Let’s take a walk in my memories. Hip waders time.
Seriously, it’s not that bad. We’ll skip the ex-relationship detritus. We won’t even trouble ourselves with the medical history, though it fascinates me. Instead, we’ll stick to housing history.
I wasn’t homeless nearly as long as other people I know, but it was in easily marked off instructive installments. I can say that while 25 percent of © Dr. Wes’ homelessness has been linked to personal problems stemming from PTSD, all remaining 75 percent of entries into homelessness were due to a combination of life as a low-income person and the whims of real estate developers.
The first time I became homeless was typical of that 75 percent. I was a graduate student getting by on $300 per month in Ithaca, N.Y.
For three years I faithfully paid my $60 monthly rent for a tiny off-campus room. The house had no cooking facilities but a shared bathroom. All the room was good for was a place to sleep.
At the end of the third year, my landlord told me to move out. “Excuse me? What did I do wrong?” Oh, nothing, it turned out. He’d just sold the property to someone else and the new owner was evicting everyone for legal reasons (the better to raise the rents in a rent-controlled town).
I could come back after changes were made to the house, but the rent would be double by then.
I thought I’d find another cheap sleeping room like that one somewhere else in town. But it was not to be, because the same man who bought that house also bought almost all the other property like it around the campus. And he was raising all the rents using the same loophole. I was homeless for a year until I could save up enough to move into another place. That one was smaller than the old tiny room but cost twice as much.
The basic pattern was simple in most of the cases in which I became homeless: I was poor, but I’d found an arrangement that was affordable, though far from ideal. Tiny rooms, often bug infested, in dilapidated buildings. In one case I was living under a stairwell in an 85-square-foot space with only 10 square feet in which to stand up straight.
Then, a landlord or real estate developer would decide he could do better with the property, and his plans just changed the scenery for me. My hovel ceased to be, and other hovels weren’t immediately available for one reason or another.
When you’re poor, dilapidated hovels are a precious commodity. They’re the housing equivalent of the dollar menu at the fast food joint when all you have is a dollar.
This is what concerns me about the news that the city may turn some of landlord Hugh Sisley’s derelict properties, near Northeast 65th Street and 12th Avenue Northeast, into a park.
I never lived in a Sisley property in the University District, but I could have. I definitely considered renting rooms from him from time to time. Not because I really like living in run-down, rat-and-roach-infested residences, but because I needed four walls, a floor and a ceiling so badly.
Now comes news about the city attorney and city councilmembers’ plan to turn the land into a park.
In doing so, the city takes the role of the incoming new landlord who has a new idea of what to do with the scenery and makes the property inaccessible to poor people.
I’d like the city to do what a real estate developer would rarely do: Have a care for the people for whom such housing was better than none at all and include them in their grand plan.
I want people to see that there is a broad principle at work here. That poverty and homelessness come about because of many private decisions by people in power, affecting those not in power — but public welfare can come from public decisions.
If only the public and the public’s institutions cared.
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