Edge of Homelessness
Compared to the 80% long-time residents still in Barrio Libre, El Hoyo was 93% to 95% long-time residents. Tucked away, El Membrillo was 100% long-time residents. No one would buy residential land in El Membrillo at that time. However, the homeowners in that section never had to lock their doors, even if crime was taking place around them. They all knew each other. Outsiders were watched with suspicion.
The common current running through all three Barrios is the strength of family relationships, many living in the same home for generations. Statistically, the very mobile Anglos move every seven years, mostly following jobs, affecting the living environment. Another Barrio strength is the importance of venerable families in Tucson who had their origin in the Barrio. They loved their birthplace dearly, and I felt their deep love for the place, intuitively responding to it. Much of what I did was for them. Maybe they did or didn’t know I knew how they felt, but I felt it. Their strong nonverbal support made a difference for me, and I am letting them know that.
The three Barrios in Barrio Viejo were still at that time one Barrio. I never represented or intended to represent the Barrio. I was an outsider. Once I gave a minority report at a Chamber committee meeting, expressing the opinions behind a smaller group in the committee, different from the main report. The TV Media gave me an interview thinking I was speaking for the “minorities”. I was as baffle as they were by their questions and my answers.
By then Barrio Libre was becoming beyond repair as far as displacement was concerned. Within twenty years, if nothing significant was done, it would lose its cohesiveness. We could only delay the day. Its strength; adobe architecture, would become its weakness to be mostly an investment and tourist attraction. El Hoyo was strong and salvageable. It would endure. El Membrillo would collapse against future industrial expansion unless action was taken. Here we had work to do.
Measuring displacement statistics can be misleading depending how you use them. In one house, an eviction could lead to seven Hispanic homeless people. In another, it would mean only one Anglo going elsewhere. Eminent Domain claiming fifty houses would displace 75 Anglo owners, or else 1,900 Hispanics or Indians. Big difference!
An example, flipping or reselling properties raises property value and therefore the tax assessment. Even though I didn’t know too much about real estate at the time, the effects on displacement was easy to understand. People on the low edge of the economy affected by these transactions, must suddenly choose between paying higher taxes or feeding a child. It pushes them out. In past years, we have witnessed examples of the impact that increases in real estate prices have had in the market in relation to increases in property tax assessments. Then inflationary circle is difficult to get out of.
The displacement ratio in this Barrio goes from 7.1 people per household to 1.2 per household. Wealthier individuals buying a vacant house felt no guilt. From their perspective, they were saving a building and raising property value, but it reduced the population. As a city official, you want tax revenue, increase per property, but there can be consequences depending on how it is done. Displacement simply sends low-income people to another district. Selling your house at the low end of the scale can only get you another house in the low end of the scale elsewhere, or move in with an overcrowded relative. It solves nothing. The only answer to this dilemma is to raise the existing homeowners’ economic base before they are pushed out.
Here I realized that my upcoming years would not be dealing with the homeless, I would be dealing with those in the edge of homelessness. Prevention is better than a cure afterwards. I had no way of knowing how many there were or how to prevent it. Are there enough people who know or care? No handouts!
Statistics
The statistic difference between one occupant versus seven occupants would impact significantly everything that was to happen in the next few years, but how, I had no idea which statistics and for whom. House flippers had a very different interests in life, playing a different game, involving different rules. Nothing wrong there per se; I have done it many times. The profile of the newcomers was mostly young, male, financially self-sufficient, single, and so-called Anglo, with no teenage children or family members parking their low-riders in front of the door. Nor having a family of six or seven inheriting their property.
To call this a racial divide, is just sprinkling it with gunpowder and lighting a match. Instead, look at it as the reality between a swimming team and a football team clashing in a lake. The answer for either team to compete against the other would be in proper re-new-training. Don’t get me wrong; I admire the courage and drive of young people moving into new territories. Restoring dilapidated buildings is a plus. Because of the nature of such personalities, there may be mutual respect between the two groups at first, the “you leave me alone and I will leave you in peace” agreement. Newcomers often feel that they are peaceful trailblazers and proud of it.
However, the potential cultural profile clash results in highlighting more than an increasing disparity, the economically weaker group, a majority in numbers at the beginning, would inevitably lose at the end. The newcomer can hide their ignorance and claim innocence, as I did. They think in terms of the collective perspective, as if the individual has no impact or responsibility. However, as a newcomer, no matter how liberal they think they are, when the clash occurs at a personal level, when it hits their pocketbook, they turn selfish and intolerant. I went to the first city meeting as described out of self-interest, not for concern of others.
These trailblazers today are exactly as the first European colonizers.
Most Native Americans at first welcomed the Europeans to share the vast land available to them. Europeans were so few, after all, and often friendly, but where are the Indians today?
I experienced many of my university friends claiming the government abused the Indians as portrayed in I Buried My Heart at Wounded Knee, but they were the same type of people who saw no wrong in moving into a Barrio, invading other people’s established territory, as I did.
History repeat itself; liberals advocating the plight of the original native inhabitants are doing the same to Barrio inhabitants. It’s human hypocrisy, but normal behavior for the human species. This action is called sublimation of goals. This is also what Black Power and TSS is all about.
In addition, newcomers bring their own history and experiences and have no clue of how things are in the area they are moving in. They want things their way.
However, I missed noticing a unique opportunity. The combining what the genius of Kelly Rolling in seeing beauty and value in what others saw as a hopeless and neglected urban landscape, with the internal self-improvement, and the strength of the Barrio residents that I saw and activated, as we shall soon see latter in this book. It’s conceivable that the two courses of action, his and ours, were not exclusive of each other, and could be combined with labor and final ownership. Maybe we could have forged a liaison between his stone, mortar, and aesthetic thoughts, with my human dynamic of leveling the playing field approach, to achieve partially different but coordinated and mutually effective results. Not depriving either culture of a future in the Barrio, and identifying diversity under a commonly shared mutual goal. I don’t think that Rolling intended displacement, it was just the consequence of a series of economic events. It was a failure on my part not to promote combining both ends.
I’ll never know. Both cultures were adapting to new times and environment. I didn’t see it. There are many ways in which I could have done better. Rather than blaming other people, it is more productive to be creative and get ahead of the game. This proposition was not clear to me at this point, but will be at the end of the book, when the rehab crew and the self-help housing programs are explained, then it will make sense. It took me years to formulate it. I hope the reader will see it too. Think of the positive. Better than wasting time criticizing the negative.
As I have said before, that is ‘reality.’ Those who win will do so with legal knowledge, technology, and the money (financial state) to make things work for them. The only way to solve this problem is not by doing it for them, but by providing the tools necessary for the economically weaker group to gain, through their own points of strength, the knowledge in economics, law, and technology, and use their cultural wealth “to level the playing field.” And that is what we did. Utilizing the rules of the game equally. Teach swimmers to play football or vice versa. If they choose not to use those tools, you can’t babysit anyone forever, as the Bureau of Indian Affairs still does with Indians today. Not all of them.
The so-called War on Poverty, sinking billions of dollars pretending to improve education, the money doesn’t go where promised. Instead, it goes into the pockets of the organizers, those competing for the finite dollar. Their schools and those specific political party cities are today worse off than before. Still, the organizers and politicians keep getting more votes somehow and more money to solve the problem they claim to be solving. One party is heading us down the wrong path, the other party looks away, keep trying to make the swimmers survive in football despite promises, for the benefit of the football team only.
The beginning of a troubling thought began to surface. More than 80% displacement before the end of the century was bound to take place in Barrio Libre if things were left to continue as they were. Assuming we could raise the financial situation of the families in the Barrio over fifty percent getting them out of the edge of homelessness and placing them in middle-income level, then at least half of Barrio Libre would not experience displacement. That would not be enough. We needed to get families to return, but would it save the Barrio as we knew it? That would be for the future to tell, not be for me to tell, any way you look at it, I knew we had to do more.