icon Blueprint for July

Are We Listening?

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7 min read

Go out and tell our story

 Let it echo far and wide

Make them hear you

– Lynn Ahrens, Ragtime

Madi Ford is listening. As you will read in this month’s Talking Heads interview (p. 6), her team at MidCity Financial includes a director of community engagement, as well as additional staff committed to listening to the residents and to neighbors.

“We underwent some training at MidCity,” Madi says, “to better understand that when we talk to a community group that is very often diverse in lots of different ways —socio-economically, ethnically, sexually—that instead of standing on a podium and talking at people, it’s better to sit in a circle, in a chair, talking with people and recognizing who you are in that process and making space for every voice to be heard.”

Jonathan Rose is listening. As we reported in our June issue, he insists that each of his company’s developments be a “community of opportunity,” integrating physical, health and infrastructure so residents can move forward with their lives.

The affordable housing industry’s justification for existence is fulfilling needs. We fulfill a predominant need by building and preserving homes. Providing a home establishes the base from which residents can address all of their other basic needs. Our homes are rentals. We own and manage the homes. We thereby are attached to our tenants’ ongoing lives. That comes with responsibility. The buildings we build and the rents we charge provide our financial compensation, but the needs of the residents we continue to fulfill provide the psychic compensation; they provide our pride and satisfaction. In addition to housing the poor, the homeless, the aged, veterans and local workforce, buildings developed by our members fulfill needs by also housing schools and pre-schools, medical facilities, job training and opportunity centers, grocery stores in food deserts and much more.

All of our residents and all of our staffs are now grappling with the disruption of life caused by the novel Coronavirus pandemic. In affordable housing homes, African American residents are disproportionate to our country’s overall African American population – according to HUD, over 40 percent of those receiving rental assistance are Black, while 14 percent of our population is Black. African Americans have been disproportionately hit by the Coronavirus. Now they find themselves confronted with four senseless deaths in four months at the hands of White law enforcement officers, events that spark vivid nightmares of an ugly legacy of slavery and lynching in our country, events that exacerbate persistent fears.

Our Black residents are hurting and angry. They demand the country as a whole acknowledges that their lives matter. Governments, which consist of people whose jobs have time limits, choose to address situations like this by dealing with the surface issues. The surface issues need to be addressed and so there will likely be a re-examination of the recruitment and training of police and their protocols. But that alone does not address the core issues. And, frankly, despite the best intentions, neither do the homes or the schools or the medical facilities or the job centers. In addition to what we are doing, we still need to get to the core.

The Core Issues
Prior to joining NH&RA and Tax Credit Advisor over a decade ago, I spent 25 years as a producer in the theater business.

I took great pride in participating in what I believed to be a uniquely inclusionary industry. The shows in which I was involved (including the one quoted at the beginning of this column) surrounded me with Blacks, Hispanics, gays, lesbians, everyone. I relished this environment. I considered these people my friends, my professional family. They came to my homes and I went to theirs. I went to their weddings; they came to my sons’ bar mitzvahs.

As protests mounted following the video-recorded murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a petition signed by 300 Black theater artists was issued headed, “We See You White American Theatre.” It quite bluntly accused the entire institution of being racist and demanded change. I was taken aback by the level of anger and felt incredibly naive. Was I so blind, so steeped in my white privilege that I could not see this? Press coverage of this event referred back to a speech the late great playwright August Wilson made at a theater conference in 1996—entitled “The Ground on Which I Stand”—-as inspiration.

August was a friend. We would meet for breakfast or lunch at a 47th Street midtown Manhattan coffee shop we all referred to as the Polish Tea Room. Over omelets or the best matzoh ball soup in town, I would ask him what he was working on. Instead of responding with a title or concept as most writers do, August would say, “Boy Willie walks into the living room of Doaker’s house and he says…” And then he would drift off into one of his long, eloquent, perceptive, moving soliloquies that were highlights of all his works and his literary signature. I loved sitting there hearing him creating, relishing, bathing in words and thoughts. So now I dug a bit to find August’s words from 1996.

The speech addressed “the affirmation of the value of one’s being in the face of society’s urgent and sometimes profound denial.”

“We stare at each other across a divide of economics and privilege that has become an encumbrance to Black Americans ability to prosper and on the collective will and spirit of our national purpose,” he declared.

Among August’s complex and detailed arguments was a rejection of the concept of assimilation and a cry for respect for African American culture. He defined culture as the “behavior patterns, the arts, beliefs, institutions and all the other products of human work and thought as expressed by a particular community of people.

“We decorate our houses,” he said. “That is something we do in common. We do it differently because we value different things. We have different manners and different values of social intercourse. We have different ideas of what a party is.”

“We both offer food and drink to our guests, but because we have different culinary values, different culinary histories, we offer different food and drink to our guests.”

What I heard from August was that to be one people, we did not need to be one culture. In fact, we needed the opposite: to respect each other’s cultures instead. Don’t try to erase race; embrace race. We can only find common ground by letting everyone be who they are.

Americans tend to lazily depend on clichés to hide our prejudices. “American Exceptionalism,” for example, is really a criticism of anyone who is not originally from America. “Melting pot” is a demand to all to be the same as opposed to recognizing differences. In Canada, where I lived for five years, they frown upon the idea of a melting pot. They consider themselves a multicultural society.

We now live in an era of yakking instead of listening. Social media, talk television and radio, presidential rallies. Yak, yak, yak. We live under an avalanche of opinions.

But if we are going to really address the underlying disease that is rotting our society, if we want to make real progress rather than superficial attempts, it’s time to start listening. Madi Ford’s effort provides us a format. Jonathan Rose’s philosophy provides us an aspiration. And August Wilson’s speech opens our eyes and ears to the scary but essential idea that even if we think we have been listening, we have not been hearing.

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        Like our world, current events and social trauma have forced a different arrangement of topics in this issue. For monthly readers, things are not where they usually are. Following this section on “Are We Listening?” you will find our COVID-19 Response Report, followed by case studies of senior housing and assisted living.

Marty Bell
Editor