Timothy Birdnow

Given the recent school shooting and calls for banning guns - tools which are morally neutral - rather bthan actually caring about our children and their moral and spiritual development, I thought I'd repost an old essay I wrote about my job in property management. It was heartbreaking; I saw children with no future because nobody cared about them, not their parents nor their schools nor society at large.

https://www.orthodoxytoday.org/blog/2008/06/the-progressive-road-to-hell/

Here is an early draft:

I work for a large ``scattered site`` property management company in the City of St. Louis, and often visit the sleazy underbelly of the city as part of my duties. (My job is a bit hard to define; I show apartments for lease, I collect rent, I speak with tenants when there are complaints or police problems, I sign up new clients, I check units for maintenance, and I check to see if properties are vacated. This job is not for the meek or squimish; we occasionally find dead bodies in places, we ALWAYS find roaches and spiders, we go into places full of rat and mice droppings, etc. People with Compulsive Disorder need not apply. Although it can be disgusting and aggravating, I generally enjoy it; it is much like being a cop, although less dangerous. I never have the same day twice.

Recently I visited Hell; more specifically, I visited a crack-infested area of north St. Louis. We have a client who purchased his buildings full of people, and who found that he had been scammed because the previous owner had filled the place with lowlifes from the street so it LOOKED like a full, income producing property. These tenants stole everything that wasn`t nailed down, then left the building in dreadful condition.

Two weeks before my visit, our maintenance staff secured the building with plywood. At that time we had two tenants still living in the upstairs apartments, while the two first floor apartments were vacant. One of the upstairs tenants had returned her keys to our office, and a collegue and I went to check on things.

The building looked long abandoned. Every window on the first floor had been broken out, and all of the back doors were standing open; the vandals had succeeded in cutting through the plywood we had used to secure the doors. They had entered both first floor units, both basement units, and the recently vacated upstairs. There was a huge hole in the side wall of the building where vandals had tunneled through the bricks with the intention of stealing the entire window. (It was obvious that they had thrown the bricks they removed from the wall through the other windows of the building.) Trash and debris was strewn throughout the yard, and the fence had been pulled down.

The basements had been stripped of copper and other hardware.

We went through the vacant units methodically. Inside was pure filth, with trash, dried food, used cotton balls and Q-tips and used condoms on the floors. It was obvious that people were using drugs and prostituting in this horrible place. (I cannot, in my wildest dreams, imagine performing a sex act inside this disease infested place!) Walls were down to bare studs in spots, or had food or human discharge on them. I feared sticking myself with a used needle accidentally.

Fortunately, since there was no heat and the food supply was exhausted, we weren`t met by an army of bugs, as is common. (Have you ever seen a living carpet? It looks like a ragged brown carpet until you see it move!)

We went upstairs into the vacated apartment and found an electric heater running at the head of a bed, and realized that a squatter had just fled through the front door while we were coming up the back stairwell. This place was as trashed and filthy as the others, yet someone was living here! We went down the front and around to the back where our ``tenant`` was waiting for us to leave. He tried to claim that he had come to help the former tenant move, and we chased him away. Of course, he would come back as soon as we left.

While we were talking to our squatter, the one remaining tenant came down to talk to us. She had been living in this apartment with no heat, since she couldn`t pay her gas bill. She had two school-aged children, who are never in school whenever we go to this property, living in this hell-hole. Since the theft of her water lines (they steal them to for copper) she had been without any water, and hadn`t bothered to call this in to the office. They had continued to use the toilet, and the feces had formed a cone which rose above the toilet seat, forcing them to defecate standing up. When they grew thirsty enough, they walked the two blocks to the nearby gas station and bought a bottle of water. No big deal!

Maintenance came with 30 pieces of plywood and extra-long screws to resecure the place (at the owner`s expense) but it won`t be long before they have to head back there to do it all again. We decided to give this tenant notice to vacate, and my co-worker was going to contact family services, because those children were being raised like animals.

The plight of those kids really struck me; they are the walking dead. The boy was undoubtedly going to join a gang in a couple of years and would either be dead on in prison by the time he was 17. The girl would probably become a drug addict (as I`m sure is true of her mother) and would go into the family prostitution business. She would probably die of some easily treated illness after first spitting out a couple of children of her own, thus perpetuating the cycle. I see nothing but coffins in their near futures.

This is what Liberal policies and good intentions have wrought! (What is paved with good intentions?) Feminism, welfare, and the sexual revolution, along with the explosion of narcotics, have completely destroyed the black family. This woman had a father, who was probably a dope-fiend who lived on welfare. In another time, he would have been poor and uneducated, but would have worked and stayed around to care for his children. Thanks to the compassion of the left, he was freed of any responsibility and could destroy himself and everyone around him at his leisure. Because more children mean more government largesse, women in the ghetto become baby factories, spitting out more hopeless welfare recipients and keeping our prisons functioning at peak capacity.

Those children deserve better. They deserve an education, a clean home, hope. The nanny state steals hope. It offers the easy way to live at the expense of real pride and any upward mobility. Sloth is the hallmark of the welfare state, and sloth leads to ignorance and despair.

There is absolutely no reason for a place like this to exist. This building and this family are a monument to the insanity that is Liberalism. Without decades of leftist social experimentation this place would never have been.

But Liberals meant well, they are always well intentioned.

We know what is paved with those intentions; I just made a visit to that place.




The New Hell

Meet the New Hell, same as the old Hell!

This piece will be something of a reprisal of ``The Road to Hell``; I visited another lost place, a hell-hole of filth and decay in the midst of plenty, and I thought I should share it with you, my loyal readers. It would be wise for you to wait at least two hours after eating before plunging into this.

For new readers of Birdblog, my day job is with a ``scattered site`` property management company. It is called scattered site because we manage small buildings-even single family homes-in all areas and price ranges, and that includes some of the worst neighborhoods in the St. Louis Metropolitan area. I often visit the seemiest of seamy underbellies, and get to see up close and personal those forsaken places which ordinary Americans know are there but have never seen. In a way, I am a modern Marco Polo, or a Coronado seeking the Lost Cities of Cibolo (except my lost cities are most definitely not paved with gold.) I`ve seen some of the worst places in America.

Dan Quayle said poverty is a matter of a poverty of values, and he is correct in this; the place I visited yesterday bears this out! We had just picked up management on a four-family flat in what had been a tolerably decent part of South St. Louis (St. Louis is like a collection of small towns, or used to be, with very well defined areas.) A year or two ago someone had completely gut-rehabbed this building, and everything that was left was new. The second floor north was in tolerable shape-just some debris, filth, and holes in the walls, but the first floor...

The first floor was a crackhouse. We saw probably 100 pieces of cellophane on the kitchen counter, clearly used to hold crack rocks. There was rotting food on the floors, numerous used condoms (I am always fearful of that), trash, and debris. Someone had dragged tree limbs inside, and was using a cooking pot to burn it in. There were cuts made in the carpet; little squares which could be replaced, the purpose being to hide drugs in case the police made a night bust. The screens in all the windows were cut, offering our ``tenants`` a quick escape hatch. Since the water was off, the crackheads first filled the toilet, then began defecating in the bathtub, filling it halfway full with their excrement. Oh, and they had dismantled the air conditioner units outside to sell for parts.

The south side of the building had tenants, and this was, if anything, even worse! The upstairs tenant`s apartment was filthy and disgusting with holes in the walls and debris strewn throughout, but was not completely uninhabitable. They had probably 15 people crammed into a three bedroom apartment, and hadn`t paid rent since last July, but they represented our ``good tenant``. The first floor was equally overcrowded, but it was far more foul; they left spilled food lay where it fell, one had to find a trail through the buildup of trash and debris in every room, bugs and mice were everywhere-including at least four of them frolicking among the children`s toys in plain site. The sewer had backed up (because someone had filled the sewer clean out in the yard with trash) and they had taken no steps to have this addressed, so there was a sewage backup in the basement at least a foot deep and the outhouse smell inside the apartment was overpowering. The tenants admitted it had been like that for a while...

(One of the things I fear is bringing home a `souvenir` from one of these places-roaches or other bugs, or some horrible disease on the soles of my shoes. I fear poking myself with a needle. I fear catching malaria, or lames Disease...)

Mind you, this building had been rehabbed less than two years ago. The investors, fooled by late night informercials and a booming rental market, thought they could sink large amounts of money into a neighborhoods that did not justify the investment, and they probably tried to manage it themselves. You have to know what you are doing; even professionals have trouble when a neighborhood changes for the worse. These owner probably could not find qualifiable tenants, and they became desperate to put bodies into their building, so took in the first people who brought the cash. That is the fastest route to bankruptcy in the rental market!

My associate is from a family of police officers, and his brother was involved in a fatal shooting of a 17 year old gang member not two blocks from this building. The youths had been congregating at a vacant building, obviously dealing drugs. The officers approached them and they ran. They were able to cut one of the scoundrels off, and he pulled a gun out and fired at them, so they drew their revolvers and, unfortunately, killed him. Of course, there was a major inquest, but the evidence was clear that the boy had shot at them first and they were completely justified in using lethal force.

This neighborhood had been rough, but had not been like THAT! The closing of McCree Town by the City to proceed with redevelopment scattered the criminals in that worst-of-neighborhoods to the four winds (thank you, Mayor Slay!) and a good many settled in this area called ``Dutchtown`` (since it had been a German neighborhood years before-my own grandmother had lived there.) It has become a hellhole on the par with the neighborhoods on the north side of St. Louis of which I have spoken in the past.

At least the children in this building attended school. Also, there were clearly good people on this block, people who simply could not afford to move away yet. I imagine that will change in the near future.

I had to stand guard while our maintenance department boarded up the vacant apartments and the basement. Fortunately, the copper pipes in the basement had been replaced with plastic, so we didn`t have to replumb the property. Maintenance had to secure every conceivable opening, because the crackheads would, like rats or cockroaches, find a way in if you left so much as a crack. (I`ve seen them tunnel through brick walls!) People kept walking by our vehicles and looking to see what would be worth stealing all the while; if I hadn`t been on guard we would have had our trucks broken into.

It will take at least 6 months to straighten this building out, and it will cost the owners a fortune to accomplish it. We will have to evict these barbarians from the landlord`s little fiefdom, and keep them away until we can make the necessary repairs and find new occupants. It will be a long, hard slog, and it may not be possible at all!

It really is hard to believe that such places exist, and not but a couple of miles from my own home. We had a tenant who represented a sizable portion of our people who actually had a fairly popular cable television show ``The Low Life`` in which he explored the seamy underbelly of St. Louis-including the lives of prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, transvestite etc. He was a cockroach of a man, a guy who enjoyed dwelling among the filth and decay of modern society. I suspect people didn`t believe his tales of disgust and rot, yet I see it on a regular basis. (Oh, the man died shortly after moving out of our property.)

Once again, I blame the kind-hearted, soft-headed approach of Liberalism; their belief in the inherent goodness of Man means that they think you can take people who are unable or unwilling to care for themselves and their families and throw them into the general public, expecting them to succeed. They believe that giving them a clean home and helping them pay bills will turn them around, but it is not the case. The lowest drag down, not the other way around; a neighborhood collapses when you put drug dealers, prostitutes, and asundry criminals in with decent people. Welfare has created enormous families such as the ones overoccupying our property, and the kids join gangs as a matter of course. A small problem becomes a huge one thanks to Liberal do-gooder meddling.

At any rate, I hope you all kept your breakfast down after reading this. I can give a mental picture to you, but the reality is much, uh, graphic-especially the smells of these places. I can`t begin to describe it! It`s important for everyone to know about these places, about the existence of such despair and squalor here in the land of plenty. The children crammed in among the mice and roaches didn`t ask to be born, didn`t ask to suffer from ignorance, criminality, and hopelessness as they have been sentenced to do. Something must be done for them, but that something cannot be the same failed policies which created these hell-holes in the first place. We have to find a new way.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 12:08 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 2755 words, total size 16 kb.