Last night's affordable housing forum at Temple Emanu-El was a lesson in getting things right by "thinking wrong," as architect Brent Brown likes to say. "Wrong," in Brown's view, really means "creatively." Despite an intermittently functioning PowerPoint presentation, Brown wowed the mostly middle-aged, well-dressed audience of about 160 with slides of his effort to rebuild South Dallas' Congo Street, home by home, without displacing people who had a stake in the neighborhood. It's a perfect paradigm for affordable housing -- except Brown wants to replace that term too.
"It's housing!" he said. "It's housing for people! We're all the same. We all eat breakfast in the morning. I wish we could find a way to realize that decent housing isn't going to make our property taxes go to hell."
The forum's official title was "Chasing the American Dream: Affordable Housing and the Role of the Private Sector in the Public Good," but what that role actually should be was somewhat eclipsed by the problem itself.
After introductions by Mike Sims, the Chair of Temple Emanu-El's Social
Justice Advocacy Committee, and Rabbi Asher Knight, the first of the
three panelists, Regina Nippert of the Dallas Faith Communities
Coalition presented a series of statistics, the most alarming of which
involved a combination of rising home prices, fewer homes built and an
increase in "lay-over deaths" -- or babies killed because people roll
onto them in the night (which Nippert associates with people moving in
together to save money). Nippert urged "ordinary people to do
extraordinary things" -- definitely the theme of the evening -- and Brown
followed with the practical examples.
"The people that live in these places are our best resources to solve
the problem [of affordable housing]," Brown said. "We have to look into
the place, not bring the solution in from outside."
When he asked the
people of Congo Street how they felt about getting houses built, they
were on board -- and they were there every day, cooking breakfast and
encouraging each other to work. If the people who live in neighborhoods
could be the same people to improve them, he wonders, shouldn't a whole city be able to heal itself?
"I'm sorry," Brown said, half-grinning. "It's just so simple. In the
end, you have a revitalized street! Sometimes it's just about doing."
Brown's act was hard to follow, City Manager Mary Suhm conceded.
She
spoke about "sustainable communities," one of those happy but totally
unspecific terms, and presented a virtual tour of the city's vision for
Bexar Street: townhouses, quaint shops a la Snider Plaza and
pothole-free streets (set, idealistically, to Michael Buble's "Feeling
Good"). Suhm outlined the options for Bexar Street and the city's other
NIP (Neighborhood Investment Program) areas: Stimulus money could go to
installing wireless Internet and improving energy efficiency, Suhm
said, and the 2010 bond program would take care of public
infrastructure (streets, sidewalks, plumbing). If that sounds overly
optimistic, stay tuned for a City Council stimulus briefing next
Wednesday -- and a follow-up forum at Temple Emanu-El scheduled for April 30.
After the panelists spoke, Sims read questions submitted by the
audience, most of them on the usual themes: whether housing or other
necessities (schools, grocery stores, etc.) should come first -- the
"chicken and the egg problem," as Sims put it -- and the issue of making
mixed-income housing acceptable.
Nippert's answer was either wonderfully optimistic or woefully naïve: "Nobody wants" -- she corrected herself -- "Few
people want to live in places where people are just like them." The
audience nodded in agreement.
For Brown, though, it's as simple as necessity. He calls the colliding
crises of the recession and the paucity of affordable housing a
"perfect storm," and people on both sides of the socioeconomic divide
will have to participate in order to save their city.
"We're all going
to have to make sacrifices," Brown said. (He doesn't tend to sugarcoat
the issue.) "It doesn't take superhero strength to make this happen. It
takes doing."
