Commentary—

I Worked Hard

For This House

By William A. Collins

 Business often,

Makes me roam;

But my wealth,

Lies here at home.

Americans are big on home ownership. It may have something to do with the frontier -– almost everything seems to. Or maybe it’s just all that mortgage advertising, real estate advertising, and television. The result is that you’re not seen as a serious person anymore unless you own a home.

But excessive home ownership causes problems. Once we have it, we tend to get proprietary. No apartments or condos in my neighborhood please, or industry or trailer parks or, often, schools. Don’t even think about subsidized dwellings or homeless shelters. We can’t abide anything that will compromise our property values, attract minorities, or worsen traffic or drainage. Upscale is where we’re headed.

So where does this leave those who are downscale? Up the creek. And not in a 3BR, 2B, FP, 2-car, ½ ac., water-view dollhouse. Nor by downscale do we just mean poor. Our own kids may have to flee to cheaper digs and better employment. Seniors too may decamp for cheaper housing and warmer weather. Immigrants then fill in the gaps, coming to El Norte to serve the upscale, and with a willingness to live in conditions never contemplated by the zoning board. Central cities, unless they have enough money to squeeze the poor out, quickly devolve into their heartland, hotbeds of crime, illiteracy, and suffering. This natural separation has caused US schools to become more segregated today than during Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the landmark Supreme Court case that forbade segregation laws but not segregation resulting from where people live.

In Connecticut, by way of example, merely earning the average family income only qualifies you for the average house in 12 of our 169 towns. Looked at another way, in Windsor Locks, not yet the land of the elite, a mortgage for an average house takes a salary of $58,000. Nifty, but the actual average salary in town is only $54,000. Texas or Nevada, here I come.

All this inequity of dwelling places, of course, is not anything that need worry us. History teaches that some folks are simply meant to be rich, others poor, and the rest array themselves between. Except in North Korea and Niger where everyone is meant to be poor. Or Monaco, where all are designated rich.

Predestination aside, however, we Nutmeggers have the power to vote on this stuff for ourselves. So if our zoning boards and town councils don’t set up our communities the way we like, there’s always another election. But on such occasions don’t expect any candidates to be pressing for subsidized housing or loosened zoning. That would be political suicide.

Worse luck, those who would actually benefit from such controversial housing often aren’t voters, or else don’t sense that voting will improve their lives. Only a local economic groundswell is likely to change things. Take Bridgeport. It’s benefiting finally from the slow-motion tsunami of money creeping out of New York City. Meanwhile Hartford still drifts along economically becalmed.

Let’s not forget either that the mind of man has solved most of housing’s physical problems. Got an emergency like, say, New Orleans? No problem. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has 10,000 house trailers sitting on a ranch in Arkansas, just waiting to be shipped. Still.

Got a mother-in-law who should no longer live alone? Well, that’s why they invented mother-in-law apartments. (For those towns that allow them.) And what about the druggies, the sick, the mentally challenged, and the wretchedly poor? For them society invented the single-room occupancy (SRO). Perhaps every town should be required to have some. As well as a requirement that new store buildings have apartments above. No, shortage of invention is not the problem.

So it’s a shame that many solid citizens feel that any of these clever solutions will somehow reduce the desirability and value of the home they worked so hard to acquire. The problem is plainly all in our heads. And ironically, towns with diverse housing end up being proud of it. Given some real experience with diversity, most of humanity is not so biased after all. It’s ignorance that breeds the ugly anger that’s so common in communities today.

(William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)