When my wife and I first desired to build our home in Hough almost 20 years ago we immediately encountered a cumbersome bureaucratic city hall process for acquiring the land to build on and the requisite permits to accomplish the task. It quite literally was a nightmare.
Later I discovered that the year we built our home, 1,700 other single-family permits were issued in Cleveland, while in Atlanta over 17,000 similar permits were issued in the same year. But the difference was that in Atlanta virtually the entire process could be completed online, whereas in Cleveland, prospective homeowners and their builders were routinely shuttled from pillar to post among a myriad of city departments where the functionaries seem to take delight in making the process as arduous and complicated as possible.
Eventually a very wise and experienced elected city official gave me his take on what the problem was: Some of these city hall employees were simply jealous that my wife and I had the financial wherewithal to build our upscale 3,100 sq. ft. “dream home” so, as the saying goes, “they were putting shit in the game.”
Sadly, some folks at city hall are still “putting shit in the game,” since, as far as I know, jealousy hasn’t gone out of style. It will be with us for as long as there are human beings who are not satisfied with their lot in life. But that shouldn’t preclude them from doing what they get paid to do (which is their goddamn job) and doing it in a competent and effective manner.
Alas, that’s not the case. Where blacks are concerned, roadblocks to progress are part and parcel of the American experience. Since the Emancipation Proclamation (which supposedly freed my ancestors) there has been a concerted effort to stymie black achievement and advancement — and not just in the South and from hood-wearing members of the Ku Klux Klan. No, many whites (and even some blacks) who would take great offense at being accused of underhandedness, engage in those kinds of behaviors because that’s what the culture has inculcated in them. They do it because that’s the way things have always been done.
And they can get diabolically clever. They’ll try to make you think the roadblocks are of your own making. That the reason you can’t make progress on your home building project is you just don’t know what the hell you’re doing. It’s you that are inept, not them. Yeah, right.
They tried that shit with Brenda and me, but due to her education level and years of experience of dealing with bureaucracies, and my doggedness, determination and willingness to become confrontational when necessary, it wasn’t long before we had some city hall folks wearing their asses for hats, and we got our home built.
As Hough is set to begin to develop once again, it appears that with some departments at city hall nothing has changed but the people. The mindset remains the same: Stymie black progress. So once again it appears as if I’m going to have to take the gloves off if I want my community to grow, develop and prosper. If I have to go to war it’s not going to be pretty, and some toes are going to get stomped on in the process, but nothing and no one is going to get in the way of our progress. And I do mean “nothing.”
From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.