First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
January 26, 2003

David Siebers is a man nobody wants. It's understandable, I suppose; I wouldn't want him myself. I don't know what his early life was like, but what I do know is that by the time he was twenty two years old, he was serving a nine year sentence in a Michigan state prison for armed robbery and rape. Not long after his release, he was arrested for attempting to lure a ten year old girl into his car, and he went back to prison for another ten years. Last September, his sentence was completed, and he was released, presumably a free man. He is, however, a registered sex offender, and FBI and Michigan authority reports agree in predicting that he will commit criminal sexual assault again. Nobody wants him around. With all his belongings loaded into a pick up truck and a trailer, he has been hounded out of the states of Michigan, Ohio, and Kentucky. When I first heard about him, Siebers was driving from town to town in New Mexico, searching for a place where he would be allowed to stay. In Viguita, where he has stopped for now, the townspeople are alarmed. They are watching him, posting signs near his trailer, having the police follow him. They would like to make his life so unpleasant that he would move on, go somewhere else. They don't know where he should go, they just know that they do not want this man in their back yards.

Around the nation and throughout the world, citizens groups spring into being and into action whenever there is a proposal to locate a storage facility for spent nuclear fuel, or even an ordinary waste disposal plant, near a particular community. Nobody wants these hazardous, unsightly enterprises right next to their town; would you? Sure, we need to do something with our trash, and our nuclear waste, but not in my back yard!

As we have struggled this weekend to wrap our minds around the growing crisis in housing, here in the twin cities and across the country, I am struck by how significant it is what we are willing to have in our back yards. I don't know all the answers to this urgent dilemma, and I'm not going to tell you how to solve it this morning. If I knew that, I would run for mayor - or at least go to work for Mr. Rybak! What I do want to do this morning is to think a little bit beyond the usual suspects in such social issues, because I have the suspicion that this crisis for the poor and economically marginal has its roots in the preferences of those with access to economic resources; people like me, and perhaps a handful of others in this congregation, though by no means all of us. It is our desire to be surrounded by the security of people like ourselves, and to be sheltered from the evidence of poverty itself and the broken lives and dysfunctional behavior that often go hand in hand with poverty, that has led the housing market into this impasse.

There are many ways to manipulate the market - privileged people do it all the time. We call it "protecting our investment." We call it "quality of life in our neighborhoods." That's what they called it back in the days when it meant the understanding that homeowners in white neighborhoods would not sell their houses to black families. We do it with zoning requirements that specify only single family homes on 3/4acre lots. We do it with building codes that forbid innovative materials or construction techniques. No one wants to live next door to an unsuccessful experiment in, say, straw bale housing construction. Ugly. Bad for the neighborhood. Not in my back yard. My own homeowners association at Victoria Ponds Townhomes has just passed a bylaw amendment stating that any leases must be for an entire unit; no roomers are permitted. And the board was careful to point out that this provision has been legally researched, and is enforceable. Even if I were to be persuaded that I am living in more space than I need, even if I were willing to take on the personal risks and inconveniences of providing housing to someone in the midst of what we all agree is a crisis, I would be forbidden from doing so by my neighbors. They don't want the complications and the risks - not in their back yard. And thus the market is stymied.

Sometimes we like to manipulate the market not in the service of our own investments, but in the interest of what we fondly believe to be compassion and justice. I remember driving through the slums of Washington D.C. when I was a child growing up in the Maryland suburbs of our nation's capital. On the way to the White House and the Washington Monument and the Smithsonian Institution Museum, we would pass block after block of rickety, visibly delapidated, garbage-strewn tenements. They were frightening to look at, and prosperous people didn't like looking at them; didn't like what they represented and the hard truth they told, but every city had them. When I lived in Chicago as a graduate student, the old ramshackle wooden tenements were mostly gone. Not in our back yard, people said. Let the government build decent housing, they said; solid modern apartment buildings that aren't falling down, and put the poor people there. I saw the result - row upon row of concrete fortresses, controlled by gangs, in which no matter what anyone did, the elevators seldom worked and people were forced to climb ten and twelve stories to reach their apartments. Neither the city nor the federal government was an effective landlord. We all know that in some cities the "Projects," as they were called, became so infamously unmanageable that they were blown up and torn down. We don't want this in our back yard! The trick is, where did the people who were living in those unappealing substandard housing units go? In many cases, including right here in Minneapolis, nobody really knows. Did they get a foothold in market rate housing? Maybe, a lucky few. Did they move in with friends or relatives, on a more or less permanent basis? If so, they may be violating zoning codes, leases, or association covenants like mine, designed to protect the investments of the prosperous. Or are they now among the thousands of officially homeless people, shuffling nightly from one shelter to the next, priced out of any housing by what the people with resources want to see in their back yards?

Perhaps what we need today is a renewal of the vision once put forward by the noted architect Frank Lloyd Wright, during the explosive expansion of cities in the 1920s and 30s. Wright experimented with designing what he called 'Usonian' houses, intended to be simple, dignified structures made of inexpensive materials and available to less affluent families. He wanted to generate principles by which construction could be vastly simplified, and single family homes produced much more quickly and cost effectively than was then the case. A few of his designs were built in the handful of planned communities constructed in that era, but Wright's aesthetic tastes were always more sophisticated than what most middle class families actually wanted. Yet the principle remains; why can't technology give us faster, more efficient, modular building processes, that would allow for a rapid increase in low-end housing units?

Well, for instance, what about trailer parks? Trailer parks?! Ugh! Who wants to live in a trailer park? Who wants to live next to a trailer park? Isn't there an expression that the privileged use to describe the kind of marginalized people who inhabit these dense neighborhoods; 'trailer park trash'? Such depressing places! Not in my back yard. And yet, this type of precarious investment in a mobile home, unsatisfying as it might appear to many of us, can be a step not only toward dependable shelter, but actually toward home ownership for people to whom such a dream is otherwise permanently out of reach. Not, however, when community after community refuses to allow the siting of a trailer park within its jurisdiction, because such a facility makes an area unattractive to more upscale development.

The reality is that privilege cannot have it both ways. David Siebers is a real person; he will be somewhere, however temporarily, and that somewhere will be somebody's back yard. Sickness, addiction, dysfunction, violence, immaturity, oppression - all of these are realities of the human condition. So long as we are members of the human family, living on one earthen planet, all of these difficult, ugly, threatening realities are in our own back yard. Our zoning laws, our inner city housing projects, our homeless shelters, are ways of making the most vulnerable of our fellow citizens invisible; forcing them to pay the price for what people of privilege want to see in their back yards.

I think we have gotten smarter over the last fifty years or so, those of us who want to solve the housing crisis, not just get it out of sight. We have learned that we have to work with the market, which like nature itself, can only be controlled by being obeyed. We have come to understand that if some people are going to rent housing, other people have to own that housing, and landlords cannot be left out of the equation. As simple and tempting as the concept of rent control sounds, its proven effect is to take housing out of the market as owners abandon property that they can no longer support, leaving blocks of potentially viable units boarded up and vacant, or occupied by drug dealers, while children sleep in cars or church basements.

This is why I have urged, since the inception of our UU Affordable Housing Project, that we use some of our collective resources to actually own and provide housing - to take on the role of landlords, so that we might realize the impact of both legislation and market forces on those whose investments make possible the rental opportunities which are the difference between housing and no housing for the people with the fewest resources. We don't want to do this, of course. It is risky; it is messy. It means putting money on the line and coping with the vagaries of real people as actual tenants. Too much trouble; who needs it? Not in our back yard.

But even if we made up our minds to do it; to tackle the housing crisis by actually providing housing, the sailing wouldn't be all smooth. Consider the case of our neighbor congregation. Almost two years ago, Plymouth Congregational Church over on Franklin Avenue had the opportunity to purchase an abandoned nursing home right across the street from their church building. It seemed like a perfect contribution; the congregation would rehab the building into forty units of supportive housing for currently homeless people living with addiction issues, HIV/AIDS, or mental illness. In a supervised environment rich in assistive services, many such people are able to live dignified and productive lives. They can hold down jobs, follow protocols of medication, maintain sobriety, and be contributors to the community rather than burdens on it. Some of these folks would probably start attending Plymouth Church, they realized. The congregation decided they could handle it. Yes, they said; right here. Here, in our own back yard. The homeless people are already in our neighborhoods, they said. We can't solve everything, but we can do this much. We can help this many, in our own back yard. So they bought the building and they raised the money, but do you know what their neighbors along La Salle street said? Some of you know; many of you can guess. They said, Not in my back yard. And they sued the church and they sued the Lydia House project, and they went to the city council to stop it. They leafleted cars in the church parking lot on Sunday morning; they picketed the services. They said that the members of Plymouth Church were all from the suburbs; they said that their neighborhood already had more than its share of assistance for the homeless. But in the background of all their signs and all their petitions was the shadowy insistence, not in my back yard.

It is tempting to think that this is a problem that government should solve - but in the end, government is us. And in the end, the solution is going to lie in our being willing to see what is actually in our back yard, and deal with it. It is not enough to send David Siebers packing again; get him out of our neighborhood, away from our children. Somebody, somewhere, is going to have to deal with him; deal with his messy, broken life, and the risk he represents. Because he is human, and so are we, and we have to live on this planet together. It is not enough to move the addicts and winos along, to get the crazy old men out of the doorways so we don't have to trip over them, get them out of sight so we don't have to think about them. It is not a solution to say, Not in my back yard.

The Yiddish folk tale that I read earlier is often told as a warning against romanticizing adventure, assuming we can find treasure only in some distant place. But it also suggests that we must search carefully that seemingly familiar territory, our own back yard, for something precious awaits us there. Within the yearnings and choices of our neediest neighbors lie the keys to a more just and vital community. The treasure is there; it is the difference between seeing and not seeing, between hearing and refusing to hear. There is no place to send the difficulties of our city, the challenges of community; we must make it work for all of us right here, doing the best we can with what we know and what we have. There are no more continents to claim - the treasure lies in our own back yards; it always has. The treasure of possibility, of visibility, of human dignity, of wise compassion that recognizes both the limits and the promise of what we can do together as a society. The golden city of tomorrow must be built upon the foundations of today, here within the world we share, right in our own back yards. Let us sing that possibility together.

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The Treasure at Home - A Yiddish Folk Tale

One night, Ayzik, the son of Reb Yekl, dreamed that there was a treasure hidden under the Praga side of the Warsaw bridge. So he traveled to Warsaw. At the bridge he tried to reach the spot he has seen in his dream, but a soldier was standing guard there. So Ayzik paced back and forth, waiting in hopes that the soldier would go away. Finally the soldier became aware of someone on the bridge, so he went up to Ayzik and asked what he wanted. Ayzik told the truth: that he had dreamed about a treasure buried under the bridge. The soldier said, "Aw, go on! Just because I dreamed about a treasure in the back yard of Ayzik, Reb Yekl's son in Cracow, doesn't mean I have to go there."

Ayzik turned around and went home, where he dug in his back yard and found a treasure that made him a very rich man.