When the "Government" plays "Doll House"
A fascinating and tragic story unfolds when I look back over the past seventy-two years of my life through the lens of "housing".
It begins when my parents, married in 1930, scraped together $900 to buy a dilapidated "fixer-upper" shotgun house in Missouri. They scraped through the Depression, having children, raising chickens (also "time-shared a cow for milk), and running an early version of McDonald's from the side porch.
My mother took care of the neighborhood children whose mothers worked for the "Miss Hilly's" of the early 1940's.
The house was on a block of fifteen homes, counting both sides of the street. It was a tree-lined, concrete paved and guttered street with homes set-back on rolling embankment lots. Ours was a small one-story "shot-gun", but others were two story and some quite elegant. We could keep up with the latest trends in automobiles, because two of our neighbors got a brand new Buick or Cadillac every year. We added indoor plumbing to our house in 1944. I found out much later that we lived much better than most on the other (white) side of the tracks. The only anomaly was a Catholic Church with white preists on the corner of the block; a left-over from the days when whites lived there. The parishioners returned for services on Sundays. A tornado destroyed the house long after all the children were grown and gone. It was buried in 1976.
When it was my turn to leave the State, I landed in San Francisco where I lived in abandoned quarters on the rolling estates of the Marine Hospital at 15th and Lake. When I married and needed better housing, I ran into the segregated housing issue and learned about "Fair Housing". Thankfully, that organization found me a place to rent.
With my new Air Force Commission I was assigned in 1962 to Waco, TX. A real, racial "Hell-hole" where Liddy Biddy and his Wife owned the Television stations and we were referred to by the "N-word" daily. Hispanics, called "Mexicans", and "Negroes" were separately segregated in housing and on the Air Force Base. Graduating as Cadet Commander of the AFROTC in San Francisco, I travelled as a new 2nd Lt to Waco, and found that my fellow (white) officers could buy housing, but I couldn't. They were pressured by their neighbors when I visited them. This opened a sad chapter of fighting for decent housing (government-sponsored) inside the military. That spread from Texas to Maryland to New Mexico; ending when I bought my first house in New Mexico in 1970.
In 1965, my brother, an Army Officer returning from a second tour in Vietnam, needed a place to live in Washington, D.C. He was entering school for a Master's Degree. D.C. was "lilly-white" then, and no one would rent to "Negroes". It took me more than a month to find him a place in Oxon Hills, MD. When the Columbia Towers were being built near Laurel, we were offered a chance to "integrate" the place on the condition that we would not associate with the three other Negro families hand-picked to live there. We turned them down.
The picture turned much brighter after 1970, because the government kept moving me, and I kept buying and selling houses throughout the 70's. That was quite an escalator to ride and I made enough money to help fund the college education of my children.
My siblings (there were eight of us who survived) had different experiences in widely different parts of the country. The most tragic was, again, public/government housing at Redfern, Far Rockaway, NY. One of my sisters found herself there after marital difficulties. She learned she was dying of ovarian cancer in the mid-70's and was desparate to save her children from being placed by "the welfare". The worst horrors of hell could not describe what happened to her and her children in that God-awful place. We were able to rescue her and her children by getting them out of New York. When the government plays with housing, the people suffer.
All of the rest of my siblings have been successful homeowners, and so have their children.
Shortly after Liddy Biddy signed HUD into law, the politicians in Washington discovered that a lot of the property owned by "Negroes" was worth quite a bit of money. They had the power to "condemn" that property and sell it to their buddies. That partially explains how the extensive holdings of my Aunt Mattie in Tulsa are now part of the campus of North Oklahoma State University. This practice, mated with Urban Renewal, was also dubbed "Negro Removal".
Race, class, greed, housing, and the government; all figured into the greatest Economic Decline in the United States since the Depression. What a surprise!
Stay Vigilant!
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