Commentary—

Housing The Not-So-Beautiful People

By William A. Collins

Segregation,

Shouldn’t be;

But it’s still,

Just fine with me.

You might not guess it from newspaper articles or real estate ads, but roughly a third of all Nutmeggers rent. Our family lately noticed some of them in an old, once elegant, house in our downtown. It now sports ten mailboxes and three satellite dishes. The local paper is not likely to do a feature.

But while one winces at the code violations that doubtless infest such a place, one shudders at the plight of other poor souls who can’t even get in. Around 75 of them show up each night at the homeless shelter. Others, upon the arrival of warm weather, materialize like mayflies in parked cars, abandoned buildings, and under accommodating bridges.

These folks do not qualify for America’s dominant housing assistance program — the mortgage interest deduction. Neither are they eligible for programs boosting first-time home buyers. In fact, rather than being helped, they often suffer at the hands of government.

For instance, they are regularly doomed by the demolition, rather than repair, of public housing. Or by the budget cuts to Section 8. Not to mention the gentrification implicit in much downtown revitalization.

And this is just in the cities. In the suburbs there never were any public units, Section 8, or decayed but cheap downtown apartments. Low-income workers there have simply been expected to live “somewhere else.” Zoning enforces that expectation.

 “Somewhere else” typically means Connecticut’s “urban sacrifice zones.” Foremost among these are Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, Waterbury, Willimantic, and New London. Those cities diligently house, educate, feed, police, and nurture poor folks far out of proportion to their overall numbers in the state. This leads inexorably to high local taxes, poor schools, run-down neighborhoods, plentiful crime, and all the other symptoms of economically segregated society.

And in the state’s other towns it eventually becomes tiresome to keep reading that one must earn $17.90 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment in Connecticut, or that our state is still short a gazillion affordable housing units. We’ve known that all along. That’s why we in the middle class each go to the trouble of inheriting property from our parents and getting master’s degrees. And frankly we don’t want any more affordable units locally. If other citizens have not been as planful as we, they can jolly well club up with colleagues in that aforementioned old house or move to Joplin. There are plenty of cheap digs out there.

Not that there isn’t always a cadre of sainted Nutmeggers working to change such things. They sit on housing authorities and nonprofit boards, they hammer for Habitat, they volunteer for VISTA, they even hold public office. There just aren’t enough of them. Consequently they lack the clout to appropriate the necessary seed money for more subsidized and cooperative units.

Such housing expenditures (and other vital services) are what the governor and Republican legislators refer to as “spending.”

“Spending” is much to be reviled. Democrats often don’t buy into that dogma, but are fearful that the voting public does. Taxes to help poor folk buy health insurance may possibly be acceptable, but taxes to help them rent an apartment, maybe in our town, are something else. Let’s not push our luck.

Thus Connecticut coasts amiably along in its bipolar coma: affluence on the one hand, anguish on the other. Lip service abounds for the ill housed, but not programs. We have learned by now that democracy plainly promotes segregation, and that in our highly civilized local religions, the Lord truly does help those who help themselves.

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