Yesterday beat up my psyche.
What do you do about people who actively contribute to their own squalor?'>
We had a service project yesterday at Westway, that little neighborhood in Federal Way that used to be ruled by a full-fledged slum lord before Monda ran him off.
Habitat for Humanity has been working with several homeowners there for the last five years or so, and in correlation, so has AmeriCorps. There's this one woman's house that we worked on last year, and earlier this year, and then again today.
We took out a bunch of trees and random crap (old moldy dog- and play-houses, rotten toys, rotten apples, trash) the past two times. This time, a bunch of us helped move her a few blocks away into a temporary housing unit so that her house could be repaired. They're going to completely replace her roof and floors and maybe some other stuff.
So some of us are helping get the new place ready, which didn't really require much since it's been redone with all new appliances and countertops and carpet etc. Soon truckloads of stuff started arriving, and we started unloading and putting it away.
Now, some of this stuff is perfectly reasonable and in moderately good condition, like the bedroom furnitute. But most of it smelled strongly of cat (hair and dander and probably old, not-quite-cleaned away urine), was covered in cat hair, and in bad repair. And that's just the other furniture. We have boxes and boxes and BOXES of random crap to move in, and I do mean junk. Utter junk.
But it wasn't really bad until I went back to the old place to help load up there. You could smell the eau de cat from outside the house. The floors were covered in trash and random toys, the kitchen was a horror that even some of my previous housemates would find disgusting, and the whole thing was filled with junk.
Now. I understand that this woman did not have the money or time or skills to repair her roof or floors herself. That sucks, and I'm glad she's getting them repaired. Nobody deserves to live in a leaky house.
But the way she lives...it's not only disgusting, it's unhealthy, and it is her fault. She's going to get a shiny, newly-renovated house in about three months, and she's going to fill that one with junk and trash and cat piss. It's just fucking depressing.
You can teach kids important skills and fix people's houses for them, but they're still free to fuck themselves over.
Also depressing is that the new rowhouse we moved her into, which has about the same square footage as our current apartment, cost $150,000. Let me reiterate: a tiny rowhouse in an ex-slum cost $150,000.