East New York's Nehemiah Housing Proving Resilient

Rob, when you have no idea of what you are talking about, please don't speak.

This is a very successful program, as the jscheff, and accompanying articles say. It emerged at a time when the city had totally forgotten about East New York, and poor people in general. Yes, it was set up by a church, and is named for a biblical figure - so what? The fact is that the lots upon which the houses are built were a wasteland. This well run program gave people hope, and more importantly real housing. Whenever I drive over there, I see well kept blocks of suburban type houses, hardly a ghetto. I think that other programs, especially the city, would do well to emulate their model, especially in terms of guidelines for financing and eligibility.

Personally, one of the best parts of this project is that they did it themselves. A church, clergymen and community, minority run and peopled, got it together and helped solve their own problems. Yes, they got help from the city and other sources, of course, but it is not a HUD program or a city handout. The Nehemiah project is the people doing it and running it, VERY SUCCESSFULLY, themselves, in their community. It's been lauded since the beginning and should be a model for low income solutions all over the country. The single family house may not be the best solution for everywhere, including other parts of the city, but the administration and the planning behind the houses is sound and well done, indeed.

Posted by: Montrose Morris at October 20, 2009 10:25 AM

Rob, when I look at an article and the first comment I see is you saying something so unenlightened and uniformed as "the fact that the development is named after some ridiculous biblical character is sketchy as hell", I'm going to say so. You know NOTHING about the project, other than the paragraph written above, and instead of finding out more, you, who can't manage to google the location of a restaurant, are going to pass judgement on the project based solely on your long standing resentment of housing lotteries and low income housing in general. Every time there is a piece on some kind of housing lottery, or program that gets people into housing, you have issues with it, and always insinuate that they are fixed or their is fraud. There has never been any accusations of that here, only kudos for an ambitious and successful project.

You will note, that I said "please don't speak", I could have said much worse. If you are entitled to your knee jerk reactionary comments to everything, and you are, then I am entitled to call it uniformed and ignorant. You are capable of great insight sometimes, I wish you would just think of the possibility that there are things out there that you don't know the facts of, and perhaps it's better to either find out, or not say anything.

Posted by: Montrose Morris at October 20, 2009 10:56 AM