Permutations of NIMBY

It absolutely is a case of NIMBY. And it must be said that Not-In-My-Backyardism can indeed be seen as not very nice. Socially irresponsible. Elitist. Selfish. Racist. Classist. Agnostic to the Great God of Free Enterprise. But…

The situation is a little more nuanced than that.

Here’s the Situation as I understand it — and bear in mind that none of this has been confirmed. So far, I’ve heard it by word of mouth. Tomorrow, if I can get to the evening meeting at which the Situation will be explained, I’ll have the details from the mouth of one of the horses.

A house at the corner of Main Drag South and Feeder Street NW has been purchased by a nonprofit. Said property has been a problem house for about as long as I’ve lived here. Main Drag South is one of the most heavily traveled surface streets in the city; in fact, at one point the city planned to widen it (it’s already 7 lanes!), saying that it carried the most traffic of any of the city’s surface roads. The house fronts on Main Drag South. The noise and dirt from a street like that, needless to say, are ferocious. It’s not a place anyone would choose to live, if they could afford better.

It was a bit of a wreck for quite a while; I think it was probably a rental. Then came the Bubble. As prices were climbing, somebody bought the house, fixed it up, and lived in it for awhile. They sold it to someone who apparently figured out its drawbacks after the fact. They noticed, for example, that people trying to turn right at the interminable signal at Main Drag and Feeder would drive up on the lawn to get around cars stacked in front of them.

So they built a pony wall around the lot’s perimeter, which they stuccoed. They stuccoed the house, too, and painted both to match: in a hideous shade of mustard brit-shindle. Proudly, they installed a lawn and a semi-circular driveway. Except for the ugly color, the house looked pretty nice.

Then it rained.

They had neglected to install drain holes in their wall. And apparently they’d never heard of caliche.

The front yard turned into a lake. It filled high enough to flood the house. And…the water  just sat there.

And sat there.

And sat there.

Eventually they had it pumped out. Somebody came in did some work, presumably repairing the damage. And the proud owners moved on.

Since then the mustard brit-shindle house has gotten a little shabby around the seams but otherwise has been inoffensive.

Now we’re told that the people who recently bought the place want to turn it into a homeless shelter.

Yeah. In our neighborhood. Right at the entryway to our neighborhood.

The Neighborhood Homeowner’s Private Club is up in arms. They’re urging everyone to show up at the zoning commission hearing to oppose the new owner’s scheme, which involves getting a variance so they can bulldoze the yard for a parking lot and erect an eleven-foot wall. The owners are holding a meeting with the neighbors tomorrow, presumably to plead their case for the poor.

Now, it has to be said that there are plenty of homeless people around here. Why, just last week, one or two of them revisited their favorite flophouse, the trash-can alcove outside my back gate, tossed their beer and liquor bottles around the alley, and left a great stinking mound of shit next to the gate, decorated with gummy toilet paper.

That’s our fellow humanity.

Central-city neighborhoods are always under a great deal of pressure. The city government itself, often (as ours is) owned by developers, invariably comes up with a scheme like a train or a double-decker freeway or whatnot that will enrich some One-Percenter at the expense of the people who live there. And centrally located middle-class neighborhoods are often bordered by dangerous slums — as this one happens to be.

I’ve been through this before. My ex- and I bought in the Encanto neighborhood just as it was starting to gentrify. It’s now one of the most sought-after neighborhoods in the Valley; what was then down-at-the-heels commerce around it has evolved into trendy shopping, business, and arts districts. At the time, we also had plenty of homeless folks living in the area, pushed out of downtown by the city’s enthusiastic redevelopment there.

None of these people were hapless victims of an economic crash. They were drug users and alcoholics. Not a few were seriously mentally ill men and women abandoned by closure of institutions that, whatever their failings, at least kept a roof over the heads of those incapable of caring for themselves. Some of these mentally ill folks, like some allegedly sane folks, were dangerous: one guy, for example, walked into a dirty-shirt law office on McDowell Road, where an early-bird admin assistant was making coffee for other staff who hadn’t shown up yet, and killed her for the fun of it. Others were just pests, the sort who would shit in your yard and climb into any unlocked car to take a nap.

Down the road, there was a homeless shelter. It would take people in at night, bed them down, and then at dawn would toss them back out on the street. With no place to go, the residents would ride the buses or hang out in the library all day, to keep cool or warm. Or they would wander up and down the streets of our neighborhood, all day long, until they could get back into the flophouse. There were always bums stumbling up and down our street, every day.

We could not let our son play outdoors without constant supervision. When he played outside with his little buddy who lived up the street, either I had to stand outside and watch them every minute, or our neighbor’s housekeeper had to do it. If I took him to the park — Encanto Park is a lovely, shady park in the middle of a historic neighborhood, with a pond and boats and playgrounds and a merry-go-round and it’s really very pleasant — yes, when I would go to the park with him, I would have to take our German shepherd. And yes, twice on those jaunts that German shepherd did her job. If I walked around the neighborhood alone, I would take the shepherd with me. And yes, several times she repelled attempted boarders.

Well, when you’re a boy child, you do reach a point in life where you don’t want your mommy or your nanny peering over your shoulder every living, breathing minute. That was why we moved out of the neighborhood.

So, as you can imagine, I feel a certain degree of empathy with the folks who don’t want this outfit to plop a homeless shelter in our neighborhood.

And I also feel some concern: all these young couples moving in here with their kids, fixing up the homes and making the neighborhood so much nicer and pushing up the property values are going to fly out of here like a flock of migrating ducks as soon as they discover they can’t let the kids play in the front yard for fear of some stoned, unwashed fright harassing them.

I like these young people. And I don’t want them scared out of here by a thoughtless scheme like this. If that’s NIMBY, then so be it.

As a practical  matter, this area probably does need a homeless shelter: but not in the middle of an established, upwardly mobile neighborhood. The shelter needs to go in where the homeless people live, for godsake! That’s over on the other side of Conduit of Blight.

Conduit of Blight marks the eastern border of a swath of old, blighted cheaply built housing tracts that flanks the I-17 freeway and spreads westward for miles. (Yes, Virginia: right-to-work laws do foster the growth of poverty and slums.)

The canal about a half-mile to the north marks the southern border of a habitat for meth gangs.

Either district would benefit from a social service provider like this.

Put the thing in here, though, and what you’ll do is call the drug users, the wrecked alcoholics, and the impoverished mentally ill into our neighborhood: into our park, into our yards, into our alleys, and into our homes. (If you don’t think they burgle, you mis-think.)

So it would indeed make sense to buy a house and turn it into a homeless shelter. But for godsake, put it in an area where the people who need it already hang out.

That’s where we are right now. It’s NIMBY, all right. No, I do not want the homeless set in my backyard…again.

Image: By Josh Swieringa – Flickr, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3270773