Mother Jones - Comments for "NIMBY Notebook: Habitat For Hypocrisy"

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Reality and idealism are not quite the same. Reality bites.
I live in a modest home next door to a Habitat subdivision, in a very affluent area of Atlanta. My house has been for sale for over a year. Potential buyers are eager, until they find out about Habitat. We never hear from them again.
Couple that with the fact that Habitat promised to buy my land as well. I later found out that Habitat never intended to include me in the deal. I was just being kept quiet and uncomplaining.
I am older, in less than good health and desperate to sell my only asset. That won't happen any time soon, for any price. As I said, reality bites.

Plus Ca Change, plus c'est la meme chose.

The reality of living in a community that has been devoured by Habitat For Humanity has opened my eyes to the term no good deed goes unpunished. I have lived in my neighborhood for thirty years and never had a problem until HFH moved in. I used to think HFH was a great program. My experience has been horrific to say the least. Three shootings, One shoot out resulting in bullets damaging homes for a two block radius, constant drug dealing at all hours, and I have been threatened by hoodlums walking down the street for sitting on my porch. Habitat offers no solution for the increased violence and it take three drug arrests for the city to evict the offender. HFH has left a community of elderly afraid to go to the mailbox, sit in their yards, and walk to and from there vehicles. The police agree the threat is real and have advised we take great care in protecting ourselves as there is little they can do. Forget the property value whats the value of your life. The reality of HFH is a far cry from the concept of uplifting people of little means. This is my life 24/7. This is reality and as informed as it gets.

They also consistently vote against a proposed commute rail system that would reduce traffic congestion in the North Bay for exactly the same reason. If a group of blue whale decided to move into Corte Madera, Greenpeace membership would drop precipitously in that county.

Habitat's mandate is to eliminate substandard housing from our communities. Each affiliate is a stand-alone non-profit. We are all a part of the bigger Habitat for Humanity International but we work within our own communities.

We build where we can find and purchase land. We don't necessarily rebuild blighted areas.

A well-built, simple, decent Habitat home will not bring down the value of a nearby mansion. To the contrary the problem with building in an upscale neighborhood is the constantly escalating value of the Habitat home. The Habitat homeowners end up paying unreasonable amounts of taxes and insurance because of that escalation in value. Many times homeowner payments consist of half escrow amounts and half principle due to these inflated costs.

Habitat homeowners in large part are hardworking people who cannot afford a home in their community for a variety of reasons. In our community it is due to escalating land prices due to pressure from vacation home owners.

Habitat homeowners buy their homes, pay mortgages and taxes and are productive citizens, they just don't earn enough to afford a home without the hand-up. Every adult in the program puts in significant amounts of sweat equity hours. We require 250 hours per adult, some affiliates require 500 hours per adult. This is not an entitlement, this is hard work, it is an opportunity available only to those who are willing to put in the time, energy and money.

Habitat works with people earning between 30 and 60% of the area median income. Earning less than that and they wouldn't be make the payment, earning more and they should be able to get a conventional mortgage.

Poor people are poor for a variety of reasons. The working poor are often poor because the employers in the area are able to get away with appalingly low wages. I know people with masters degrees who don't want to move from their communities but cannot find wages that are commensurate with their skills, education and abilities because of the local economy.

People are individuals and should not be judged by their economic circumstances, the color of their skin, or anything else. Not all the poor are bad people, immigrants, minorities or uneducated.

Let go or your fear.

I have been glued to my computer screen for hours reading these comments and a lot of things just popped into my head. First thing, we are witnessing a clasic case of Tragedy of the Commons. It's all about Maximizing for a few people instead of Optimizing for everyone. I am interning at a non-profit organization consulting other organizations that are interested in developing low-income housing. I am also an architecture grad student. One thing that I have learned working in and studying housing is that if you place a group of different people into the same situation they will react the same. I.E. if you mix up the economic groups into a similar atmoshpere they will react the same. For example, if you place a well-off person into a ghetto, they will have a lot of problems. And if you place a poor person into a rich neighborhood they will think the sky is the limit. Unfortunately not everyone is given the same situation in life but I think that by creating housing in different places, including a rich neighborhood, everyone will benefit. My second thought is the references pertaining to projects or other low income housing and my view is this: if you put a man in a cage he will act like an animal he will do one of tow things, he will find a way out of the cage or he will become an animal. But sense we have more common sense than animal, supposedly, the majority of the people caught up will try their best to find a way out. That's just human nature. So everyone putting down people living in projects or low incoming housing need to rewind and wake up. I know this because I was born in reaised in Newark. I've overcome a ton of obstacles and temptation to be where I am today and it hasn't gotten any easier. If the minimum wage for your state is 7 dollars how do you live in one of the most expensive states in the country. I can only dream of one day owning my own house even with my career. And that has nothing to do with my status, sex, or race. Living shouldn't be this hard. We should all be geniuses or something, spending our time on more important things like wondering why the hell someone created something that could put a hole in the Earth. Who in their right minds would create such a thing??!! That's how crazy we've gotten about this power thing, so crazy that we're willing to take ourselves out just so we can say "Ha! take that!" It's insanity people. And even if there was no such thing as money people would find another reason to hate: "My hair is longer than yours so that makes me better" I maen come on. We're wasting our time. We are becoming dumber than all of the animals combined. We call this civilized? back in the day people made a home out of whatever they could with whatever they had, now there's a rule on where and what you can live in. Are we going forward or backward? The last comment I'd like to make is about something runup7 said. First of all if you can call out or name all of the good you did for people you should ask yourself these questions: are you really doing it to make a differenece or are you doing it to be a nice guy? Second for you to speak of the good you do and to then say "but I won't let my kids go to public school so they won't get beat up" you sound like a hypocrite. First of all low income kids aren't necessarily violent, besides I went to Lehigh University a very well to do school and I trusted the poorer kids then I did the richer ones. You said rich kids aren't as violent as poor kids well that's because the new tape hasn't come out yet. Some rich kids will kick your ass and record it. Either that or they mess with you mentally making you think your they're friends and embarrass you in front of the whole school. Only some of them though, not all. ;) Finally, finally, the biggest problem of humankind is our lack of knowledge and respect for each other. We respect our pets more than we respect each other. We know more about creating weapons of mass destruction than we do about the history of our origins and traditions. Not just American, but all ethnicities. We should also know more about why some places are poor and why others aren't and it's harder to have this if you're that than it is if you were this. You follow me? Point blank we're all caught up on things that are irrelevent, but unfortunately...this is our reality.......

I'm also English and am running an affordable housing organization in the US.

Yes, there is a class system in the US, based more on wealth than on accent, who your parents were and where you went to school. However, wealth is at least a somewhat mutable factor; background is not. To me, that makes the British class system incrementally more pernicious.

SORRY!!!

Wow!

I'm English and crossed the pond to get away from a snobbish class system.

I see you have a snobbish class system of your own.....

So many great points have been raised by others about the benefits of well-designed and well-managed affordable housing for not only the residents but for whole communities. I believe the liberal/progressive community has always had a schism between environmental liberals and social justice liberals. The affordable housing debate really illustrates this divide in spades. It does seem to come down to a couple of things. First of all, people are extremely protective about their quality of life and anything that changes that is going to be fought tooth and nail. Second, I find that many people simply get locked into a defensive posture and become immobilized. Only through taking about 10 steps back can you even begin to unpack all the assumptions and biases. Third, it appears that the liberal/progressive label doesn't actually mean very much anymore. Ideally, I think it should mean that you care about more than just your own self-interest...that you actually care about others who live in your community whether or not those people have similar or different socioeconomic backgrounds. Perhaps what we really need to do is to redefine what it means be to a liberal so it actually has real meaning again.

I find it disheartening (but not at all surprising) that many residents of Marin consider firefighters, teachers, police officers, etc. "undesireables." This is not a race issue, but a class issue. There are many well-intentioned, nice people in Marin, however, there are also many self-entitled elitists who are only looking out for themselves. I speak from experience, as I am an employee of Marin County who deals with locals like Duane daily. I have seen firsthand the benefits of affordable housing programs in Marin that have allowed fellow County employees to relocate closer to work. And although I could have afforded a modest home in Marin, I chose not to live in the County, for fear I would end up living next to neighbors like Duane. That is not the type of environment nor the system of values in which I want to raise a family.

i grew up less than a mile from duane's house on eagle rock drive, but i was a black sheep; i skipped college and i've been a tradesman for a 25 years. i live in a big west coast city, and i've been on the equity elevator long enough to afford a home in a good neighborhood. i'm a committed liberal: i write a fat check to the DNC every year, and i recently supported a proposal to locate a homeless shelter in the park a half-block from my house. this guy duane seems like a nut-job if he can't stomach some regular working-class folks living on his street.
HOWEVER: my kids will be going to private school pretty soon, because i'm not going to risk having their asses kicked in the public schools which are populated by the children the poor, who do a lot more crimes and violence than the children of the rich. also, i'm considering moving back to marin to keep an eye on my aged parents, but i won't be demanding a house in tiburon; i'll live in a tiny hovel in east corte madera or petaluma and commute, as befits a union member living amongst the wealthy. what do you people say to that?

With the (That's the way life is mentality) there is no sense in identifying all these problems.