Many of you know that I usually focus on federal issues, but I want to get something off my chest. People periodically talk about “blight.” The language suggests a focus on the buildings. They may need paint or repairs – though that doesn’t seem so offensive in rural areas. People with more money like to see property that matches their artistic senses more closely. I have always enjoyed walking among fine specimens of architecture. But what we tend to call blight includes homes. Regardless of color, and most of the poor are white, people live there because that’s what they have enough money for. They may laugh and play like the rest of us despite what appears to those of us with more money as flaws in their living space.
Since I’ve worked as a store-front lawyer in programs designed to give legal assistance to people without the resources to hire lawyers, I’ve been in some of those homes. And I knew the folk who lived there. I will never forget some of them – decent, hard-working people who did the best they could for their families and their neighbors, and when they could, their houses too, though that depended on their landlords.
But the normal way people try to deal with blight is to tear it down in which case the people have to scatter. Of course others will complain that they’ll bring their blight somewhere else. In Cape Town, South Africa, people were pushed three quarters of an hour out of the city and had to hang out of so-called busses to get to their jobs. But they put flowers in their windows, carted jugs of water and hooked themselves in to the electric wires that pass by. The only places for the kids to play were a garbage dump and across unguarded railroad tracks.
When I was in St. Louis, government blew up the Pruitt-Igoe houses. I don’t remember evidence that St. Louis was improved. For a different project, I worked with a group of social scientists at the universities in St. Louis to explain that the impact of building a highway through a poor and Black community would have been total community disintegration – separation of people from their workplaces, separation of churches and congregants, separation of businesses and patrons, separation of professionals – doctors, lawyers, etc. – from those they serve, separation of friends and even families – that’s the result of eliminating “blight.”
There is of course another approach. There’s no perfect solution that works for everyone, but various groups and governments around the globe, some even in the U.S., have tried giving people money or other support. The evidence is that those programs work. But people get outraged about their hard-earned money going to help people who, for whatever reason, don’t have any. Except of course the people who are helping themselves to my and most of our hard-earned money are the super-rich who have decided that it is unseemly for them to pay taxes – taxes are for the unwashed who barely have the money.
Frankly, I think a little public support could pay dividends to the community. On the other hand there’s that warehouse – now that does need to be torn down before it falls on another Amtrak train and assorted people in the neighborhood.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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