🚀 go-pugleaf

Tiny Human Ferret wrote:

> Kenneth Cornelius wrote:
>
> > When I was going to Central High (now, I guess, Cardozo) in 1938,
>
> Jeeze, yer an ol' duffer! Heh heh.

Yep, a ten-year-old boy trapped in an old coot's body.

> <snip>
> This confirms my understanding of the place, originally it was very
> upscale, as was that whole hilltop area. For instance, to compare, look
> at the high-address end of the 1400 block of Belmont Street NW. Around
> the turn of the century, this was the big hill north of Florida Avenue,
> and essentially undeveloped. Some rich person put in the Italianate
> gardens creating Meridian Hill Park and the hilltop was developed around
> 1915 to 1925, IIRC, and Belmont, Chapin Streets were "the cat's meow" to
> use the then-current (again IIRC) term.

Remember Henderson's Castle right across the street from Meridian Park?  Anyway, I
think the thing that started CT downhill was the Martin Luther King assassination
riots.  There was a lot of destruction along 14th street, and what had been a thriving
corridor vanished.

> > The same principle must apply to scattered site housing.  As I understand this
> > the idea is to dilute the unfortunate amongst the more prosperous.  I agree with
> > you in that I don't want Clifton Terrace next or near to me here in the suburbs,
> > nor scattered site housing as it is likely to be implemented.  It is expecting
> > perhaps not the impossible, but at least the highly unlikely, that some hard
> > scrabble type juggling two jobs is going to take very much interest in
> > maintaining a showplace.  His place will indeed go to hell unless he gets help.
>
> Not necessarily. See this last-month's entry at
> http://www.clark.net/pub/klaatu/district.html for some in-detail remarks
> on "how it is being done" (badly) on the "QT" for some disabled folks,
> and how it probably ought to be done is easily seen. Basically it needs
> a combination of free-market on the one hand, and some regulation of the
> free-market on the other hand. The city itself ought to be involved only
> peripherially and a safety-regulation capacity only.
>
> > Quite so.  I was about to suggest that the neighbors of proposed scattered site
> > housing units get an agreement with the sponsoring government about the
> > maintenance of the property.
>
> Ideally the government does no sponsoring. They simply make sure that
> the tenants aren't abused or forced to live in substandard dwellings
> that can't make code.

So you put people into houses that are guaranteed to meet some kind of code.  You do
this knowing full well that even with the best will in the world, they don't have the
ability to care for those houses?  The help you give essentially is to put them into
an impossible situation.  This is known as half-assed.

> There are several "scattered site" locations in my community, admittedly
> not pre-release or post-release housing for hardened criminals, but they
> don't cause any more problem than, say, immigrant family houses, and in
> fact they're generally a little cleaner and more orderly, if not as
> spiffily decorated with weird little shrines and stuff hanging from
> trees flapping in the wind.

Things like halfway houses are meant to serve a transient clientele and they are
either not expected to maintain them or are required to do so as a condition of
residence.  In either case, the sponsor is
responsible.

>  The trick is for the neighborhood to set the terms.

> No. This is not the trick... not at first. The neighborhood ought to be
> as helpful as possible, an adversarial relationship from the outset is
> in general a really bad idea. When stuff starts going to hell and starts
> doing it obviously, you should have already known about it through your
> consistent and continued efforts at outreach.

Who's talking adversarial?   It's known as setting the ground rules.   The
neighborhood should not have to be involved with the tenants at all.  The sponsor put
them there; the sponsor is responsible.