The Blue House Down the Street - Comments

I really enjoyed this article and the effort and thought put into it! Good job. It's very Jane Addams like. However there are probably legal remedies for making someone take responsibility for their home and contacting them appropriately. Best of luck I hope the community clean up is successful and nurtures strong community ties and habits of the heart-as Tocqueville said!

I think this is so true. In Chester, near where I live, (and taking into account poverty) people just don't care. They either let the house fall to pieces while they live inside it or they leave it there to rot while they move somewhere else.

When I went to Memphis four years ago I was amazed at the houses there that were falling apart. It was almost like a ghost town aside from the historical landmarks and Beale. So I see what you're saying and I have to agree with you.

I think there are two very important factors that you haven't acknowledged or taken into account with this whole thing and those two factors are poverty and finances. Throughout the article, you don't seem to really mention this even once. There is no mention of where the needed funds for this sort of plan would come from. That's not to say the plan is a bad one because it could end up being very helpful. However, a plan like this cannot get off the ground without money. Your plan may be a good one, but without taking into account financial factors, your plan will never be anything more than wishful thinking. Poverty and a lack of money in general are two of the cores of the low housing market. We can't get the housing market up if so many people continue to live in or near poverty levels.

Renovating a house is very costly and very hard, where would the volunteer groups get the money the supplies would need? Many local governments don't have the budget to hold up a volunteer group and the community may not have the funds for it either, I'm sure a lot of Memphis residents are living in or near poverty like the majority of Americans anymore. How would these groups get the large amount of money renovating a house would need? Going further, where would the buyers come from? If this issue with poverty persists, there won't be any "new buyers" because people won't have money to buy a house. A lot of people rent because they can't afford to buy a house for themselves. A majority of Americans cannot even afford food for their family anymore, nonetheless to buy a house. Fixing the housing market isn't as simple as renovating a house and expecting people to come buy it. If people don't have the money, they won't buy. It all comes back to poverty and a lack of money in general.

With that said, I also have to dispute your point that renovating houses would somehow decrease crime. Renovating houses would do very little to decrease the crime rate. Many people are driven to a "life of crime" because of their financial situation, I speak from personal experience on that one. Renovating a house will not do much to change the crime rates because it will not change the financial situation of so many people. It won't get drug addicts rehab and it won't get the mentally ill treatment. It won't give these people hope that they can get out of poverty and away from feeling like they have to be criminal to survive. With stopping crime, renovating houses will do hardly anything to accomplish that at all.

As long as we have such high levels of poverty, high levels of unemployment, and wages below a living wage then fixing the housing market is out of our reach. We need to focus on helping people get out of poverty, help people get jobs, and give our workers an actual living wage before we can truly fix the housing market. This plan sounds like a good one but at current, it's not a very realistic one.