“Low Income Housing” is Not a Solution — It’s Part of the Problem

(The solution is increased — not decreased — human connection)

*****

The reader is requested to consider the following scenario:

You’ve invited a friend home for coffee and conversation.

At your front door you must stop, and say to them:

“I’m sorry, but I’m not considered capable of good judgment regarding with whom I should and should not hang out.

“Before you can come in, you’ll have to allow your ID to be photographed by that person sitting over there…”

Or this one:

You have a family member coming from a faraway country to visit you, but you cannot offer, after all their expense and trouble, even the common consideration of a spot on your floor.

You must tell them:

“I’m sorry, but I’m not actually an adult. I’m still a Junior High Student, and I’m not allowed to have overnight guests.”

Or finding an eviction notice on your door for burning so much as a stick of incense.

(There are people prowling a corridor just outside your door, neighbors climbing on their toilets to sniff their bathroom vents, for one whiff of that incense.)

Management is of the tongue thrusting adenoidal variety with whom any attempt at meaningful communication whatsoever marks you for especially denigrative treatment and increasingly suspicious surveillance.

How ‘bout knowing that your home is set up so that the person to whom all your friends must display their ID also has the ability at any time to throw a master switch and prevent you from leaving at all?

In a day in which single individuals are making enough money from the current world disaster to become richer than small countries…

At a time when large boarded up structures are ubiquitous among us and rapidly becoming nothing but more so…

The homeless crisis in America is very largely a manufactured one — designed to make large numbers of Americans accept virtual imprisonment with a sense, not of outrage, but of relief.

There’s an enormous — and increasing — difference between “housing” and a home.

You feel that you deserve to have a home.

Right?

*****

Among us, poets are not paid. The poet/editor of this website, being physically disabled, lives at a fraction of her nation’s poverty level, and is presently homeless. Become a patron of the fine arts at: https://www.gofundme.com/are-you-a-patron-of-the-arts