My wife and I married at the end of the 1970’s. With me working in Belleville, Illinois and her job in Sunset Hills, Missouri we picked a new all adult apartment complex near the eastern edge of St. Louis County.
The place wasn’t perfect. The walls used a honeycomb aluminum product under the drywall, making hanging the mirror over the dresser impossible. And, on nice days, so many young ladies in bikinis filled the chairs around the pool that I had to bring my own lounger.
One day, in the open field just west of our apartment, construction started on two new complexes. One, for seniors, featured red flashing lights outside every unit which occupants could trigger to help the ambulance find them. The other buildings contained the dreaded “Section 8 housing.” Like my neighbors, I was not supportive.
You see, St. Louis County government resisted housing for struggling families and to get the feds off their back they approved a series of developments – most all on the unincorporated edges of the county. Apartments went up in Black Jack in far north county (a major reason for that area’s incorporation), barely north of the Jefferson County line southwest of Fenton, and, in unincorporated Mehlville. Of course, the complexes filled the moment they opened: for generations the county has needed more affordable housing.
Over the years I realized opposing affordable housing was wrong for two very basic reasons…
First, our society depends upon low-paid people to cook our food, clerk in stores and work in many government jobs.
For example, my nephew hired on with the Missouri Department of Transportation a couple of years back. His base earnings hovered about $2,175 a month, meaning most landlords would only accept him for an apartment costing less than $550 per month: try finding one of those in St. Charles County. He worked full time but still lived in my sister in law’s basement.
Second, safe and affordable housing ought to be a human right. It isn’t. At Circle Of Concern everyday we helped families forced to spend 70% of more of their wages on marginal housing. They faced a horrible choice, to either spend most all of the or money on basic shelter, or, spend that much or more commuting to work from far, far away.
This is not just a St. Louis thing.
Already, more than 150,000 people in L.A. County spend at least three hours commuting.
And
Passenger vehicles are the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in California.
On top of that, if SCAG’s plan goes forward, remote cities like Coachella will have to significantly grow their footprints, irreversibly destroying the natural environment to make way for sprawl.
Coachella is 145 miles from Beverly Hills and a few more miles to downtown LA.
SCAG refers to an effort by California Governor Gavin Newsom to come up with a plan for more affordable housing near available jobs in southern California: the Not In My Back Yard types want lower paid people to live in the dessert.
Note too that one of the issues in the current Chicago teacher strike is the lack of affordable housing: ”Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign…said that’s because the chasm continues to grow nationwide between teachers’ salaries and the cost of affordable housing at a time when urban school districts also are having an increasingly difficult time recruiting and retaining teachers.”
Even more sad, The New York Times [10/24] carried a special section on thousands upon thousands of hard working folks living “underground” – often in illegal basement apartments – about the City That Never Sleeps. For them no safe, legal housing exists.
So when I hear the St. Louis airwaves fill with people upset about apartments being ‘forced’ into communities of single family homes, well I used to be a NIMBY but I’ve seen the error of my ways. Alas, it sounds like most other St. Louisans don’t want to grow.
By the way, my nephew liked his co-workers but realized he couldn’t become a family man on what MoDOT pays. He found a better paying job – he still lives in the basement but he’s making progress.
Glenn Koenen