By MKDOR
I hope this article will compel all who read this to re-evaluate their stance on housing as a human right. This particular situation has already received mainstream media coverage in Kansas City, fitting into the commonly used genre of temporary fixes to systemic failures. However I will highlight these harmful normalities with vivid and explicit imagery, in an effort to facilitate a belief-altering confrontation.
The Residents of Cloverleaf Apartments do not deserve the heinous conditions they are living in. Have these people engaged in military aggression, invading towns and villages with tanks and planes, fire-bombing schools, hospitals, and neighborhoods? Have they formed a political machine, leading a mass media campaign to spread harmful lies and libel an entire group of people based on their race, religion, or sexuality? Do they have hegemonic control over an inaccessibly complex legal system, which they use to divert billions of public dollars away from education and healthcare to fund violence and murder for its own sake?
No, the residents of Cloverleaf Apartments, like the vast majority of people of the world, are a peaceful, expressive, and hard-working community. Cloverleaf Apartments is a large complex of separate multi-unit buildings in the southern-most region of Kansas City, Missouri. This apartment complex received funding from HUD to ensure that the units are available to low-income residents. Let’s pause the story here.
Many readers are now conceptualizing the rest of this story based off of the previous paragraph, if not the title alone. We are used to the facts that in our society people are identified by their income level and those with low income live difficult lives. Yes, there’s also the prevailing misconception that people with low income are somehow deserving of their adversity. The low income designation fixes a presumption for all conversations, even those held with good intentions, regarding how such people’s lives can improve: these are a helpless, needy, and perhaps burdensome people that require constant intervention from the respectable classes of society. History has shown that no theorized solution resulting from these conversations have been sustainable.
I will return to the story, but instead I will refer to the residents as simply residents, like anyone else, and I will say that Cloverleaf Apartments is funded by a federal initiative. We don’t even have to lampshade why those particular residents chose to live there, since they are workers like most people, but that is an economic discussion for another article. To receive continuing federal funding, the apartment complex is evaluated annually to keep it in alignment with the goals of the initiative, and the residents file re-certification paperwork to maintain their tenancy- among other things the tenants reaffirm that they are using the premises as a residence and not as a storefront or industrial shop.
It turns out that the owner of the apartment complex had been misappropriating federal funds, which is not uncommon. For some reason, we are used to wealthy people stealing large sums of public money, with hardly any financial restorative justice or even a reprimand when they are caught. However, we are not used to bearing witness to the effects of blatant thievery on a grand scale; instead, mass media omits this information, and we keep our eyes averted, perhaps for fear of what we would see.
In February, after a major winter storm, the roadways throughout the apartment complex are only visible from the tire tracks through a thick layer of snow. This is because the place has been without any property maintenance for months. That also explains the towering garbage heaps that formed around the dumpsters throughout the complex. The deteriorated conditions of the buildings indicate that maintenance has been at a bare minimum for years. Multiple apartment buildings were already boarded up, some of them due to busted water supply lines that went on to flood the building and the parking lot, forming a thick sheet of ice that trapped multiple cars.
There’s an overwhelming amount of harm that at first thought was caused by the callous greed of the property owner, the person(s) in charge of a New Jersey company named NB Affordable, but that isn’t the only entity that disregarded their responsibilities to this apartment complex and the people who live there. There are administrative mechanisms in place that allow our public institutions to ensure the timely and effective use of public funds, even before the funds are dispersed. Anyone who has sought private lending for a real estate purchase or business startup is very familiar with the marathon of paperwork and phone calls. America’s economic system grants near unlimited power and discretion to private financial entities so that they can protect their own wealth foremost. But our public institutions, like HUD, can hardly achieve the same. It was not until the conditions of this apartment complex fell below a livable and repairable state that HUD mobilized, with their ultimate solution being a $2100 payment to the residents for “relocation assistance”.
Rather than seeking the addictive temporary “high” of rescuing these residents with altruism and ad hoc solutions, this episode of systemic failures is an opportunity for many Americans to channel their fear and rage, elevated by the current national political meltdown, into organizing to build sustainable public housing with our own power, and phasing out our deprecated capitalist system. The neglect, exploitation, and abuse of these people by privately-owned companies and public agencies under America’s privately-owned government has persisted through federal administrations of both major parties, each one blaming these atrocious outcomes on the other, and blaming the residents for their own suffering as well. That we have terms like “low-income” and “public assistance” in our vocabulary means that our current system is guaranteed, by design, to continuously inflict all of these harms to more people. These are severe harms that will take generations to fully heal; a $2100 check is so temporary it will almost be as though it never happened. The residents of Cloverleaf Apartments never wanted such a low level of survival. They want to live, like everyone else.