Why is no one asking that to the non-impacted neighborhoods where there currently is no affordable housing? Why is PPL supposed to address supportive family housing issues as well as fix desegregation in Minneapolis? Why is there an assumption that everyone moving into PPL is a person of color?
As a shelter provider who has tried to site shelter in non-impacted neighborhoods, we come up against just as much resistance from those neighborhoods as we do in "impacted neighborhoods." Are we supposed to spend years (YEARS!) banging our heads against a wall to try to site one shelter in Linden Hills when we have community members sleeping outside? There are people in EVERY SINGLE neighborhood who would be opposed to affordable/supportive housing or shelters. I agree that poverty should NOT be concentrated in the core of the city, but what happens when every other neighborhood blocks you out as well?
Dennis Plante Responds:
Allsen, the two types of neighborhoods you've mentioned protest additional shelters and affordable housing in their neighborhoods generally for very distinctly different reasons. To understand those reasons answers the question (and it's a fair one) you've posed.
The more affluent neighborhoods will ALWAYS be more successfull in their attempts to block housing of this type. The people living in these neighborhoods are generally better-educated, have more money and more time to invest, and are much more politcally active in matters such as this. If any proof (on this matter) is needed, just review voter turn-outs in specific neighborhoods. Citizens living in economically and socially disadvantaged neighborhoods spend a far greater percentage of their time dealing with issues that are not even within the reality of those living in more affluent neighborhoods. You see, while I spend my free-time patrolling my neighborhood streets, protesting in front of absentee slumlords houses out in the 'burbs and mentoring children, THEY spend their time debating the style of street light they want in their neighborhood and how to keep "riff-raff" (probably such as me) "out of their neighborhoods.
To a point where I have even had a member of list list tell me flatly that if I actually had a "choice" in the matter (entirely untrue), I probably wouldn't live in the neighborhood I currently live in. Nothing like admitting that it's "my" problem and not "theirs" - as long as "they" continue to be successfull in "their" efforts.
Personally, I don't want any more "affordable" housing in my immediate area, because I want to give the next generation of disadvantaged citizens a fighting chance of breaking the horrible cycle they currently live in. The one "WE'" all created. Most of the children in my neighborhood don't have a chance, the odds are too heavily stacked against them for them to ever have a reasonable chance of becoming productive, happy members of our society. And "WE" are doing it to them because "WE" have determined that it's perfectly fine to make "THEM" all live in certain areas.
Dennis Plante Jordan
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