Blackout shades
The Mayor’s recently concluded set of Eastside investment summits took place against a virtual backdrop of boarded-up houses and empty lots, the legacy of decades of poverty, discrimination, and absentee landlords. Hundreds, maybe thousands, more buildings in the City’s historically black neighborhoods are in precarious shape, their roofs sagging, porches detached, windows broken.
“It’s old house, old house, empty lot; old house, old house, empty lot,” says Malcolm Monroe, who is fighting the City to save the home his parents built in the ’30s, a single-story woodframe house just north of Nolan and east of New Braunfels. “It was gun boxes — all kinds of wood; wood was hard to get.”
On this street alone, at least two houses have been demolished, and two more are boarded up. The City disputes Monroe’s claim to the house, which was in the name of a brother who died without a will; Assistant City Attorney Savita Rai says Monroe doesn’t deserve the house, in any event, because he hasn’t bothered to work on it since his brother was murdered there in 1997.
http://www.sacurrent.com/news/story.asp?id=70918
Posted by Victoria Bell
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