EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

HOUSING

The New York Times featured an interesting guest editorial this morning by an economics professor. It was a "we can build our way our of it" solution to the affordable housing crisis by someone who has probably never attended a planning commission meeting. He says that zoning and bureaucracy are significant obstacles blocking our way.

I call, “Bullshit.”

 I can name a half-dozen cities in our state that have the land and utility capacity and would approve vast "Levittowns" tomorrow. Assuming some sort of construction "Deus ex Machina" miracle that suddenly lowered material and labor costs, the projects could be built quickly and with minimal red tape.

So why not?

Just check the racial composition of those cities.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 38 (Cont._3)

We started looking in earnest for a house a month or so after we married. We had advantages, of course, being Caucasian. Also, the GI Bill offered me a lowered interest rate and a no-down payment loan. Friends gave us a lot of advice, some good and some bad. One said, “buy more house than you can afford and you’ll grow into it as your income rises. That sounded to me like the cowboy who bought a horse he couldn’t ride because it might quit bucking someday.

The best advice simply said buy the least expensive home in a stable and popular location. The value of the more expensive homes will exert an upward influence on the value of yours. Also, buy a home you could conceivably pay for with one salary. Life is unpredictable. Some advice is ageless.

The generation before us had settled, when the war ended, for modest frame homes, some no larger than 800 square feet. Their sons and daughters would settle for no less than a three-bedroom, two-bath, brick structure as a “starter home.” That was to be one of many differences between the so-called “Greatest Generation,” and the Baby Boomers.

It also confounded the “trickle-down” theory taught for so long in planning schools. The older generation was supposed to move from their “starter homes” into more expensive ones, freeing cheaper units for purchase by the younger set. It didn’t quite work out that way. Nobody wanted the cheaper houses and they quickly converted to rental properties, with no provision for upkeep.

The only thing that trickled down was rain flowing through rotted roofs.

About this time in America, the purchase of a home began to represent, for many families, the best way of amassing wealth. This would require a steady rise in housing values over decades, much like a company’s stock that never stopped rising. It would also generate substantial benefits for homeowners that didn’t accrue to renters. We had no idea at the time how much this trend would change our country.

My non-white comrades who had served alongside me in the military faced different challenges in taking advantages of the GI Bill’s housing benefits. They faced few choices in housing location at that time. An urban renewal project in Little Rock had cleared a slum neighborhood and converted it into a spacious subdivision of mini-mansions for the wealthy and elite African-American families: physicians, attorneys, business owners, and, once, a star of the Harlem Globetrotters.

Less affluent brothers and sisters were relegated to racially acceptable neighborhoods. One can easily understand what that meant.

There wasn’t anything equitable about it. That’s just the way things were. Life rolled on. We, as a family, were about to take advantage of the inequity. We, as a company, were about to learn how rocky the underlying racial prejudice in our country could make the road of life. At the time, we were foolish enough to think that prejudice might dissipate someday, become gone with the wind, so to speak. The most wondrous dreams can sometimes be the most foolish.

We plan on buying a house.

Old Homes

Early morning thoughts while listening to a Sibelius violin Concerto:

On Sunday evenings I like to watch Nicole Curtis on the DYI Channel show “Rehab Addict” for three reasons. First (and don’t you dare tell the Queen B I said this) she has the kind of looks that would make an oak tree sprout rosebuds. Second, she has good tips on renovating houses, something we still try our hands at from time to time, the Queen B and I. Third, Nicole doesn’t destroy. She saves and renews.

That’s refreshing on a channel that usually features wild-eyed morons with sledge hammers destroying perfectly good cabinetry that could either be saved or donated to a family who needs it. They follow this by putting up cheap, gaudy cr…, uh, stuff that won’t last a year.

We have never built a new house. We’ve restored an old Victorian cottage in Little Rock’s Quapaw Quarter and an old farmhouse in Lonoke County, both to some degree of respectability. We also spruced up a couple of other homes to the point where we made a profit upon selling them.

Now we are renovating a condominium in downtown Little Rock. Actually we are having it done. We’ve gotten a little slow in “the springabout” to be lifting sheetrock panels over our heads as we once did.

Living in a “throwaway” culture is a little sad, though. The typical automatic dishwasher now will perform, from my investigation, for somewhere between six and ten years before it must be replaced. In our small condo unit, the dishwasher installed in the seventies whines a bit but still does the job. So do the bathroom sink fixtures. Can you imagine how long those silly things that one just taps to make the water come out will last? Oh well.

Anyway, it seems that the idea of “sweat equity” doesn’t command the appeal it once did. In my profession, we concern ourselves a lot with the concept of affordable housing. In an increasing number of cities, it simply doesn’t exist. If a young couple starting out wants to work there, they won’t be able to live there. Too bad.

We were lucky. We were young once, and foolish. It simply never dawned on us that we couldn’t take a fallen down old home and bring it back to life. I suppose had we been smarter, as these young folks are today, we would have known not to try it.

But I’m awfully glad we did.

Brenda and my nephew, the late William Howard Morgan, Jr,
work on a 1890s Victorian Cottage in Little Rock.

See also: www.wattensawpress.com
www.travelswithanalien.blogspot.com