investment Archives - Community Engagement Learning ExchangeCommunity Engagement Learning Exchange

Weather disasters are ripping through communities in North Carolina and all over the world, dislocating people and devastating buildings and forests and farms. Each time, after the emergency response to dangers of injury and contamination and emotional trauma, the community is changed. Sometimes what is left is neglect and abandonment, so that unhealthy conditions become worse. Sometimes what happens is gentrification, so that dislocated residents cannot afford to come back to trendy buildings. But sometimes it can be community leadership, so that neighborhoods can rise stronger and healthier than before. This is the story of strong community and healthy housing six months after tornadoes shredded a path through east Greensboro.

Would you tell your children there is no food because you gave all your money to the slumlord? Or would you buy groceries and risk another eviction, knowing that each time the money doesn’t stretch far enough to pay the full rent, that it is harder and harder to get housing?

That is the agonizing dilemma of thousands of mothers and fathers and grandparents raising grandchildren as they experience the “persistent shortage of safe affordable housing”. Eviction, if they don’t give every penny to the landlord. Homelessness, because they can’t find anything else when wages are low and rents are rising and eviction records are counted against them. Plus, landlords may not want families with children; that is illegal discrimination but common practice. Substandard, because that may be all someone will finally agree to rent to them.

If our community had more housing, in decent condition, with rents affordable for families, then children could eat and not change schools four times a year and not go to the hospital in asthma crisis. And parents could smile instead of being depressed and stressed as they have to choose food OR roof OR health but not all three.