THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD

In a weak moment of idealism last year, I asked my husband to give me a Little Free Library as a Christmas present. These are the windowed boxes mounted on posts and filled with books which mark the front yards of certain progressive communities. The books are free for the taking: passersby are urged to "take one now and leave one later," but the box is meant to remain full of used books for all ages and interests whether or not neighbors replace the ones they take.

Little Free Library #75394

More than two months later, the wooden library FK gave me, already listed on a national registry as Library #75394, remains in its box in our study, along with the cans of paint and the specially designed post meant to hold it. Nearly a decade into our sojourn in Traveler's Joy*, South Carolina, I'm growing less and less clear on what the word "community" actually means in this town, except to realize that a library does not belong on my lawn. Bob,* the local real estate agent who sold our home to us on Kent* Street in 2009, recently confirmed our unscientific observations that the neighborhood is shifting rapidly away from a community of working class owner/families into an assortment of tenants in rented properties.

The adult children of our former neighbor, Miss Donna*, two doors up on our side, held on to her home after her death three years ago but rented out Miss Donna's rundown property across the street to a raucous, chaotic family that keeps pigs in the backyard and regularly dumps mounds of debris in the storm gutter. Last week one of the pigs got loose. I see the pigs as an improvement on the pit bulls the family kept before, but when the pigs are troubled or threatened, they scream with unearthly vigor. This was the case when the sow broke out of her pen and lowered herself into the green expanse of the neighboring lawn. She could not be coaxed homeward, and when four children and their grandmother pulled on her tail to convince her, she shrieked like a woman being burned at the stake. They finally rigged a rope around her neck, strung it under her belly, and the kids towed her uphill by lifting her hind legs off the sidewalk and dragging her backwards, wheelbarrow-style. The pig screamed "wee-wee-wee" all the way home.

 

Ossabaw hog.

In the small white house next door to us, the retired fireman whose notion of "getting some fresh air" involved driving through his backyard in his Buick, and who once turned down my offer of homemade wine by telling me, "no, no, that'll have me seeing double and feeling single," passed away in January after a long illness. Before moving in with his son in Charlotte he told me to help myself to the peonies and iris his wife had tended in the beds that bordered our property. I did, and now I think on Gerard* whenever the peonies, of an old-fashioned scented variety which may be 'Shirley Temple,' glorious notched petals of blush and white, bloom in my garden. Now that his son is listing the house for sale with Bob, the beds will be tilled over. We're hoping for good neighbors next-door, but looking around Kent Street and its environs these days, we're not optimistic.
 

Passalong peonies blooming in May.

A few days ago, on a morning when the rain had finally stopped and the sun emerged, my dog began scratching at the front door. Alice usually barks or growls when strangers approach the porch, but this frantic scratching at the weather-stripping was a new behavior. I looked out through the glass storm door and saw a woman collapsed on the sidewalk in front of my house.

Some remnant of instinct from my years living in a large American city told me that this was not a person suffering from Type 1 diabetes or heart failure; she seemed youngish for a heart attack but was just the right age for a drug overdose. Since I was still in my bathrobe, I called 911 rather than going outdoors. As I was on the phone with the operator the fallen woman rose to her feet, unsteadily, and walked away down Kent Street, seemingly headed for the gas station on Abbey* Street. This is where all the vehicle-less people living in the Section 8 housing at the top of the ridge must walk to obtain their beer, cigarettes and microwave meals. I told the operator to cancel the emergency, but she promised to send local police to look for the woman, in case she was in medical distress. By the time the Traveler's Joy officers arrived on my doorstep, however, she had vanished.
 

I looked out and saw a woman lying on the ground.

That evening, I pulled my cart into the checkout line at Food Lion and saw the same woman, no longer unsteady, standing in front of me with a friend whose groceries were being rung up. She was just as I'd described her to police: a petite white woman with dyed pink hair pulled into a topknot, wearing a frayed denim jacket, jeans, and a backpack. As she stood talking with her friend I had a good view of her face. It was covered in sores, the kind usually caused by long addiction to crystal meth.

Should that have really shocked or unsettled me, that habitual drug-users are living (and overdosing) in my neighborhood? Logically, no. It's been apparent to my husband and me for some time that while by all outward signs Traveler's Joy appears to have few functioning businesses and virtually no industry, there is a 'shadow' industry that thrives here with the tacit support of local government. This is the business of slumlording. Bringing change or prosperity to town by means of new business or development has been consistently discouraged by some old-timers who have expressed their objections openly. They believe that such change would inevitably result in higher taxes on property-owners. It would also inevitably cut down on the number of people living in Traveler's Joy who survive by means of entitlement programs such as WIC, SSI, veterans' and disability benefits. Such people are desirable as renters because they pay their landlords with government-guaranteed funds. (See Matthew Desmond's excellent nonfiction book, Evicted; Poverty and Profit in the American City, for an explanation of how and why owning rental properties in low-income neighborhoods can be profitable.)

The owners of these rental properties in Traveler's Joy are primarily the adult children of long-time residents, such as the heirs of our deceased neighbors on Kent and Cedar streets. Typically, they inherit land and property and pay almost nothing for the upkeep of that property, while economizing on already low taxes through creative means. The tenant house across the street from us that has given us so much grief (and now I can't stop worrying about the older boy who runs everywhere in his bare feet. Considering the pig-pen in the backyard, he is a prime candidate for hookworm…) …this house is listed on tax records as the primary residence of the owners. If it were listed as an income property the taxes would be higher. In fact, the sibling-owners live in another county and another state, respectively, and are rarely seen on Kent.

Kent Street: playing on the debris pile.

The squalid mobile home on nearby Cedar, occupying the high ground above our garden and those of Gerard's and Ramona's, is owned by another member of a "founding" and therefore favored family. Over the years, this mobile home and its muddy yard have housed a fast-cycling procession of tenants who have generated deafening noise, trash and abandoned animals. According to tax records, the owner purchased the lot and the trailer in 2005 from a man for whom he held power of attorney; in selling the property to himself he was charged the princely sum of $5. This property-owner is one of the most successful slumlords in Traveler's Joy. He owns an entire trailer park of shabby single-wides occupying a narrow strip of land on the ridge-top above Cedar Street, and now, over the objections of homeowners and a couple of the more civic-minded town councilmen, has installed a second trailer park identical to the first on land dug out from the cliffside below the original plot.
I know from conversations with local law enforcement officers that the initial park of one dozen single-wides crammed on to an acre of land comprises a troubling concentration of unlawful activities that tax the tiny police force here. In one trailer, I was told, the three inhabitants boast four homicide convictions among them. And yet no one seems to believe that the man who collects rent from all the residents bears any responsibility for creating the situation. No one will acknowledge that the que sera sera attitude of town government in this respect is part of what makes the location desirable for residents engaged in harmful or illegal activities.

Rental property in Traveler's Joy.

When I first came to Traveler's Joy it was hard to accept the town's practice of permitting property owners to charge rent for dwellings that are unfit for habitation by human beings. (See my earlier post, 12/04/13, "The Tenant House") Drive down any road into or out of town and you will pass mobile homes without glass in the windows, plywood nailed over the gaps. You'll pass houses lacking modern heat and working kitchens, with partially collapsed roofs or floors. The questionable set of values at work here presumes that poor people are lucky to get any kind of roof over their heads, even a partial one, while holding that a property owner with the moxie to charge money for such appalling conditions has every right to do so. As the former mayor once told me at a town meeting when I objected to the town's lack of oversight in such situations: "You can't go trampling on people's rights." It was clear to my husband and me that his use of the term 'people' on that occasion was meant very specifically to refer to those of his friends and kin who owned such properties. The rest of us could butt out.

I'm not naïve enough to think this is an isolated situation. I suspect this brand of protectionism is thriving in many small southern towns, where regulation is habitually ignored and the good ol' boy practice of cronyism insures profit for the favored few. Meanwhile, homeowners and local police departments in these towns must cope with the effects in their communities of increasing poverty, petty crime, drug use, transiency and the kind of social ills that are symptomatic of a burgeoning underclass, such as we are experiencing in Traveler's Joy.

When he was campaigning last summer, the new mayor told us that our town was coping with an alarming rise in shootings and drug-related crimes, something that isn't widely known without a newspaper in the community (The Traveler's Joy Times* was forced to close in 2010.) The mayor blames the escalation of violence here on gangs from a troubled community across the border in North Carolina expanding their operations here. I wonder if the changes in our demographics have also contributed to the reduction in revenues that the town receives. Traveler's Joy has run a budget shortfall for the past five years, and in the current fiscal year the coffers proved to be half a million dollars short of expenditures.
 

Main Street in Traveler's Joy.* A few days after this photo was taken,
the town chopped down the holly tree, along with the others growing nearby.
No explanation was given.

In trying to understand what's going on in my neighborhood and my town, I came across an analysis from the Brookings Institute that seems to speak directly to the changing make-up of certain residential blocks in Traveler's Joy (and, in fact, to communities all over America where high levels of unemployment and drug use go hand-in-hand with a shortage of economic opportunities and low levels of education). In this report, authors Isabel Sawhill and Paul Jargowsky refer to a study done in 1988 by Sawhill and Erol Ricketts that focused on those behaviors which seemed to be held in common by members of the "underclass." Not only do these common traits tend to limit the individual's chance of achieving the American dream for themselves and their children, but they reduce the social benefits for the neighborhood as a whole by providing social models that are self-defeating.  Here's the pertinent portion:

"They defined the underclass as all those living in census tracts with very high concentrations of certain behaviors. Specifically, the tract had to be one standard deviation above the mean for the country as a whole on all of the following indicators: proportion of teenagers dropping out of high school, proportion of women heading a family, proportion of households on public assistance, and proportion of prime-age and able-bodied men not in the labor force. The underclass is then defined as those living in these troubled neighborhoods, regardless of whether they themselves engage in such behaviors.

Instead of focusing on individuals, however, Ricketts and Sawhill emphasized neighborhoods because of the tendency of these dysfunctional behaviors to concentrate in certain areas and to become normative or quasi-normative for the adults, and especially the children, growing up in these neighborhoods. If many of one’s friends are teenage mothers, for example, then it is easy for any individual teen living in the neighborhood to see this as an acceptable, perhaps even a desired, lifestyle. But the development of such norms—norms that are at odds with mainstream expectations—leads to a diminution of social mobility for those growing up in such neighborhoods and imposes costs on the rest of society."

Back of Main Street.

You may argue that the absence of a Little Free Library on my block is not much of a "cost" to the neighborhood at large. You would be right. And yet I feel diminished every time I walk into the study and see the large cardboard box pushed up against the window, the one that releases the fragrance of planed wood if I lift back the flaps and peek at the library, still in its packing material. Giving up on the idea of free books is like giving up on my dream of a home, the one I imagined we were making here. Were my expectations too high?  Almost certainly. But I also believe that the people largely responsible for fostering our town's current crisis and risking its future are people motivated solely by profit, and such motives will not produce an appealing, livable community for the rest of us. I can only hope that the caring friends and neighbors we have come to know in Traveler's Joy, those hard-working well-intentioned people who lend their voices to the town council, who support the public library and the schools, and who are even more dismayed about the negative forces at work in Traveler's Joy than I am, will find a way for the town's rosier prospects to prevail.

For the time being, however, the library stays packed up, as do our plans for improvements to the house and garden. We are waiting to see if we can weather this storm.

*The name of my town, its people, its streets and its former newspaper have been changed.