Wednesday, February 27, 2008

The Poor Systematically Being Driven out of Corvallis

I see in the paper today that Hugh White and pals want to build a hotel on 1st and Monroe. I lived on 2nd and Monroe at the Julian hotel, a low income dive, for three years. There were people who wanted that building gone then and would openly call it a "blight", mainly because it housed poor and disabled people.

The roof always had leaks. Several of us called the fire department when the water was leaking down through a hall light fixture, fearing fire. The fire department said the water leaking through a light fixture was not a fire hazard until there was a fire. We felt this response meaned they too hoped the building would burn.

I live in Albany now because I could not find affordable housing in Corvallis, when evicted by my Corvallis slumlady just before Christmas a year ago. I love Corvallis. I lived there for several decades. To be forced out like that, because of Corvallis' affordable housing issues, was very hard.

I am not alone in being forced to leave Corvallis because of few opportunities for housing for very poor people on HUD. I ran into an older women at the Corvallis library at the talk given by former friend Wendy, the author, who asked how I was. I told her how much I missed Corvallis and she said she feared Corvallis would soon be a place where the only the rich could afford to live and where the poor would not be welcome.

That's what got me thinking about this, then I see the Hugh White drool in today's paper, about building a hotel on 1st and Monroe, by the low income hotel, the Julian. I know the two won't mix. So which will go? Not hard to figure that one out.

The takeover of the river front by high enders is just another sign that Corvallis is turning into a gated community of privilege.

I urge all of you riffraff of Albany, like me, former Corvallis residents, to enter richey rich zone often, dressed in the poorest of rags and talking white trash. They wont' be able to tell you outright that you're not welcome in their blessed kingdom, because of white liberal guilt.

When that homeless man was deliberately shot by a frat boy, who tried to hide his crime, lied to police then got only five months for shooting another human being, only myself and another poor person protested this insane sentence outside the courthouse in Corvallis.

The liberals of Corvallis don't care about the poor or about injustice, unless, of course, the perceived injustice is at Guantanamo Bay. The pricing out of the poor in Corvallis creates problems here in Albany, where many of the displaced end up.

I loved living in Corvallis. But I loved the parks. The people there, they're the same as most people everywhere, full of hot air.

2 comments:

  1. It disgusted me when those high rise units were put in a couple of years ago. We already have enough of these high end homes.

    You are correct when you say Corvallis is becoming a rather gated community for the priviledged. We absolutely need more affordable housing and more enforcement by the City to have more HUD-approved housing. There are people who care about this issue. Many of them though are low income! Sometimes it takes being in a situation to become fully aware of it.

    Another way of looking at it is that Corvallis is merely a reflection of the world at large: a place that is becoming the land of the have's and the have not's.

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  2. The have and the have nots. At least I have cats. I am cat rich! I do know a ton of exceedingly interesting people also. I would not trade my cats and the interesting people I've met doing what I do for all the money and high rise fancy dandy condos in the world!

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