“The trouble with this country is that there are too many illiterate and lazy people here. ... Has anybody heard of working hard to get somewhere? I am so sick and tired of feeling sorry for the poor people.”

        Here's another e-mail reply to my Sunday column on the “projects” in English Woods:

        “I've become concerned for your sanity. Are you insinuating that taxpayers haven't done enough for the unwashed class of people who sponge off of all taxpayers? ... What a plan to promote harmony — shaft the taxpayer some more so the welfare queens can live in a new house, next to people who sweated to earn a new house.”

        It's an opinion as old and weathered as the projects. It sits like a half-buried boulder on the site where new public housing should be built. And here's a surprise: People who have lived in the projects say there are some veins of truth in that stone.

"Ghetto mentality'

               Diana, who lived in English Woods for five years, almost next door to the unit I visited and wrote about, said there is a phrase “in the black community, "ghetto mentality.' It's not that they don't want something better, they just don't know anything else.”

        “There are generations there, from grandmothers to grandchildren, and they just keep having babies and never go anywhere.”

        Diana didn't want me to use her last name because she has made it out. She left behind the landscape of despair, wife beatings, crime, sadness, crack houses and the trap of “dope and bad men.”

        “There were lean days and unhappy days, don't let me kid you. There were days when I thought, "Oh, Lord, these look like Army barracks.' There were days when I didn't want to walk to the store and walk by all the drug dealers.”

        But she refused to let it steal her hope. “I worked and I saved a little. I've been a cashier all my life. Nothing high paying. I didn't graduate.”

        Now she has a nice home far away from English Woods. And her daughter is going to college.

        Diana is the single mother we should keep in mind. She's the reason English Woods should be bulldozed and replaced with market-rate homes and new public housing that families can rent and work to someday own.

        Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority Executive Director Don Troendle says that's the key: the dream of ownership. Working neighbors don't tolerate parties until 3 a.m., he said. Tenants who get out of line are evicted immediately. Zero tolerance, infinite rewards.

Three wishes

               Lynne Geddes has worked with families in the projects for 30 years as a teacher in Cincinnati Public Schools.

        She wrote, “On my last visit to Millvale, I was working in a first-grade classroom, helping with a writing assignment. The assignment was, "If you had three wishes, what would you wish for?' Two little girls wished for a house and one of them wanted a room of her own and one for her baby brother. Another child wrote about the food he would like to eat. These are not the things that the average 7-year-old wishes for. Everyone wants a nice place to live and the white middle class forgets that.”

        The truth is not black and white. Drug pushers and thugs who poison the projects with fear don't deserve a fresh start.

        But people like Diana, and their children, do.

        E-mail pbronson@enquirer.com. or call 768-8301.
       

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