Housing

I happen to believe that safe and hygienic housing is a human right, not a privilege. As I watch homeless individuals nodding off on sidewalks and near highway ramps, I experience anger at the politicians who allowed the selling off of state mental hospitals for development in the name of clinical progress.

 

Their much touted system of in-community housing for these individuals has been an abysmal failure. It is costlier and less effective than the old mental hospital campuses. A combined approach of the mental hospital campus and in-community housing as a stepwise treatment model would have been more effective, and probably less expensive overall, when accounting for emergency room visits, shelter beds and prison occupancy. Another government screw-up encouraged by capitalist privateers.

 

My neighborhood is currently witnessing a revamping of public housing. Old postwar city-operated housing projects (estates) are being leveled. In the place of these brick boxes, wooden townhouse-styled buildings are being built in rows. They are surfaced in bright pastel colors. They look like suburban condo complexes. Similar reconstruction has been taking place for two decades around Boston. Neighborhoods around the ugly old developments have been transformed by this cost-effective architectural fix.

 

I appreciate the visible expenditure of my tax dollars to this purpose. How superior to guns and bombs which are dropped on foreign civilians. How superior to subsidizing wealthy banks, wealthy food corporations and wealthy automobile manufacturers. How superior to buying technological spies to watch the public for any sign of resistance to the government.

 

My own experience of finding housing in this city has been time-consuming over the years. I moved annually as a renter to avoid astronomic rent increases. Later, as a homeowner, I climbed the housing market for nearly twenty years to get to my current residence, where I feel I am living comfortably. Boston has become a tough town for those without considerable financial resources who want to live in the city.

 

My humanist sense of justice and equality is offended by the capitalism of condoned homelessness and substandard housing owned by absentee landlords. Allowing these trends is an overt failure of government. Home ownership in the U.S. (approximately 45%) is the lowest since World War II. Massive corporations are buying up repossessed properties by the tens of thousands to be rented to the same population who have been foreclosed upon.  While academic economists and stockbrokers gleefully declare the end of the Great Recession, secure and affordable housing becomes more and more elusive for many in our society.