hog-eye Ben Road” and should have remained so.

There’s the house across the highway from our homeplace, standing in the exact shape as it did over 70 years ago. In my brother’s yard, if one looks closely, he can see the remnants of the pipe where our pump house once stood, From there, one can triangulate, using the painted tree, to the location of our chicken yard, barn, wash house, and even the privy.

I finished the mowing and we left, deciding to “drag Main,” and see what was happening. The old town has suffered in modern times. There’s nothing more fun for the residents of “Sundown Towns” than to laugh at the old girl and the troubles she’s seen. I suspect it’s better, though, to live in a town full of problems and people who are willing to work on them, than in a town full of bigoted assholes.

One final joy, the old Community Theater still stands intact. In fact, we enjoyed a conversation with two nice young men doing some repairs to the flooring. When I was a kid, if you were white and had a quarter, you could spend an entire afternoon there. You paid ten cents to get in, ten cents for a box of popcorn, and five cents for a cup of soda. For that, you got a double-feature and four cartoons. You had to be white, though.

Still a handsome city.
My great-grandfather's
Civil War unit once defended
this street from attack
by the Rebs.

Folks are now spending big money in the city for projects that are available to all citizens. They are even beginning work on restoring the old Pines Hotel on Main. There’s lots of new building going on, some near the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. A once distressed shopping center in our part of town now appears fully occupied. There are glimmers of hope everywhere.

Things change in this world, and they don’t change toward equity. It takes luck and hard work to provide livable and diverse communities. My hometown takes no back seat to any in terms of the latter.

Oh, and my brother was grateful for the help.