Mark is very correct in his assertions. When I lived in Waite Park (NE) there was a city owned rental home next to mine. Both tenants were good families, one foreign, one a single mom. It never bothered me to live next to it except between tenants, mostly not knowing what would move in next. It also bothered me then because it took the city three months to get the place ready for the next tenant (it had not been destroyed by previous tenant, I peeked). The present tenant is the single mom, and I think her and her children are better off being in a house in a nice area rather than an apartment or a bad neighborhood. They have stability and the bad element to destroy her children is not as prevalent. I congratulated her several times for the good job she is doing on her children because I am the product of a divorce, and know how hard it can be on her.
There was at least one other city rental house nearby and I never heard it to be a problem, and the tenant took care of the yard quite well. Ron Leurquin Nokomis East -----Original Message----- From: Mark Snyder [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 8:43 PM To: Minneapolis Issues Forum Subject: Re: [Mpls] Is Rental Property the Issue? Dave Stack is correct that I was thinking primarily of adults with my comments. Children are a different situation and deserve additional attention, especially because they have essentially no control over the environment they live in. >From what I've seen, the biggest obstacle facing children in poor families in Minneapolis are unstable living situations that cause them to move frequently and also change schools frequently, often leading to their falling behind. If direct housing assistance to families, either as Jim Graham has suggested by subsidizing home ownership or as Dennis Plante has suggested by deconcentrating poverty, helps solve the problem of school-aged children moving around too much, that might be worth the cost to taxpayers right there. However, I don't know that neighborhood surroundings matter as much as stability of the individual child's home. Who is the bigger influence in a child's life - their parents or their parents' neighbors? With the exception of extreme poverty where meals are missed and such, are kids really that aware that they're poor? I grew up in a single-parent and poor family, but I have to say that I didn't really notice much difference between me and the other kids until maybe around junior high school when we actually started to pay attention to things like clothes and what brands kids wore. Or maybe it was just me. Does anyone know whether kids in poor neighborhoods who do live in relatively stable situations where they're not moving constantly and have responsible parents do better at avoiding things like drugs, gangs or other criminal activity? I would guess that they do. Again, that's why I say that focusing on just one aspect of the lives of struggling families, in this case, where they live, will not lead towards a real solution for the poverty and other ills that plague our most impacted neighborhoods. We need to address all of the obstacles in a coordinated fashion. Where there's substandard housing and concentrated poverty, there are also going to be the health issues, the educational issues, the job skill issues, etc. Addressing each of those issues in a vacuum is what we've been doing pretty much forever and it should be fairly obvious by now that it doesn't work very well. The other problem I have is that whether you go with the Graham idea or the Plante idea, both are awfully tough sells from a political standpoint. As distasteful as it is, we do have to maintain some awareness of how policy in Minneapolis is viewed by the folks at the Capitol. I'm willing to bet that they'd look at something like the Graham proposal and say "Gee, Minneapolis has enough revenue to be giving away houses to the poor. They can stand to have their LGA slashed some more." Even though this wouldn't be an accurate portrayal of the situation, when has that ever stopped the folks on the Hill from sticking it to us? As for the Plante idea, while I certainly understand the reasoning behind deconcentrating poverty, I'm still willing to bet that folks in those more well-off neighborhoods are going to see it simply as being told to take on poor families and associated problems they'll bring with them from Jordan or Hawthorne or wherever. And they'll balk, just like they do when the issue is ever brought up of locating supportive housing outside the huge cluster in Whittier. There are areas in NE where just saying "affordable housing" or "increasing housing density" will get you a dirty look from some folks. Start talking about something like Plante suggests and you'd probably hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth all the way to Duluth. I'm not proud to have some of these folks for neighbors and I'm glad to say it's not as bad as it used to be when I was growing up, but I'm also too realistic to pretend they still don't exist. So how do you sell folks on these ideas? The numbers alone won't do it. You'll need to come up with an argument that is good enough to overcome the cynical reactions, the emotional responses and the NIMBY syndrome. Mark Snyder Windom Park TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
