CDBG
In addition to the historic application and the Economic Development Grant from HUD, we applied for Community Development Block Grant funding (CDBG), also from HUD, to be the catalyst to changing the dilapidating direction of the neighborhood. It took a year to apply, a year to be approved, three years to see the first administrative monies, another year to receive project money, and then finally two short years of actual work. My goal had been to limit government funding to only three years, or it would become a dependency. In fighting the City Department, for three productive years it took us seven. City staff would later claim that we were inexperienced and didn’t follow guidelines. They abused our lack of knowledge on City procedures to trick us into delays, and we often did have to circumvent City guidelines on purpose to be able get things done. They are full of tricks, such as making you re-write things and then claim you are past your deadline for submittals, and many others. It is always your fault.
At times in life, many things move slowly, then suddenly things happen quickly, overlap, blur, interrelate, and it can get confusing, here are a few:
SUNDRY ADODE ADOBERO YARD GRANT
Along with and at the same time as the CDBG and the National Historic Register happened, and we give credit and thanks to Chris Delaporte and Gage Skinner’s for their initial push, the TBA applied for a Challenge Grant to the Department of Neighborhoods in HUD, to start an Economic Development Project. It took someone of professional integrity, like Delaporte, to go beyond his title and department’s goals to assure his work fell on fertile ground. I cannot say enough good things about this man! He made sure doors were opened to provide comprehensive local support to his overall mission.
In architectural training, there is no emphasis on the social significance of economic development activities. In high school, we are not taught finances nor the basics of how the economy works nor how it impacts urban business progress. We would have fewer poor people in this country, and elsewhere in the world, if we were taught basic financial common sense in our schools. Poor people are deprived of the education of economics, but not from students at universities such as Yale, Harvard, and Princeton where it is required for their graduates. I am not so sure about sufficient ethics studies either, but that should also be mandatory.
At our own expense, Ellen and I made two trips to Washington D.C. looking for Monsignor Baroni, appointed by President Carter as Assistant Secretary of the Department of Neighborhoods, and responsible for evaluating our grant proposal. In a building of thousands of offices, what we were about to do is called amateur lobbying (an ugly word in my vocabulary) and we did it well. In our first trip, the Monsignor was absent, but we took his secretary to the cafeteria for coffee and rolls, and on the way back she showed us his office, where the Monsignor had many large pictures from neighborhood activities. From her we obtained the names of individual staff involved in the Challenge Grant and took their secretaries one by one for coffee and rolls. None of their bosses bothered talking to us.
HUD’s immense building of long hallways full of impersonal cubby-holes is close to the epicenter of world power and influential people. To have someone from the distant lost desert of Arizona invite a simple secretary for coffee to talk about a proposal that had to do with convincing higher ups to fund making mud, may have been the highlight of the year for the common Washington DC secretaries. No one else did it.
Back in Tucson we found the right picture - was it from Jose Galvez? - of a girl in the Barrio looking out of a broken-down window. We enlarged, framed it, and sent it to Monsignor Baroni.
Within a year, we went back to see Monsignor Baroni, who received us. This very charismatic man gave us a warm welcome. On the wall right behind his desk, in a place of honor, was the picture we had sent him from Barrio Historico. Smiling from ear to ear we knew we had won getting the grant.
Ellen and I flooded ourselves with coffee again and learned from the secretaries that our mud-making grant was now considered very “sexy” by their bosses. In this mini-world of Washington, D.C. bureaucracy, many now knew who we were and how Tucson, next to Old Tucson, AZ, full of cactuses, where cowboy movies are made, close to legendary Tombstone, had a historic Barrio. Not to underestimate the power of ‘the people’, I never know if decisions are made by bosses or by their many secretaries.
We got the grant and started an Adobero Yard, after a few hiccups, soon to become independent and self-supporting, as intended. A lot of people were part of making the Adobero Yard a reality. Arizona is rich in handmade sundry adobe construction heritage.
We supplied the tractor with the front loader to mix and load the clay, sand, and water, and bought a flatbed truck to transport the adobes. All start-up issues were overcome. The Self-Help Housing families later made their own adobes in this Yard. It’s labor-intensive, steady business, and quality is important to keep the blocks from breaking in transport. A good training ground for those willing to move up in construction as a career.
Just think of it, a neighborhood with its own tractor and flatbed truck, assorted tools, making and selling adobes, ready and now eager to face challenges, having the strength of family unity, pride in results, and the capable use of hands to get work done, in the middle of adobe country. What else do you need? – More!!! Never, never give up.
You would think the following is funny, but is it? Among the hiccups, the Adobero Yard experienced, the Federal Building code had recently suspended recognizing sun-dry adobe as a building material, due to some Structural Engineering, science, and regulations! Many cities followed, disqualifying new homes from using adobe, unless adding an undesirable mixture with cement. As a result, insurance companies and banks would not support sun-dried adobe construction. Yet, here we were with federal grants for an adobe making yard and a Self-Help Housing project, funding to build new adobe houses in an historic district enrolled in the National Register because of its adobe buildings. The Department of Human and Community Development told the City not to let us use Federal funds to build these new houses, but we were using private banking. We had another fight in our hands. At the end, a group of experts went to Washington and successfully convinced the powers to reverse their regulations on adobe.
Neighborhood Reinvestment and Neighborhood Housing Services
Ellen and I had applied for a training and were accepted by a new federally funded program called Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation (NRC) in Chicago, a bipartisan program to train directors for what was then called Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS), intending to shift the emphasis from government funding to the private sector involvement and funding, mostly banks, in rehabilitating declining neighborhoods but not as dilapidated neighborhoods like ours. It was a very busy year. TBA received no funding from either NRC or NHS, but the intense training and skills learned benefited our work in the Barrio. A few years later I went to work with them in Texas.
Contradictions
There are a few contradictions in the story I am telling. The alert reader will be aware of them, and I will address them directly. One, if I claim that government intervention is so detrimental and paternalistic to the individual psyche, then why am I getting involved with so many government programs?
Another could be the positive criticism I give to history, tradition, and their relationship to culture. When is tradition, as compared to creativity, an asset to be nourished and protected? And when is it an albatross that interferes with adaptable survival and progress? Then, what is or should be the role of the family in the Hispanic culture in the modern age? As simple as it sounds, this question is pivotal to worldwide survival of humanity.
Contradictory issues often hang on their details. The intent of communism as stated is to overthrow existing governments, and replaced them by a communist government and attain global control. When taking over a country, immediately they collapse the family and impose ‘Governmental Patria Potestad’ meaning the government’s right to legal, physical control of the children, not the parents. Why? Because to take control of a community, they employ the saying that “it takes a village to raise a child”, not the parents, meaning controlled indoctrination, leading to eroding family unity. They threaten family members to spy on their own family.
In cases where legal conflict occurs over who has authority over the custody of a child in the United States, the court must choose the closest and safest family member. Whereas in a communist country neither the father nor the mother is the custodian, only the government. So, it would depend on the detail of where a trial takes place as to who gets the child now in the U.S., an uncle or a foreign government. Unless of course, the child is kidnapped.
If we consider what George Orwell wrote:
“Power is in tearing a human mind to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing”
with President Thomas Jefferson’s quote:
“He who permits himself to accept a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time till at length it becomes habitual,”
then it becomes obvious that when you hear a habitual reference to a village and a child, a stepping stone, the intent is to tear away the significance of the family, parents, and by extension, to erode the strength of a community, its culture, and a country by giving the government, the village (their interpretation) the control over the child.
Tradition plays a significant role in the development of civilizations; the lack of caring for tradition means lack of caring for the Native American, for the Aztec civilization, for Amazon tribes, for your parents’ values. An apparent contradiction is in that tradition can sometimes hold us back, but also it is mostly what holds us together. Common sense, which is not common, and wisdom, are elements needed to know the difference in value between traditional and innovative.
Another contradictory word, depending on its use, is the term manipulation, which I will elaborate on later. Manipulation provides no rest for the weary. Manipulation is constant and even necessary sometimes but also oppressive and misleading at other times. How can we tell the difference?
The significance in identifying these contradictions is the dire necessity to recognize their reality and not be persuaded by those who misuse them to their advantage, who turn them into righteous politically correct limited definitions, rather than significant communication. Terms such as government funding, history, family, tradition, competition, freedom, diversity, manipulation, social justice, equality, plus a few others are critical. Correct interpretation of certain words is crucial but ignored by 98% of us and the media.
Take the words Social Justice or those such as freedom, liberal. and conservative, and equality; like a chameleon, their meanings today are no longer what they used to be. You must wonder if THAT has been achieved intentionally.
Remember Jefferson’s words about a lie repeated often? Social Justice originally referred to the individual’s right, while today it refers to socialism or the collective rights. The term social justice was originated by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages to differentiate the individual’s role from the government’s overpowering role, and to oppose the injustices at a time when kings and the nobilities were the law and order, not including justice for average resident. Therefore, social justice meant the justice within a society, not by a state, meaning the individual being aware of acting with justice, to take the control away from the rulers, from the courts of that time, from the government. This is how it should be.
The meaning of the term social justice has been hijacked and perverted. Today, it means the Estate takes justice away from the individual and back to the ‘nobility’. Even many in the Catholic Church, the originator of the term, have fallen for this distortion. Today’s social justice turns the criminal into a victim of misdirected social justice and claims society is the guilty one for the criminal to have turned that way. Pure demagoguery. It is the responsibility of the Catholic Church to return the term back to its original intent or trash it. Talking about demagoguery; there is an inherited big error in the following quote from the present Pope: “Only by becoming poor ourselves, by stripping away our complacency, will we be able to identify with the least of our brothers and sisters.”
Nice thought! However, it is false. No one, who by choice strips him or herself of anything, can identify with anyone who is there for not having been able to surpass such conditions. The mind is intrinsically different. An attempt to psychologically have communion with inability does nothing for the none-abled. Commiseration can be spiritually edifying for the strong, but it is no solution for the weak. In this case, it is mental masturbation.
And yes, getting the poor out of poverty is a necessary Christian action of significance. However, Physical poverty, and all the ills that it conjures, is not a Spiritual condition but an Economic condition. Mental poverty can be both. It is crucial to profoundly comprehend the difference. A church through spiritual advice can improve part of the mental element of such condition, by uplifting the will, but still lacks the knowhow to cross the threshold out of physical poverty.
I have said that corruption is the major cause of world poverty, but now I must add that misdirected or incomplete charity is the second perpetuator of a large portion of the world continuing in poverty.
The other side of the original Social Justice is not about the justice system. It is justice by the individual person, the individual responsibility, the carpenter, the teacher, the parent, the policeman, the judge, the boss, and the kids engaged in bullying which later causes social retaliation, you and me. Social Justice is warped by the violence in so many movies and videos glorifying useless killing and perverted values, or lack of them. A mistake. You’ll see how my specific response to each of these contradictions slowly evolved with hard-knock experiences in the Barrio.
Entrepreneurship is the turbo driving force of capitalism, when devoid of corrupted manipulation, it is the proven best way to raise a nation out of poverty. The advance of the common man through personal improvement, opportunities, competition, private property, and effort far outpace any other type of work to eradicate poverty. Corruption and totalitarianism, meaning control of the means of production and distribution, is a cruel if usual punishment against humanity. As Churchill said, “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” Adding “Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon,” and “Socialism is like a dream. Sooner or later, you wake up to reality.” Furthermore, “Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capitalism; Liberalism attacks monopoly.” Beware! The meaning of ‘liberalism’ has changed since then.
“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.” Charles R. Swindoll.