'No way out of the slum'
Photos by Ron Bishop and Hali Pawl
Poor housing plague
By FRED PARRIS
Kansas Staff Correspondent
Dirt steps dug into the hillside lead to the house. A splintered plywood board dropped atop concrete blocks serves as a porch.
Inside, wallpaper peels in long, leisurely strips. A naked light bulb hangs from its socket and brownish stain marks the ceiling's weaknesses.
While rusty pipes line the bathroom walls, they are purely for show. The plumbing hasn't worked for weeks and the stench from the stool permeates the bathroom and into the kitchen.
The scene is a house in East Lawrence. It could just as easily be in North Lawrence or in the district around Memorial hospital. It is typical of much of the slum like housing which exists locally.
A comprehensive survey done by a civil engineering firm (city planners) in 1963 concluded:
"Poor housing, although generally hidden from public view in relatively inaccessible sections of the city, exists in substantial quantities."
One of 20 is unfit
The survey cited 546 houses as substandard—about 4.9 per cent of all Lawrence homes. The city planners deemed one in every 20 Lawrence homes unfit for human habitation. The report affirmed the observations of Kansas task force members:
"Unlike most big city slums, Lawrence's substandard housing is neither segregated nor concentrated in a single area. Instead, it is spread throughout older, low income areas of the city."
Modest but well-maintained homes often share the same block with shacks."
At the same time, both the planners and Kansan task force members cited the area north of 15th Street and the area around 7th and New Jersey Streets as the areas hardest hit by blight.
In the New Jersey Street area north of 11th Street, the engineers said, 30 per cent of the dwellings were substandard. They branded 23 percent of North Lawrence residences below par and 13 percent of hospital area homes as blighted.
Recommendations
The planners made these recommendations:
- The demolition of unsalvageable dwellings and the construction of single-family homes in their stead will impair of basically sound structures
- Adoption and enforcement of a strict housing code and, perhaps most important,
- Sponsorship of low-rent housing project by non-profit local corporations.
Yet today, four and a half years later, only a few houses have been posted "unfit for human habitation" and demolished. And while the city commission has adopted a minimum housing ordinance similar to that recommended by engineers, the affects have, at best, been negligible.
City Manager Ray Wells said the city can inspect homes on its own initiative (as is done in Kansas City) or it can rely on resident complaints. Whichever technique is used, ordinance allows the city to require demolition or repair.
But Building Inspector Kenneth Jorgenson said his staff is too small to allow city-initiated inspections.
Citizens fight poverty
Continued from preceding page
This helps the older people get to places they couldn't easily reach, he explained.
Not satisfied with offerings
The East Lawrence Center, however, is not satisfied with its current program offerings. They hope to initiate more programs—including a food stamp program.
Mrs. C. A. McCree the center's community organizer, said "The Chamber of Commerce says there are no poor or starving people in Lawrence. "We know better. We've been trying for several months to get such a food stamp program into effect with little response."
If the food stamp programs were put into effect, people could buy a $10 stamp and be able to obtain $15 to $20 worth of groceries, Luney said. The federal government would pay the difference.
The Buddy Patrol puts the "legal agency in the hands of the community itself," Luney said. "The people would be responsible for the people."
The Buddy Patrol, a successful program in Louisville, Ky., Tampa, Fla., and New York City is also under consideration and would allow certain members of the East Lawrence Community to act as policemen for their own area.
Works with Harrison
Luney said he has worked closely with Leonard Harrison, director of a similar project in North Lawrence, the Ballard Center.
"We work together to insure that we do not do
Ballard provides 10 to 12 tutoring classes for youth, including piano, typing, woodworking, creative dramatics, dancing and high school studies, Harrison said.
The United Fund and private donations support the Ballard Center, Harrison said. Its programs are divided into three phases: Recreation, education and the community action.
the same thing for the same people," Luney explained.
Mr. Bowers, Luney, and Harrison expressed enthusiasm for a $3 million housing project to be located on MichiganStreet. The project, a joint effort of several Lawrence churches, will provide housing on a rent subsidy basis. The government will pay for what the people cannot, Mr. Bowers said. Twenty per cent of the 120 unit complex wil be filled with poverty-classified persons.
In addition, clothing is sold at Ballard at a low cost. It further provides legal aid through the Lawrence Legal Defense Fund and a credit union for the underprivileged.
Perhaps Mr. Bowers best summed up the poverty problem in Lawrence when he called it "calculated ignorance" of the Lawrence community.
"The housing, labor and poverty problems in Lawrence are a vicious circle," he said. When people cannot find jobs, they cannot have adequate housing or food. The conditions worsen, he said, until these people are in poverty and cannot help themselves.
These groups have answered the call of the poverty-stricken of Lawrence. A lot more, they agree, desperately needs doing. They haven't even scratched the surface. For that, they say, a total community effort will have to be dedicated.
He claims, however, his office does "respond" to the few complaints it gets.
While Jorgenson's latter assertion—that the city acts on complaints—is doubtful (See page 7), city officials and private citizens suggest a reason other than limited staff for the city's reluctance to inspect on its own initiative.
They would demolish, not fix
Were repairs required, city officials fear, landlords might choose to demolish rather than fix up their properties. Tenants would have nowhere to go.
Task force interviews showed tenants themselves are reluctant to initiate complaints for fear repairs might also bring higher rents.
Charles Kahn, dean of KU's School of Architecture and Urban Design, said slum property is valuable, not only because of its negligible upkeep, but for other factors.
Lawrence's housing shortage, for example, allows landlords to charge as much as the traffic will bear.
Kahn agreed landlords would demolish rather than repair. He said slum property frequently is bought in anticipation that the land, not the house, will increase in value. A rental house just adds to it.
Ironically, Kahn said, the property's value is further increased by tax laws. Property owners must pay higher taxes after improvements, Kahn explained, the rationale apparently being "If you can afford to fix up the place, you can afford higher taxes."
Efforts are underwav
Efforts are underway, however, to give slum tenants "somewhere (else) to go."
- An interdenominational non-profit group, for example, hopes to have a federally-financed 124 unit project for low and middle income families ready for occupancy by late this year (See ----, this or --page).
- The city has applied for a Department of Housing and Urban Development grant to build 600 units for the elderly. That application is now being reviewed by HUD, Wells said.
- But here, rather than housing for a priority, the city fathers have chosen to renovate Lawrence's downtown business district first.
- The city also has requested a million-dollar grant in Neighborhood Development Program (NDP) funds to renovate Lawrence's older sections—north of 15th Street, including North Lawrence.
Establishment's own first
While some residents angrily chide "The Establishment's looking out for its own, putting its business needs ahead of human needs," City Manager Wells said the city might be able to turn its attention—and left over NDP funds—to residential renewal by the fall of 1970.
Wells said advanced plans for downtown renewal were already drawn. He offered no other explanation for giving the city's tidy commercial district priority over the shockingly substandard residential areas.
The business district's facelifting and other priorities come first, however, and Lawrence's slum dwellers do the best they can, many of them making their own repairs.
One woman, an Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) recipient and the mother of eight, is panelling the living room of her rented house because the landlord refused repairs. Using scraps and doing most of the work herself, she explained, "I wanted one nice room where I could be and not be depressed," she said.
Another family, also renting, built a stone retaining wall from rocks taken from the city dump.
Other families, of course, are not so fortunate, nor so energetic.