Restoring the Lands

The housing bubble of the 00's followed in Chicago's westside Austin neighborhood as if on steroids. The median sales price of a house in Chicago at the beginning of the decade was roughly $150K, and for a house in the 60644 zip code was 100,000. Just before the bubble crashed the Chicago-wide value climbed over twice as much, fueled by speculation, predatory lending, greed, widespread beliefs (spread by experts) that the value of housing will never depreciate, and - most importantly - from a can't-fail attitude by the banks and loaning institutions that were eager to cash in on rising prices.

60644, Chicago Recently Sold Homes

As we can see, the prices rose over a period of time to astronomically silly levels. In another Chicago neighborhood, Logan Square, my pastor showed me several houses and the sky-rocketing prices that they went for as much as twice to three times to then even quadrupling over what they previously were sold for within the range of about fifteen years. The largely Mexican American residents and working class whites were being sold and forced out of their homes by rising tax properties or landlords who smelled opportunity. In the meantime, they were losing their homes and communities, friends, schools, churches, doctors, support networks.

When the prices astronomically dropped (about three-fourths in Austin overnight), many others had lost what little equity they had.

Doesn't sound like losing much to some people. Middle class whites like to say, "If you don't like it, just move." And maybe it's easier for them, but when it's been your home for a generation, and when you consider that a sizeable portion of our society is constantly on the brink - deciding between housing and food and clothes and medicine and insurance becomes much harder when you also have to factor in extra transportation costs and time, plus the thousands of hidden costs related to moving. When you consider that landlords usually now demand two and a half months, at least, for rent and deposit before moving in and that most working poor families do not have that kind of cash available, or that credit ratings for poor are low - and disproportionately so for people of color - and therefore deny access to decent living accommodations, it's little wonder that many displaced families end up homeless in the same neighborhoods they've just been residing in for the last generation.

But what if the very people of these communities had power to control their destinies? What if the property they took care of, rejuvenated, lived in, worked from, and worshiped, went to school, and shopped nearby, the property they inhabited fully - what if that property were given back to the local community? What if we could fill all the now-vacant houses with the families currently out in the streets? What if families did not necessarily need to double-up just to make it by, sharing one bathroom and two bedrooms with eight or more people?

What if - and this may sound cah-raaayyyyy-zeeeee - what if the empty lots that line every block - sometimes residing in nearly one-third of the area - could be turned into gardens and even mini-farms for fresh, healthy, affordable food? Could that even be a means of providing local jobs and meaningful work for several of our community members? What if the abandoned factories, closed storefronts and shops, and vacant warehouses could be creatively reborn?

Daycare and after-school centers. Job training. Clothes manufacturing. Bicycle repair. Computer and phone refurbishing and repairing. Alternative energy. Sign manufacturing. Specialty restaurants. Mechanics (locally-based, so you can trust them? Nice). Health clinics, including mental wholeness. Library co-ops. Music centers. Recycling/Reusing/Renewing centers. Office space rentals. Art galleries. Furniture manufacturing and repair. Think tanks for scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, mothers, community leaders, students, and environmental workers to go, study, research, teach, learn about how to holistically restore the community.

Factory (sash window)

Okay, so I'm not the most creative. But the point is, the community decides what it needs, what it has, what it can give and offer, what it is skilled at and what skills and resources it needs to build. But it needs space to occupy, ferment, and accomplish its dreams. It needs its own space. And then it'll need less from the center. We won't need to worry about food stamps or medicaid or social security, because the community will be able to take care of its own.

So long as others are in control of our land, we are not truly empowered and we are - to a significant degree - dependent on their mercy. That is what happens when our entire society is centered around a consumerist modus operandi. We give everything away to far off places via trading and buying merchandise and pray and expect that we'll receive back in monetary value that we spend, again, on merchandise that is centralized in far off places - corporations that do not invest in our communities except on the rarest of occasions (and with the most triumphant of fanfare). We need a space of our own and an economy of our own.

We desire, earnestly, to work with our minds, our hands, and our lands.

Poverty Colonialism in Chicago and Uganda

Several years ago, a church that I was heavily involved in spent good parts of its summers bringing in youth groups from White suburban and exurban churches. This fulfilled a few needs. The need for the church to bring in some funds so it could pay its youth pastor full-time. The need for White youth a million miles removed from urban poverty to see it for a few days and feel better about themselves. The need for our neighbors to shake their heads at lost white kids in their neighborhood.

They usually did service projects, like picking up scattered trash in the neighborhoods and running Vacation Bible Schools. But, come to think of it, cleaning trash is probably a perfect metaphor for this type of poverty colonialism. White people coming to make a difference, not aware of their surroundings, not aware of who they are coming to serve, involved in futile projects that effectively shame those they are there to help. And then leaving - themselves feeling a little frustrated by the wind that blows all the trash back, by the generational sands of poverty that didn't recede during the three days of their visit, and by the humiliation of public service.

Although, I hasten to add, as far as these things are concerned, the church learned to take steps to educate their guests in a primer of urban living, using natives from the church for that task*. And I got to sit in during a screening of a local PBS documentary on the decades-long project of tearing down the notorious (but strategically located, prime real estate) Cabrini Green housing projects. The Greens were being shuttled for a mixed-income privatized project of town homes. The idea behind it is that the poor Black families that will remain (after the displacement of hundreds of families) will benefit from having upper middle class neighbors who diligently go to work every day to earn their keep and better their lives.

Some protest arose from the young viewers: How can the residents not want their help. It's obvious they need whatever help they can get!

Cabrini Green, from "Life in Chicago" by Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist John White, 1982. Found on Flickr.

This all struck close to home. After all, gentrification had been happening (and is still happening) in the surrounding neighborhoods and our own congregants were finding themselves unable to live in their neighborhoods anymore nd found themselves scattered from their networks of support and family. To those with plenty of money and who can afford alternatives methods of networking and support, this may not be such a primary need and they may not recognize it for what it is. But that's the heart of the matter of Poverty Colonialism: Educated white males are trained from an early age to truly believe we know better. This belies the heart of racism. We think we know better because - whether or not we have come to grips with it - we think we are better...

Teju Cole does an outstanding job of laying out the problems of Poverty Colonialism - what he and most others call the White Savior Industrial Complex (page 2 here) - in the Atlantic. I think the article needs to be required reading for all of us would-be saviors.

Some long-ish excerpts:

I disagree with the approach taken by Invisible Children in particular, and by the White Savior Industrial Complex in general, because there is much more to doing good work than "making a difference." There is the principle of first do no harm. There is the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them...

I am sensitive to the power of narratives. When Jason Russell, narrator of the Kony 2012 video, showed his cheerful blonde toddler a photo of Joseph Kony as the embodiment of evil (a glowering dark man), and of his friend Jacob as the representative of helplessness (a sweet-faced African), I wondered how Russell's little boy would develop a nuanced sense of the lives of others, particularly others of a different race from his own. How would that little boy come to understand that others have autonomy; that their right to life is not exclusive of a right to self-respect? In a different context, John Berger once wrote, "A singer may be innocent; never the song."

One song we hear too often is the one in which Africa serves as a backdrop for white fantasies of conquest and heroism. From the colonial project to Out of Africa to The Constant Gardener and Kony 2012, Africa has provided a space onto which white egos can conveniently be projected. It is a liberated space in which the usual rules do not apply: a nobody from America or Europe can go to Africa and become a godlike savior or, at the very least, have his or her emotional needs satisfied. Many have done it under the banner of "making a difference."...

How, for example, could a well-meaning American "help" a place like Uganda today? It begins, I believe, with some humility with regards to the people in those places. It begins with some respect for the agency of the people of Uganda in their own lives. A great deal of work had been done, and continues to be done, by Ugandans to improve their own country, and ignorant comments... about how "we have to save them because they can't save themselves" can't change that fact...

If Americans want to care about Africa, maybe they should consider evaluating American foreign policy, which they already play a direct role in through elections, before they impose themselves on Africa itself. The fact of the matter is that Nigeria is one of the top five oil suppliers to the U.S., and American policy is interested first and foremost in the flow of that oil. The American government did not see fit to support the Nigeria protests... This was as expected; under the banner of "American interests," the oil comes first. Under that same banner, the livelihood of corn farmers in Mexico has been destroyed by NAFTA. Haitian rice farmers have suffered appalling losses due to Haiti being flooded with subsidized American rice. A nightmare has been playing out in Honduras in the past three years: an American-backed coup and American militarization of that country have contributed to a conflict in which hundreds of activists and journalists have already been murdered. The Egyptian military, which is now suppressing the country's once-hopeful movement for democracy and killing dozens of activists in the process, subsists on $1.3 billion in annual U.S. aid. This is a litany that will be familiar to some. To others, it will be news. But, familiar or not, it has a bearing on our notions of innocence and our right to "help."

Let us begin our activism right here: with the money-driven villainy at the heart of American foreign policy. To do this would be to give up the illusion that the sentimental need to "make a difference" trumps all other considerations. What innocent heroes don't always understand is that they play a useful role for people who have much more cynical motives. The White Savior Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage. We can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years, but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send $10 each to the rescue fund...

-----------------------
* Full disclosure, I had an opportunity to go over the script with one of the groups. I laid it in a bit heavy. I try not to be such an arse in public anymore. But anybody who follows me here or on Facebook knows where I put that energy.

JasDye for State Senator (Rent Is Too Damn High)

In a recent story in the venerable Cracked (which I generally adore, by the way), I ran across this paragraph and got my little danders up:

Hating capitalism is not on the table. This is America. Capitalism defines our history, our economy, and our national psyche And the purpose of this protest cannot be a naive attempt to change the very souls of American businesspeople. To punish businesses for their greed. It's the wrong message and counterproductive. Call me jaded, but I thought we all just took it for granted that businesses are amoral creatures driven by profit. Being enraged at Corporate America for being greedy is like reading Cracked.com and being enraged by its use of the list format. This is who we are.

I'm constantly bemused but really always annoyed by variants of this claim I just read in Crack'd:
Why punish the greedy bankers?


Maybe it's the fact that the question is a distraction. It's a ruse, meant to frame complex issues into bloody solutions.

Maybe it's the sheer hypocrisy of the statement. After all, rarely do the same people argue that we shouldn't punish immigrants for jumping a fence and an arbitrary border to allow their families to survive and give their kids a chance in life.  Sort of akin to this:

Or maybe it's the fact that I'm a moralist and supposedly, so are those who usually argue this point. Many are Christians. The Cracked writer self-identifies as a liberal. And yet the very question is antithetical to two basic tenets of Christianity and liberalism.

• Sharing is good.
• Greed is bad.

Any economical, political, and social system based on greed is one that deprives the majority of basic needs.

And while the rich can afford mansions, the shrinking middle class increasingly steal away into gated communities, and the noveau-rich try out sampler McMansions, those of us who question the system are patronized like children.

"But you can't say what they should and should not make, nor what they should or can buy with those. Besides, they work hard for their money."

I know many families scrunch together in one measly apartment. We have personally taken in people who would otherwise be homeless for various periods of time, partially because the housing laws and practices are unfair for those with bad credit. But also because people were in between jobs, or were treated unjustly by the system, or recently divorced.

Yet tons of acres of land are currently unused in the barrios and ghettos that could be turned into affordable or sustainable housing, or community gardens and even farms, but landowners don't want to give up temporary rights.

Families were foreclosed on their homes - even if they were making their mortgages - when the bubble burst. Even though they invested in their properties and lived in them and were finally settling into a place of their own they were told was theirs by the very people who would forcibly take it from them, they were out on the streets and lost their investment.

And their homes.

Let's view it from another perspective, though. One-fourth of all jobs in the US now pays enough to qualify as poverty-level or below. That is one out of every four jobs that the typical American could have - from the shrinking few that are available - is making less money than necessary to survive on, under an old rubric that needs to change.

The old rubric of poverty is based on food. Because food was a much more expensive portion of the typical American family's budget, it was estimated to be a third of the monthly cost of living. And that is what the rubric of the poverty level is based on: How much would it cost an American family to sustain themselves on emergency food - and then multiply that by three. Which may be a fine way to still describe who qualifies for federal or state aid, but it's completely disastrous if, say, it's no longer relevant.

While the overall prices of food have largely stabilized and not moved much over the last thirty years or so (of course, we are dealing with that cost in other ways), the costs of housing and insurance have bloated far out of proportion. While food used to account for a third of the budget and housing roughly one-fourth, now food counts for a seventh of the typical budget while families are lucky to find a place to live that will only cost them a third of their intake. But at poverty levels, without subsidized housing it's nearly impossible for a working class family to find safe housing - let alone housing that is easily accessible to their places of work (often, they are across town from their low-paying jobs) that costs anywhere near fifty percent of their wages.

And, again, we are in a recession. And the first cuts during a recession are to social programs of uplift. Programs that would help ease the financial burden of finding affordable housing. Oddly, the very programs that are most necessary during these very times for the most people. But, since those people don't have access to the halls of power, more of those people are left under the burden of both food and living scarcity.

So, after their regressive payroll taxes are taken out, what little remains for a vast amount of working class Americans is chewed up between child care (if possible), food, clothes, car notes, gas to get them across the city to their low-paying jobs, and rent. Health care may not be an option because they aren't wealthy enough to afford it and are considered too wealthy to go on Medicaid.

Everything is in a constant state of emergency for a third of US citizens. 


This is unacceptable.

And frankly, I'm not interested in blaming landowners, or bankers, or even banks - as a whole (Some are guilty, for sure. But not all). I'm interested in dismantling a system.

An economic and political system that favors a few for the price of the many is an evil system. Greed is EVIL. It should not be the primary motivator of any system.

There are solutions, but I am under the conviction that it would mean changing our entire society's values around.
To live more simply.
To truly have a love revolution of sharing.
To give control back to community.
To live off the earth and therefore employ everybody who is able to work.

It is called Localism. We're continuing to talk about that, but I also want to talk about my possible run for a political seat.

My name is JasDye. And I will speak truth to power with the American people. Because, for most of us, the Rent Is Too Damn High.

Sweet Home Chicago (Come On! Baby Don't You Want to Go?)

Chances are, if you're at all 1) a Chicagoan and 2) involved in local politics, you've heard of TIFs (Tax Incremental Financing). You also know that TIFs are a form of tax that are supposed to be diverted to help blighted communities (such as Lawndale) garner business interests and stay together. Of course, they're not being used for that purpose. They're largely being used to court big businesses that least need the incentives.

So, let's make it about retaining community. Sweet Home Chicago is a coalition of various community groups that advocate for affordable housing funding from TIFs.

The Sweet Home proposal:

Each year the city would dedicate 20 percent of TIF funds collected towards affordable housing. If this were in effect in 2009, $99 million would have gone towards housing.
Developments would qualify to receive funds if 50 percent of the units were affordable to households earning less than $37,000 for a family of four. In addition, citywide, 40 percent of the units created each with the dedicated funds must serve households earning less than $22,600 a year for a family of four.
For housing that is for sale, units would have to be affordable to families of four earning less than $60,300.

Please sign the petition for Sweet Home Chicago.

The ability to pay rent and stay housed comes before any other need of a community. If TIF (tax increment financing) dollars are meant to build and support blighted communities, there is surely no greater way for Chicago to use them than on affordable housing.

Affordable housing needs to be a priority. It is the long-term sort of investment that is too often overlooked for short-sighted, quick infusions of cash that don't sustain communities. We agree with other housing advocates and organizations that the language of the Sweet Home Chicago bill can ensure planning flexibility while still prioritizing affordable housing.

Please don't let this opportunity to ensure a place to live for Chicago's neediest citizens pass by.

This petition is to let the Mayor and Councilmen of Chicago know that, as negotiations on the bill move forward, the provision of affordable housing must remain a priority.

Being Nickel and Dimed to Death

We're still fighting for basic affordable housing here in Chicago. But as I was finishing up Barbara Ehrenreich's masterful Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, I was struck by how this is all just right under the noses of most middle class and upper class Americans. The problem is, we're so struck blind by the sheer blindingly awesome affluence and its shiny objects are that we disregard those who have sacrificed, in Ehrenreich's terms, for our gain. Hopefully, these selections will convince you of the utmost need to read through and study this brilliant and yet sadly hilarious book, this sidewinder's undercover tale.

The problem of rents is easy for a non-economist, even a sparsely educated low-wage worker, to grasp; it's the market, stupid. When the rich and the poor compete for housing on the open market, the poor don't stand a chance. The rich can always outbid them, buy up their tenements or trailer parks, and replace them with condos, McMansions, golf courses, or whatever they like. Since the rich have become more numerous, thanks largely to rising stock prices and executive salaries, the poor have necessarily been forced into housing that is more expensive, more dilapidated, or more distant from their places of work. Recall that in Key West [one of the locations where Ms. Ehrenreich had moved for a short stint to find work and lodgings among the working class], the trailer park convenient to hotel jobs was charging $625 a month for a half-size trailer, forcing low-wage workers to search for housing farther and farther away in less fashionable keys. But rents were also sky-rocketing in the touristically challenged city of Minneapolis, where the last bits of near-affordable housing lie deep in the city, while job growth has occurred on the city's periphery, next to distinctly unaffordable suburbs. Insofar as the poor have to work near the dwellings of the rich--as in the case of so many service and retail jobs--they are stuck with lengthy commutes or dauntingly expensive housing.

If there seems to be general complacency about the low-income housing crisis, this is partly because it is in no way reflected in the official poverty rate, which has remained for the past several years at a soothingly low 13% or so. The reason for the disconnect between the actual housing nightmare of the poor and "poverty," as officially defined, is simple: the official poverty level is still calculated by the archaic method of taking the bare-bones cost of food for a family of a given size and multiplying this number by three. Yet food is relatively inflation-proof*, at least compared with rent. In the early 1960s, when this method of calculating poverty was devised, food accounted for 24 percent of the average family budget (not 33% even then, it should be noted) and housing 29 percent. In 1999, food took up only 16 percent of the family budget, while housing had soared to 37 percent. So the choice of food as the basis for calculating family budgets seems fairly arbitrary today; we might as well abolish poverty altogether, at least on paper, by defining subsistence budget as some multiple of average expenditures on comic books or dental floss.

When the market fails to distribute some vital commodity, such as housing, to all who require it, the usual liberal-to-moderate expectation is that the government will step in and help. We accept this principle--at least in a halfhearted and faltering way--in the case of healthcare, where government offers Medicare to the elderly, Medicaid to the desperately poor, and various state programs to the children of the merely very poor. But in the case of housing, the extreme upward skewing of the market has been accompanied by a cowardly public sector retreat from responsibility. Expenditures on public housing have fallen since the 1980s, and the expansion of public rental subsidies came to a half in the mid-1990s. At the same time, housing subsidies for home owners--who tend to be far more affluent than renters--have remained at their usual munificent levels. It did not escape my attention, as a temporarily low-income person, that the housing subsidy I normally receive in my real life--over 20,000 a year in the form of a mortgage-interest deduction--would have allowed a truly low-income family to live in relative splendor. Had this amount been available to me in monthly installments in Minneapolis, I could have moved into one of those "executive" condos with sauna, health club, and pool.

Ok, as much as I want to transcribe the next part--about the paltry rise in wages over the prosperous nineties, despite the incremental growth in wealth for the companies that are not raising wages--I should skip to the end and save myself the CTS and yourself the unfettered privilege of reading this work on your own.

According to a recent poll conducted by Jobs for the Future, a Boston-based employment research firm, 94 percent of Americans agree that "people who work full-time should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty"** [Makes me wonder who the other 6% of monsters are]. I grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that "hard work" is the secret of success: Work hard and you'll get ahead" or "It's hard work that got us where we are." No one
ever said that you could work hard--harder even than you ever thought possible--and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.

When poor single mothers had the option of remaining out of the labor force on welfare, the middle and upper middle class tended to view them with a certain impatience, if not disgust. The welfare poor were excoriated for their laziness, their persistence in reproducing in unfavorable circumstances, their presumed addictions, and above all for their "dependency."... But now that government has largely withdrawn its "handouts," now that the overwhelming majority of the poor people are out there toiling in Wal-Mart or Wendy's--well, what are we to think of them? Disapproval and condescension no longer apply, so what out-look makes sense?...

The appropriate emotion is shame--shame at own own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay than she can live on--when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently--then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life... As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, "you give and you give."

Someday, of course... they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they're worth. There'll be a lot of anger when that day comes, and strikes and disruption. But the sky will not fall, and we will all be better off for it in the end.

*For reasons for this, may I humbly suggest you watch Food, Inc.? Now?

**"A National Survey of American Attitudes toward Low-Wage Workers and Welfare Reform," Jobs for the Future, Boston. May 24, 2000.