Apparently, the squatter currently occupying the White House thinks I am a deadbeat criminal. Or at least that’s what he wants you to think.
Because last week he tweeted, “I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood. Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down.”
Anyone who is so threatened by proximity to people they perceive to be so much less than they are is much more likely to vote for someone like him.
And then he went to Texas and said, “You know the suburbs, people fight all of their lives to get into the suburbs and have a beautiful home. There will be no more low-income housing forced into the suburbs. . . . It’s been going on for years. I’ve seen conflict for years. It’s been hell for suburbia.”
The reason the squatter gave for saying this nonsense was to tout the benefits of his administration’s repeal and replacement of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, an Obama-era regulation that required local governments to take proactive steps to ensure fair housing opportunity in their jurisdictions in order to receive federal housing funds.
But the real reason he said it was because it serves him well to stigmatize and dehumanize people who live in low-income housing.
I was once one of those people. I lived in low-income housing for ten years.
It was a small complex with eight apartments designed for people who use wheelchairs. Everyone there had a disability. We paid 30 percent of our income for rent and HUD paid the rest. Living there was affordable.
All this wasn’t in the suburbs but a Chicago neighborhood that has grown increasingly swanky over the years. But to this day, painted high on the brick wall of a three-story apartment building that looms over the complex, you can see a picture of a tree and the words: “We Shall Not Be Moved.”
It’s a reminder that many of the people who lived in the neighborhood when the complex was being constructed in the early 1980s put up a fight to keep us out. They were afraid to have a bunch of people in wheelchairs living so close.
I don’t think they were literally afraid that we were going to harm them. But, because we had obvious disabilities, our mere presence would cheapen up the landscape. And the fact that we were both disabled and low income posed a double threat. It shook the neighbors who wanted to keep us out so much that somebody climbed up three stories and painted their rallying cry on the nearest brick wall.
But the reason for their resistance doesn’t matter. It’s that same hostile arrogance the squatter, through his words and actions, is trying to rekindle and fortify. Anyone who is so threatened by proximity to people they perceive to be so much less than they are is much more likely to vote for someone like him.
I think it turned out to be a very good thing for the neighborhood that the little low-income housing complex was built and is still there. If it wasn’t there, some developer would surely have bought that patch of prime real estate and erected another of those needless highrises full of tiny apartments with absurdly exorbitant rents that are popping up like a prickly rash all over the city.
Then the neighborhood really would have been swirling down the drain.