It Takes a Village

Builder Magazine, 2007

By Pat Curry

I was really supposed to be researching other things at the library tonight, but I got sucked into this beautiful story of idealistic landowning farmers, feisty developers and lots of help from the community. Affordable housing shouldn’t automatically be ugly or less stylish—there’s so much you can do with what you have.

Homes and communities are not like start-ups—I feel there has to be a balancing act so that more cool places like Green Cay Village.

Too many rules would destroy lots of creativity and innovation as well as standard of living, but too few would create a place where someone has to be either really lucky or risk their business to do the right thing.

Green Cay Village works with four preferred lenders, says sales manager Daniel Travis, to help buyers learn about special loan programs that might be available to them. The lenders are trained and certified by the county and state to locate and access state and local grants for down-payment assistance, first-time home buyer programs, a state bond program for affordable housing, and special mortgages for teachers, healthcare professionals, police, and firefighters.

To make sure that the homes would go to working families, Goray put anti-investor restrictions into the sales contract. Unless the buyer has extenuating circumstances, such as a job transfer, the unit can’t be rented out for two years. If it’s sold within a year, 100 percent of the profit goes back to the developer. In the second year, 50 percent of the profit goes back to the developer. After that point, any profits from a sale will be retained by the owner. “Everybody thought we were crazy because the government didn’t make us [restrict investors] and it was not a condition of the sale of the land,” Goray says. “We thought it was the right thing to do.” It proved to be an incredibly valuable policy when the market turned and investors everywhere started dumping properties and walking away from deposits.

“If we sold to investors, we’d be sitting here with 60 percent cancellations, trying to sell in a soft market,” Goray says. “I think we have 5 percent or 6 percent cancellations, due mostly to job transfers. It’s kind of a fun story.”

I think it’s great to have a home and it is part of the American Dream, but considering the cost of mortgages and that skyrocketing home prices are unsustainable, maybe we can modify that dream and make it OK to live in affordable or low-income housing too.

Maybe not everyone was meant to play the stock market in the United States. Maybe a lot of people are doing great things for society by being schoolteachers or low-paid baseball coaches, right?

Jamaica, the birthplace of ska, rude boys and skinheads! 

This  passage from the seminal work The Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks Jr. is true of any large-scale project, programming or not included in the deal. Whoa!

Brooks is amazing with a literary voice that sounds more like a romantic Soviet Union gulag prisoner in Siberia chronicling his life victories and failures than a software programmer at a large corporation. This leads one to beg the question: was the Soviet gulag so radically different mentally from developing software at a large corporation? 

No scene from prehistory is quite so vivid as that of the mortal struggles of great beasts in the tar pits. In the mind’s eye one sees dinosaurs, mammoths, and sabertoothed tigers struggling against the grip of the tar. The fiercer the struggle, the more entangling the tar, and no beast is so strong and skillful but that he ultimately sinks.

Large-system programming has over the past decade been such a tar pit, and many great and powerful beasts have thrashed violently in it. Most have emerged with running systems—few have met goals, schedules and budgets. Large and small, massive or wiry, team after team has become entangled in the tar. No one things seems to cause the difficulty—any particular paw can be pulled away. But the accumulation of simultaneous and interacting factors brings slower and slower motion. Everyone seems to have been surprised by the stickiness of the problem, and it is ahrd to discern the nature of it. But we must try to understand it if we are to solve it.

What a beautiful solution the Delancey Street Foundation offers: by rehabilitating people who have “been at the bottom” and helping them find their own way back, they are creating a wonderful sense of hope. 

It’s pleasantly surprising to find a rehabilitation center set up by people who had once been addicts or convicts themselves. Only someone who’s actually been there can understand the complex emotions and uncertainty the constituents face.

Maybe that’s why the Delancey Street Foundation works.

When we look at the individual stories of the more than 14,000 graduates, the long-term impacts are not only their successful lives, but also the new and exciting lives of their children and grandchildren and the generations to come. The rewards of the struggle for success and the long-term impact of Delancey Street is the broken cycle of poverty, drugs, violence and crime, and a new cycle of learning, caring, economic, personal and family stability for many thousands of families once without hope.

The long-term impact of our work is also realized when Delancey opens a new door through which hundreds more can follow to gain access to opportunity. From the beginning, Delancey has opened many new doors. Like the door that let the first ex-felon be admitted to practice law. Or to serve on a school board. Or to get a real estate license. Or to vote.

I am really not into blindly ignoring that there isn’t a level playing field here in America. It’s very irresponsible for us to label people as bad people when so many of us have had unfair advantages. It’s tragic that the playing field is getting even more uneven year after year in the United States, and worse, that most people don’t even realize this.

Rehabilitation is tough, it doesn’t always work, but it’s the best system there is for crime. Setting people up for failure once they commit their first crime is a very, very unhealthy way to deal with other human beings.

We cannot throw people away. Thanks to the Delancey Street Foundation for doing such great work. 

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