In her reply to my criticism of the Historic District Ordinance, Sue Tepas has made a forthright statement describing the hard facts of life in the big city. In this neighborhood, in any neighborhood, (she hopes) you are expected to keep your property in good repair. If you can’t afford to do that you will have to make room for someone who can.
She suggests that anyone who is forced to sell his house because he can’t meet building code standards should try to find other housing in Skinker-DeBaliviere which is more suitable to his income. Should he rent? What kind of decent places can be rented in this neighborhood by a family with seven kids? If he tries to buy another house, what kind of house is available to him? He can’t afford the extra cost of a house that has been renovated, so he will have to settle for one which is in the same condition as the one he has just sold, and then he’ll have his battles with building inspectors all over again. No, a homeowner who can’t afford to comply with building standards here will have little choice but to try home ownership in a neighborhood where the standards are more lax.
The reason this is possible is that inspite of Sue’s fond wish to the contrary, building code enforcement varies widely from one place to the next. In the Central West End, for instance, tough code enforcement is producing an exclusive neighborhood. On the other hand, there are areas like the Near South Side, where Code enforcement must have broken down completely. In between, there are neighborhoods like Carondelet or Hill, where the residents have used the code to maintain decent housing for people of moderate incomes.
Evidently, a community gets the kind of code enforcement it needs to maintain its character. So let’s decide the kind of character we want for our community and enforce the building code accordingly.
Do we want this neighborhood to have genuinely open housing which people with low and moderate incomes can afford? If so we should insist on intelligent and humane enforcement of the existing St. Louis Building Code, which is essentially a set of no-nonsense regulations spelling out the size of foundations so the house won’t settle, and the thickness of walls so that there will be fire separations or the way to trap a sink so that it will drain properly.
But what I hear from the Historic District people is that they want more than that: they want to regulate the esthetics of our buildings. It is all being done for art’s sake of course, because we appreciate “the finer things” but the effect is the same as that of any other suburban building restriction: It will keep the riff-raff out. How? By striking hard at those who can least afford it, the owners of deteriorated wooden porches. The properties on which these porches are located usually have a good deal of other deterioration and they have probably been singled out as the objects of previous efforts on the part of neighbors to have their owners shape up or ship out. These efforts have not been very successful because until now, it was necessary to get inside a person’s house to come up with a really expensive building code violation, and since the owner can refuse to let the inspector go through his house, that requires a search warrant. But a deteriorating porch can be seen from the sidewalk, and to repair it according to Historic District standards requires $2,000.
So the Historic District Committee has indeed drafted an ordinance with teeth which should be of some help to those who seem to think that the problems of poverty which Skinker-DeBaliviere residents come in contact with are most easily solved by ridding the neighborhood of poor people. However, as a device for “bringing the neighborhood back” it hardly merits Sue Tepas’ expression of gung-ho enthusiasm. After all, when a group of young people starts out to rebuild a neighborhood and comes up with nothing better than some legislation to create another income ghetto that is hardly an occasion for rejoicing.
Is there some law of nature that requires rich and poor to live apart from each other? I can’t believe it. After all the only thing that keeps my neighbor from attaining the status of a solid citizen is money. She has no money of her own, the banks won’t lend her any, and HUD’s funds are a bonanza for real estate speculators and nothing else. What about our own funds?
Suppose the neighborhood had a revolving fund of $30,000 to be loaned out at low interest rates for purposes of code compliance. Unlike the city’s disaster areas, where such a sum would be a drop in the bucket this amount could make some real improvements in this neighborhood (fifteen porch renovations for openers). It could be raised by getting subscriptions like $100 from 300 families and it would be managed by community representatives chosen in hotly contested elections.
If such a fund were in existence it could come to the aid of neighbors with problems of massive deterioration. And if a proposal like the Historic District Ordinance were to come up its managers would probably scream, “Impossible!” because of the additional burden placed upon it.
Lest I be accused of utopian thinking, I’d like to remind everyone that we are by no means the first neighborhood to come up with bootstrap financing, and that on a somewhat larger scale than the one I have suggested, such funds are known as credit unions. Besides, let’s not underestimate this neighborhood’s generosity. After all, we are maintaining nearly free medical care for ourselves at the People’s Clinic. Why not nearly free financing of home improvements?
Michael Stahl
Originally published in The Paper, December 1976.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1976_12.pdf, printed page(s) 2; PDF page(s) 2.
