I just want what you have . . . but I don't want to work for it!

The Dallas Housing Authority has almost completed a $4.5 million project reserved for low-income blacks, the Villas at Hillcrest, in an affluent far North Dallas neighborhood. The course of this project has not run smooth. As you may imagine, the people in the area were very much opposed to a housing project near their homes.
(And certainly reserving these townhomes for blacks is discriminatory, but that's another post).

The liberal perspective is that poor people are poor in large part because they are forced to live in blighted areas. My perspective is that areas are blighted because most of the people who live there have no pride, no work ethic, and no ambition -- hence, they are poor! Put another way, the blighted area doesn't make the poor person; the poor person makes the blighted area. So when you plop down a housing project in a nice area, it will, in all probability become blighted itself. But I digress.

James Ragland's column in the July 16 edition of The Dallas Morning News (page 1B) decried efforts by the neighbors of this project to insure that the landscaping fit in with the area. The DHA is proposing xeriscaping (Ragland repeatedly and erroneously refers to it as "zeroscaping" in his column). The rest of the neighborhood has lawns and shrubbery. I believe the neighbors are rightly concerned -- if the DHA doesn't care about the landscaping, what else will they let slide?

But the thing that really caught my eye in this column was one statement. Ragland says, "The bottom line is that these poor black tenants want the same things as their affluent white neighbors: a decent and safe place to live, challenging schools and good neighbors." I guess that's true, but there's one glaring omission in Ragland's statement -- the affluent white neighbors worked and paid for theirs!