Posted: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 12:00 am
From The Journal Times Editorial Board
The negatives one may hear about proposed housing on Sixth Street is not reason. It is fear, and if we surrender to it we will do more harm than good.
The plan to resurrect the old building which covers 314 to 324 Sixth Street is a worthy one. The Housing Authority of Racine County intends to buy the building, put its offices on the second floor, and build 10 low-income housing units on the second and third floors. On the first floor are four storefronts, but only two are occupied, one by the Sixth Street Theatre and the other by the Racine Arts Council. A new landlord could bring new ideas and tenants to a street that is blossoming. Tenants may find jobs Downtown, allowing them to rebuild their lives without incurring the great expense of a car.
Before we become lost in fears gestated through a cold winter of economic problems, let's look at what we're really talking about.
When people couple low-income housing and crime, they're thinking not about 10 units above a building on a street with art galleries, restaurants and shops. They're thinking about the huge public housing projects of the middle 20th century. Those warehouses for the poor isolated the poor and are blamed for breeding a culture of crime. For some people, they're probably tied up with memories or images of the civil unrest of the 1960s. Those big projects are now being turned into rubble because society realized that they didn't work.
To borrow a phrase, housing doesn't commit crimes; people commit crimes. The stereotype, whether of low-income people or firearms owners, is the same. It attributes a quality to all members of a group without pausing to consider that those people aren't the same. We have crime because a few people reject honest work, or because they have been raised in a culture where crime is an acceptable activity, or because they see no other options. It would be wrong to assume that all low-income people are automatically criminals.
Ten housing units on Sixth Street doesn't constitute a high-rise ghetto. They would be homes for people whose luck may have changed, or people trying to work their way up from a hard life. Nor is the Housing Authority of Racine County a slumlord. In fact, there are likely to be fewer problems with the residents of that projected low-income housing because nothing would be more embarrassing to the authority, or would undercut its mission more, than to have poorly supervised residents in its own building.
Let us also remember that there is already low-income housing in Downtown. Yes, there is. If you suddenly feel unsafe after remembering that, that's fear talking. Let's not allow fear to push us into a bad decision about a good idea.