Locked Out of The American Dream; Unmixed Master

You You Dr. David This civilization is a affordable housing for all our people and it's a minimum of respect for the civilization. No one should have to be afraid of being

put out of that home because we have hundreds of units out here that's vacant. So this is what this sign means. Someone, someone, someone ought to be living here. Nothing illustrates the twist and the exclusive nature of the whole American economy. Then better than the real estate work, it's the market where not only you can use people locked out, but you can see them locked out every day. Locked out, set out. Locked out, turned out. Oh, that market. How's it? It's a basic necessity of life. It's a largest item in most families budgets that shapes our lives. In the neighborhoods. This program is about the millions of people locked out of the American Green.

This program is about this nation's failure to provide decent, affordable housing for all. It's also the story of grassroots efforts to find solutions to the problem. That's what creates. I don't know, but how is that? level three. What does that provide? I don't know. The average family I mean the average family can't afford to buy the average home in the average American city. And for people who are making less than the median income or less than the average income, it's not just a problem, it's a crisis. The area here was an area of poor blacks and poor whites living more or less together.

In this area in the seventies had about a hundred percent displacement for this townhouse and condo development. Nestled in this new development, you can still see what the neighborhood used to look like. Small frame houses generally, where people had lived for years and years. You can see the driveways where people, where their houses were sitting, where their little shade trees were. I mean, usually when you're kind of picking up the pieces a decade later, you can't get a feel for the human drama of this. But just the pathos of people being ripped out of the community watching the community being torn down around you.

You really need somebody not like an urban planner to record this. You know, it's more properly a Shakespeare somebody. I really think the final nail in the coffin of this neighborhood was when this freeway actually opened last year. Right before it opened, I was serving on the thoroughfare committee. We had all kind of extra requests along here for exit ramps and stuff like that. It was just a real land grab going on down here in an anticipation of this opening. When it opened, that's really when the mass bulldozen started in this area.

Sometimes the it's a market displacement. Sometimes it's an eminent domain displacement like this is. Sometimes it's gentrification. This thing takes different forms in different parts of the city, but generally it's one variation out with the poor and with the pavement wherever you go. The housing crisis is fundamentally one of low income people, families earning salaries

with steady jobs being increasingly unable to afford decent housing. And that's what makes this a crisis. And increasingly it is forcing people into overcrowding. They cannot leave their parents home. They have to double up with friends and family and pose upon them because they cannot find shelter. Or they pay exorbitant amounts of their income for rent. And when they do that, they're either trading off other purchases that are essential. They're not buying food, they're not buying medical care, they're not buying clothing. Or they're only one paycheck away from homelessness. And that's what makes this a crisis.

And that's what makes this a crisis. You just walk in the street. Just thinking the society is just forgotten about it. Oh Paul, it's better than mine. It's about good ain't it? It's just about good.

Well, before I got my patients, they were helping me. They just made me feel needed. Then when I got my check, they was glad I got a place. And I'm off to bed, I got a place. That are on the streets. And what we found is a person gets a room, gets some kind of personal security and safe place to live. They function very well. But what happens is they're led out of a state hospital with no housing, no place to live. And all they have is one or two weeks medicine. And then they're on the streets and a lot of time their medicine is downer, so it's valuable on the streets. They'll sell it. And then when they could take in their medicine, their condition re-emerges or gets worse. Exhibit all this aberrant behavior and end up thrown back into hospital for a few days. It's kind of a revolving door.

I got my own room. I got my own bed. I received mail here and sent my prayers here. And I just had this piece of me. Now, a lot of behavior on the streets that is sometimes considered evidence of mental illness is really not that. It's this state of total insecurity that you're in when you are literally homeless. You don't ever get enough nutrition, you don't ever get enough good restful sleep. And you're in a state of complete vulnerability. And I dare say that most people that have homes if they had to live on these streets a few weeks would exhibit behavior that would look like they were mentally ill or at least delusional.

Like I said, I'm out trying to find a job so we can get out of the situation when we get into a better environment. I'm trying to make it so you have a good place to stay. It's like an ideal family. I want a house, a backyard.

And I too big, they still like to swing with a swing in a backyard, not a dog. So, you know, they can just play right around and write their friends over. It has got me down a whole lot. They're really happy me out a little bit too. They give me a little support, say, Mom, we will stay with you. No matter how hard it is, we'll still be there with you. Let me do my three, two, three. Get it, get it. My mom says you're joking. Check it out, it's chilly feet. It looked dangerous over here because there's many empty houses over here. You think that, like, if you go by a house, somebody will pull you in and out.

And like, when it's done, you'll be outside. You'll be scared to come out of custody. So, enter your house. Keep breaking. They break your wounds. They be climbing in your wound. They break your screams and make you pay for it. They put junk in your yard, thanking this junkyard. Don't look right. And like, if your family lives in a better place, think less of you. Instantly still here. I got a school in North Dallas. And out there, they got a lot of pretty houses and stuff. And people live healthy out there and stuff. And when they ask me where I stay, they say, you stay out here and I say, I say, yeah, because I don't know where I stay. They think we don't have enough money to move over the thing that we don't have nothing. And there's got to be some pretty apartments.

And the house got to be clean, the walls don't have to be heaven. Wearing some of that that don't need to be on it. And the bell's doing it and ton of us need to be fixed right. So there you go.

People are sitting next to me. 40,000 total beings. Each of them isn't that would a lot of cost money. Just for the public and all the property. Right now I have a job working in department store where I work in the snack bar and I'm going up for the manager of the department. I earn around 150 to 200 a week and my rent is 42 dollars a month right now. But I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States. And will to the best of my ability and will to the best of my ability.

Preserve, protect and defend. So help me God. Congratulations sir. We've done a tremendous job at a time when we've got a we've got a federal deficit. Where everyone has to make a contribution toward belt tightening. So as to avoid bank rupting the future of your children, my children and their children. So we've done our part in terms of adhering to that agenda that the president. It was a mandate of the president. Thank you. The issue for us in this country was affordability more so than availability of housing. So we felt that there was sufficient housing stock.

So we felt that by acting responsibly and effectively with the funds that we had, we could do more with less. We could house two to three times, two and a half to three times as many people utilizing the voucher than we could with the expensive new construction of public housing. People had to take 50 rubles to prevent it.

Hello bear, I love you all here. We take 50 rubles with elevators and different things like that. The issue is not whether or not to correct mistakes. It's whether to correct mistakes at the expense of the overall supply of low income housing. The United States can well afford to replace this housing in a different configuration, less density, better location, and more services. What it cannot afford is any further loss of a housing stock that is perpetually available for families with the greatest housing needs. We don't have a house, we don't have a house.

So what we decided we was going to do, we was going to ask the good Lord to help us and bless us, save these housing projects, fix them up and clean them up. And I do believe the Lord is going to bless us to do that and help us to do that. I'm so glad that Jesus saved me. He saved me. He saved me. The Lord Jesus is looking on the hall of my father's house, my niece.

We're getting ready to break up our next artist. Amen. How many of school shoes are going to help me pass my test? He's going to help me. Amen. What I suggest to you is a segregation is going to be around. What you have to do though is fight off the devices used to segregate and the major device used to segregate in these years in current terms. Contemporary times is the ability to deny resources to a particular area. Let's put some money into the segregated, once segregated area and bring it up to snuff. And then naturally because people look for better things and want to maximize their own advantages, whites would want to move into this area because they have super schools over there. They have amenities over there.

That is, it cannot seriously be offered as an option. Now it's wonderful. And hopefully we'll have it all over the city. And in fact in 25 years it will be able to be a little racial paradise here. And the one we will not have white neighborhood associations falling out for dead at the thought of black folks moving within 10 miles of them and all kinds of things. But until then our clients are going to go and seek the protection of the federal court because they do not have the faith in the political process and do not have the faith in that kind of evolutionary change. If they only have housing available in West Dallas, I think the central issue for a mother would have family is to get into a house where she can have control close to some good schools, close to an area. And if the city does what they're supposed to do in terms of ordinance enforcement and you get into something like tenant management, something innovative, something that's going to weld the people to the projects in terms of an ownership. I think that what you're going to have is people willing to live there.

I'm glad to be out of West Dallas. Even if they fix up West Dallas, West Dallas is still going to be West Dallas no matter if they turn down, rebuild. It's still going to be West Dallas. Everybody consider West Dallas bad. I said wait a minute, I just moved over there because I had to move there. If I had a choice, I'd never would have went. See, West Dallas just has a reputation. Not all people from West Dallas are bad. It's just that a few that all, if they're not bad when you get over there, you got to pretend you're bad to survive. But I don't like people in West Dallas. That they bring girls by people houses, steaks and knifeies. They pull them out on people. So when somebody tried to fight and they be ready to fight. Me and myself, I chose the suburban citizen and I'm glad that I did. I like it, job wise, it's good, education wise, it's good, and plus the environment. It's a whole lot better.

There are reasons that the Section A program is particularly useful as a deserigation tool. As opposed to construction of new public housing. It is mobile. It does offer families a chance to get into areas that here, here to four, have depended that they could not get to unless the housing authority and the city and the political powers that they had the guts to build public housing there. Section 8 and free-floating vouchers, you have to depend on the private supply for the housing of public housing. People wanting publicly assisted housing. Now you have a unit owned by the government. You don't have to rely on the private whims in order to meet the supply or the demand. The First Amendment is very straightforward.

You would prohibit the use of federal funds to demolish more than 2600 units of public housing in my congressional district in Dallas, Texas. You will be told by a member from the other side of the aisle that this is primarily a desegregation matter. The truth is that this is primarily a question of the availability of public housing to the poor. 900 of the tenants in the projects to be demolished. That housing was not saved. It is still unusable. It might as well be demolished for anybody who needs that housing. There is any way possible that you could save the housing project I wish you would because it's people like me that have children. The next couple of weeks. Thank you all for being here. Keep in mind that it's good to say for some people to say that we have $1.7 billion available for to modernize public housing. But also keep in mind there's 1.2 million units across this country.

There's 3,000 plus housing authorities and I can go to any city which I will be doing on leave here and I will get the same kind of demands. We need to do more than just provide secure well maintained units. We need to address the human development needs of that family. What we're finding now is an increasing number of people in public assistance. Many, many more single female-headed households with young children which in turn creates a whole other range of social issues that we need to deal with in public housing. We have just opened up in one of our family high-rise is something we're calling the Family Development Center.

We need to talk about more jobs, job training, we need to talk about remedial education, we need to talk about childcare. I dropped out when I was in the 10th grade. I never finished and I always wanted to finish school. I had 3 kids but I always wanted to finish school so I came there. I wanted to do something but babysitting was my problem so since they opened the daycare I jumped right into this. There's a lot of people that really don't get involved in this because they feel the same and we feel we want a better day in life like we are. It gave me the opportunity to learn computers which I would like to be a computer operator and to keep up with the math and work the day that the kids are getting in school. Some of the children out here now don't even care about school because they feel like moms land around and look at the stories but when they see moms getting to the boat and you know they got home what you do, we work together.

They encourage me to the good ones and I think that's good and a long one down the line. We knew that there was public housing money for modernization of public housing and so we got approved for that and it was 141 units of public housing and we said to HUD instead of putting it out on contract why don't we train the residents? It really makes me feel good about myself because like I said at first I wasn't doing anything but sitting home my son's 15 and my daughter's 12 and they really get a kick out of when I first was coming home I had on my hard hat and my boots and all they really got a kick out of it. It was better than sitting around watching shows and it makes me feel good when I'm looking at what I've accomplished and all somebody said fix that wall I fix it.

Because of who moves in just makes me feel good to say hey I had a part in this and that's the great part about it. We think on the long term not only will we have imparted skills and not only will we have gotten a quality product but we think we're going to have less vandalism and we think we're going to have much more protection of that property in terms of hey listen I my sweat and labor is in there and don't you mess up that unit. The budget cuts alone did not create this crisis the bottom line is that there's no profit in building housing for people who can't afford to pay for it. As a result market forces encourage the destruction instead of the renovation of low income housing and neighborhoods. Land speculators play sort of a game of musical chairs with housing.

I might live in an apartment I think of it as home the owner of the apartment thinks of it as a transitional land use. I live in a neighborhood I think of it as being where the kids go to school and where I walk around and enjoy things and the urban planner downtown thinks of it as the site for his new marketplace. His brand new mixed use development that's going to get him a promotion and and that's going to help him get a job in private industry when he leaves. So there's different the people in the neighborhoods in poor neighborhood generally not in control of their neighborhood because they don't own the land. And the forces that are arrayed against them are are quite large quite powerful. You may not look like it because it's all stripped down for moving but this is probably the best house we've ever moved.

Usually this structures we move are condemned. So when we first started we were trying to prove that every house could be saved and I still say that almost every house can be saved. If you just take enough care really. My daughter she's 12 will she'll be 13 on 23rd this month and my son he said and she's more exciting. He gets what she understands better.

We were the church of the Sunday she said I'm going to school up to pray you know pray for the house. So when you go on and pray I pray my seat you know so she went up to the art to pray for the house you know what's to get it. We've got it on your on your key situation you've got one key you know to fit both dead boats on this door and on this one. Now this one doesn't have a key it keeps you from locking yourself out. Let me show you in here there's a couple of things that still need to be done. This you see this tile was kind of hard to match so it'll look home here when you get your stuff in it. I'm ready. I ain't got to do this enjoy it now. But the saw horses are wobbly and I haven't made them.

Those wooden things in the wooden A shape look through the last. See how old is the brick is old and crumbling. This is not. It's a total cup we have it needs a lot of work and I plan on doing most of the work myself with the help of volunteers. If this place looks like this at Christmas time it's home you know I'm happy. If this place looks like this a year from now I may get a little frustrated because the roof still leaks but it's home. If I have to go a year without heat it's home. I like living in this house because it's bigger than our old house.

It has a lot of room move around there instead of all of us being cramped up into one little room. I like it because I can invite friends over and us working together, working together, getting dirty together, laughing together. This is going to be a beautiful place because your ideas are going to be in it and Kevin's ideas are going to be in it and my ideas. And that's going to make it home. The general unawareness of the real condition of the poor and then secondly and even more serious is the pervasive belief that nothing can be done about it. That the problem has no answer. That the governments tried and failed and there's nothing that can be done. We can't accept that. We just can't accept it. Something has to be done is done in other countries. And the big job today is to build demonstrations of answers. There's the concepts I'd like to put forward then, but I think we'll get back in our discussion.

I think that on an immediate day-to-day basis, I think there are a lot of things we can do to reduce the cost of making housing fit and livable. We haven't developed the processes in the systems really to work in an orderly way at housing for the very poor. And by having that source of low-cost money coming into this bank, then loans are able to be made to either nonprofit developers who are doing this. Or for the families themselves to help them purchase a house with a below market rate of interest on their mortgage.

That program is sold on the basis that here's your chance to perform a charitable act to house the poor and still have your money and get 3% for it. And that appeals to a lot of people. A lot of money can be raised this way. We still have things to do to refine it. It isn't complete yet. It's not perfect. But all together we've raised almost $4 million in Baltimore. In January of 1987, City Homes incorporated purchase to 101 row houses in Baltimore from the landlord that had them, I guess, for maybe 20 or 30 years. The reason we purchased 101 at one time was number one was price. We got them considerably lower. And also in doing the repair work, we could do it on a large volume basis on buying the material as well as getting contractors to work at a lower price because of the volume of work. The savings are astronomical by the bulk purchase. We'll have only $20,000 per building finished complete costs. And that's the acquisition as well as construction costs and the soft costs.

Hi, Mr. Jones. How are you? Good. We're just coming by to check on some of the work that men have done. Oh, thank you. Most tenants have been here for a number of years. Once the house is fixed up, we assume that they'll stay there because we found that house as we've had the properties and it changes their life in more ways than one. And I like it so much that I don't know what to say. It's so comfortable. And there are a lot of other things can be done. New housing can be built at lower cost. We worked with a fine modular homes builder, Ryland, to get the size of a house down, still a fine house. We got the county to work with us on making land available at three and the state to work with us on low cost money. And this wound up with a three bedroom house on a 50-foot lot that sold for $29,600 and was affordable at a payment of $239 a month to a family with an income of $9,000 a year. I could have never did it unless I got the, you know, the low interest rates and that, but other than that, I could have never did it.

These programs point the way to hope. They point the way that things can happen, but they simply cannot reach a size and scale that remotely measures up to the need without strong federal support. It was never intended for the federal government to provide housing for all people who were eligible forward. We've never been able to do that in the past. And I don't see anything, any indicators that would at least impress me that we're getting the federal government's going to be able to do that in the future. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, sir. How are you today? There has to be a change in direction from the Congress in the president. I don't blame, I don't say this a Republican issue. I don't say it's a Democratic issue.

I don't say it's an American issue that everybody has to come together and start building affordable housing throughout our country. One of the grievances that people in Boston found was that the poor and working class families weren't benefiting from that blooming skyline. The neighborhoods were crumbling, and it was a real tale of two cities in the sense that people were seeing this downtown office boom while they were having a hard time making ends meet. One of the key principles of the administration here in Boston under Mayor Flynn is to share that prosperity of Boston's booming downtown economy with the people that live in the neighborhoods. All right, good, how are you?

What are you doing? Who are you with? He's a really going to be nice at home. What's happening? How's it going? All right, how are you? It isn't just the construction unions that are involved in this. Now we have a public pension fund involved in it. This is the local 589 is the bus drivers and the Mast Bay Transit Authority. And the next development you'll find another pension fund that will begin to find ways to stay right in their own backyard and be a force for good in the life of the city. We marketed it in such a fashion as to assure that 70% of the units would go to the folks that were born and brought up in the neighborhood. 30% as marketers go out to city in terms of all of the ethnic groups that might be involved.

It doesn't look that way now, but when it's finished I again say would find them a pride that it's attractive for housing affordable or otherwise that's going to be built in the city. Well, we've done the lottery and we've done it so far and you can see that there's a lot of good young families that are generally wouldn't have an opportunity to be able to do what they're doing. And it does all the things that provides a home. Who's that, Mikey? Mikey's nails for breakfast. They pulled our name out of the hat. It was unbelievable. The dream come true. It really was. It was unbelievable. I couldn't even stand up so nervous and shaky. It was unbelievable.

You know, these kids get a chance to grow up in a house, you know, in a home. Which probably would still be paying rent somewhere, you know, and trying to make ends meet and things like that. I know we're secure right here, you know, right now, and they can build these houses all over the place, you know. If you get a roof over your head, no, huh? Oh, I am, pal. Yeah. Oh, I'm going to tell that you're old man when he's living in the earth. Everybody pick up. It's God. What it's all about is those kids and that family and it's a great opportunity for them. And it's, you know, it's a credit to the whole process in terms of the, you know, the mayor and the governor and the union pension funds and banks and all the other kind of goings on it, glue it all together. You're looking at it. The appreciation in Boston, which, you know, Boston's had one of the most rapidly appreciating real estate markets has really been felt here because this, this neighborhood was really devalued in the 70s.

And then suddenly started when people recognize it for, you know, the potential to invest here and make a lot of money. You've seen people bought houses typically, these triple debtors were between maybe 30,000 and $70,000, depending on what year they bought them. And now they sell between $180,000 and $225,000. You form a corporation, which is a cooperative, which everybody in the building buys a share in, just like you own a share of IBM, except in this case, you own a share in the cooperative corporation. The limit equity part means that that share's value is restricted over time. So when you get ready to move out of the building, you sell your share, but you can only sell it by something tied to usually the consumer price index.

So the idea that we like behind the limited equity cooperative is one is that it gives people control over their housing, but two that it creates a housing stock that is removed from the upswings and the downswings of the housing market. It's just there to house people. Nobody wants a single parent with three kids, a dog, a cat, it's like, hey, get rid of the dog, get rid of the cat, maybe we'll take the kids, but nobody wants them, nobody. I've been here for 10 years, I've put a lot of work into it. It means the first time I can actually say, home, and it means it's my home, it's actually going to be my home. When nobody can say, we're selling the building, you know, you're going to pay now $1,000 a month, we'll find someplace else, and I've been in that position to be able to put the say into it, to have some part of the decision making process of what's going on. You become part of the neighborhood.

Our ability to raise start-up money with the assistance of our corporate sponsors and the Boston Housing Project is greatly enhanced. I mean, it took for the granted projects we would do a neck. It takes over $2 million in start-up money, if for bricks aren't even touched to do that, $2 million and more. And so you obviously need assistance in raising those kinds of funds, and you need people who are willing to put their reputations on the line to convince lenders and other entities that this is a thing worthwhile doing.

It can be done. We have now created the capacity to do it, and it should be done. In the final analysis while we're quite, quite proud of what we've been able to do in Boston, it can't take the place of a federal government that is turning its back on the cities of America. I mean, you just can't receive those kinds of enormous cuts in critical services for poor families in America and try to expect to have local cities make that up and one fell swoop, but just will not be done. We would strongly urge that the federal government, when it next gets involved in helping to support construction and rehabilitation of housing, that it work principally through those entities, their state and local governments and nonprofit organizations. It's very important for the government to learn from the mistakes of the last 50 years that when you work with the private sector in the long run, their interest in maximizing the value of the housing, that is to sell it in the end to some other higher use,

are at odds with the federal desire to provide a source of affordable housing that the government should be doing all it can to foster a non-speculative sector in housing that is dedicated to housing not as a commodity, but to housing as something which services people's needs. We would strongly urge that the federal government, when it comes to housing, to provide a source of affordable housing that is dedicated to housing, that is to sell it in the long run, that is to sell it in the long run. The history shows that governments respond to prices, but how much more the lives of the homeless below, how long the families cut down from food and medical bills, could provide.

We have to leave the best 50 years once again, explode. It's more than a housing crisis. It's a crisis of leadership and political will and we are all responsible. We have to leave the best 50 years once again. We have to leave the best 50 years once again.

Thank you very much.