🚀 go-pugleaf

Kenneth Cornelius wrote:

> When I was going to Central High (now, I guess, Cardozo) in 1938, there was a
> group of large apartments next to it called Clifton Terrace.  They were very
> nice.  A couple of my school friends lived there.  There were
> receptionist/concierges at a desk in the entrance hall and carpeting on the
> floors.  They were well cared for places.  Twenty-five years later, when my
> mother moved in for awhile, they were still clean and cared for.  When I wanted
> to install a TV antenna for my mother, I had to have a big conference with the
> janitorial staff and get their approval.  Fair enough.  That was then.
>
> Then the ownership and everything else changed.  Most of the staff vanished.
> The boilers went to hell.  Piss stains appeared on the walls and holes appeared
> in the plaster.  The laundry rooms became a free kill zone.  My mother, of
> course, was long gone the instant this started.  I retained a mild interest in
> the place and one day I woke up to discover that my Clifton Terrace was just
> about the most notorious slum in the city.
>
> I've long been puzzled about this.  CT was not public housing then, though it
> probably is now, what with Barry's lady and others having had their way with
> it.  I've read books about "Defensible Space" and other stuff blaming
> slumification on architecture, but that doesn't apply here.  It was the same
> buildings all along.   What seems to have happened is that the succeeding owners
> just started sucking all the money out of it without ever intending to put any
> in.  The character of the tenants was the least of it.

Barry's wife has nothing to do with it.

Clifton Terrace is Section 8 BECAUSE it is cheap slum housing.
The landlord converted it to Section 8 because that allows landlords
to get more from housing vouchers than they would from unsubsidized
tenants for the same slum property.

Barry, Cora, and the rest of the DC Govt now want to evict the
subsidized Section 8 tenants and sell the building to a luxury housing
developer. That's right, no affordability provisions involved.

When an apartment is in a bad neighborhood, it discriminates against
the poor; when you try and renovate affordable housing in an apartment
complex with a good view, it's considered preposterous waste of the
underlying value of the land, and hence an affront to the rich.

> 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.

I have never seen a LEGITIMATELY OCCUPIED scattered site house that was
not reasonably well maintained. There are several in my neighborhood.

Most are not legitimately occupied because they are only technically available -
DC got them condemned and never made them habitable in the first place!

If you're talking about upper-middle-class standards of elegance,
you're asking to much, of him and of me, should I choose to move
to your neighborhood...

-BER in Takoma Park