Having a Dream in Goshen
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union HAVING A DREAM IN GOSHEN BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS A man builds a fine house, and now he has a master and a task for life; he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it...
...I had called on her then in her one-room shack and had stood just inside the doorway...
...Subsequent studies of self-help households, including Goshen's, found a basketful of other happy consequences: the children's school grades improved...
...It was both a last-ditch hope and a powerful act of faith...
...As a freelance novice back then, I was lucky enough to cover the Goshen experiment...
...In 1970 one-acre lots could be bought for as little as $ 1,000...
...Under Lyndon B. Johnson the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) entered the self-help picture, supplying technical assistance dollars to nonprofit sponsors and long-term, lowinterest mortgages to rural families...
...It'slikethatwhenl'm big...
...A short while ago, I visited one of the surviving programs, a self-help project that struggles for every breath...
...asked Jesse Ortega, whose family was one ofthe original Goshen six...
...Back in California's San Joaquin Valley, a new organization inherited the Goshen legacy...
...It was exactly as Emerson had prophesied: "A man builds a home, and now he has a master and a task for life...
...But most of the farmers have sold their land to people who work in Washington or Baltimore...
...Atfirst," she said, "I didn't think it was possible...
...the parents got better jobs...
...It won't be my fault, Tino...
...Self-help housing seemed an ideal way to aid them, a perfect blend of two American traditions: puritanism (the sweat) and generosity (the subsidy...
...Two years later I returned to see how the Goshen six were getting along...
...One of those poems featured Jesse and Tino Ortega: Tino, wake up...
...and, naturally, the families stayed put—their days of transiency were over...
...Here is part of what I wrote: "One dusty August I visited a Goshen housewife whom I had met two years before, just after she and her husband had joined a self-help group...
...They aren't able to build more than a handful of houses each year...
...It's mainly a bedroom community now...
...Those were heady times...
...and the snakes...
...They were betting that "sweat equity" could do for them what cash routinely did for their more affluent neighbors...
...Doyou want a snake to bite me, Tino...
...You see what I go through every night, Every time I have to...
...He and the Council have labored steadfastly on behalf of the poor in their area...
...All the pieces are in place," Marshall concedes...
...That's the good news...
...Ralph Waldo Emerson In 1962 some enterprising Quakers in Goshen, California brought together six farmworker families, all of whom lived in shacks unfit for human habitation, and showed them a better way...
...I had left quickly...
...The Goshen dream triggered a small self-help housing explosion throughout rural America, one that still faintly reverberates today...
...mmmmmm Don't go to sleep...
...In fact, SHE'S total probably accounts for two-thirds of all the selfhelp houses ever built in America...
...It was like a dream, and for an hour we sat in her bright living room, sharing it...
...The gentrification has caused some headaches for self-help housing...
...The need is there and so is the know-how...
...It'snotfair...
...Come in and see now...
...The way was called self-help housing, a technique that had been successfully applied in many parts of the Third World but had rarely been used in the United States...
...The bad news is that elsewhere in the nation the selfhelp output has been considerably less impressive...
...currently they cost upwards of $30,000 apiece...
...I'mbig, Tino...
...My guide was Mike McCauley, ahousing expert with the Southern Maryland Tri-County Community Action Council...
...Moreover, those blessings turned out to be only half the story...
...The small, $8,000 redwood houses took nearly three years to complete, a good deal longer than anyone had expected...
...Even the Bureau of Indian Affairs, not generally known for its progressive instincts, launched a "mutual help" program, declaring that itwouldbuild50,000houses on 100 different reservations...
...But Tino said, 'No.Gotothemeetings...
...Then, for the first time in their difficult lives, they basked in such ordinary domestic comforts as indoor plumbing, central heating and watertight roofs...
...That's what keeps us going...
...You might say it's on a respirator...
...A child was playing with beer cans on the floor, while she sat listless and sullen on the unmade bed, not wanting me there...
...Congress has been unwilling to pull the plug...
...You came to the other place...
...Getup, Tino...
...McCauley pointed to a hand pump in front of one of the shacks...
...That's the community's sole water supply," he said...
...I even wrote some poems about shack-life, or life before indoor plumbing...
...In the face of White House hostility, Congress has managed to keep the program barely alive...
...Yet in two decades they have managed to build only 250 self-help houses, or about 12 houses per year...
...Wouldn't they be a whole lot better off paying the mortgage on a decent house, something they could own...
...Farmers Home funds are strictly limited...
...It never reached the first 500...
...Everyone has to haul water from that pump...
...I will build youahouse.' Hereallymeant it...
...This part of Maryland used to be all tobacco country," McCauley told me as we drove along route 231...
...As one participant commented, "I'mnotleavingthisplace.Myblood is in the rafters...
...Its headquarters are located in Charles County, Maryland, just 36 miles from the White House...
...There seems to be a tacit quota on the number of self-help houses FmHA is willing to finance...
...Again...
...People pay as much as $400 a month to live in a place like this...
...I'll die...
...But ultimately the families did win their bet...
...People did not shrink from the possibility of building a Great Society in which the poor might get a decent break...
...What's lacking is a federal commitment...
...She did it last time, Tino...
...It's like a dream...
...Suddenly we were in another country, one filled with jerry-built hovels, outdoor privies and junked automobile carcasses lying in the weeds...
...According to tabulations made in 1987 bytheU.S...
...he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair the rest of his days...
...For the construction foreman, patience was the watchword...
...The remarkable thing about selfhelp," observes Robert Rapoza, a Washington lobbyist for the projects," is that it's still here...
...I have to go out there...
...many of his self-help builders had never before wielded a hammer or saw...
...remember, she said solemnly...
...Tino, there's no moon...
...Ashmrl...
...This time, as I knocked on the door of their new, three-bedroom house, I wondered how she would receive me, and when she appeared I started cautiously to introduce myself...
...What...
...But most of them are struggling," he adds...
...The fact is that both the Reagan and Bush Aòministrations have done everything they could to abandon the few self-help housing projects extant...
...And surely the hardships of shack-dwellers loom as large today as they did 30 years ago...
...The other half related to family success...
...Huh...
...Encouraged by a little assistance from the Friends, the Goshen families decided to pool their labors and their dreams...
...For his answer, he turned off the highway and onto a dirt lane called Benedict Road...
...Where's my pan ts...
...Do you want me to die...
...Why not...
...Come with me...
...I asked McCauley if he didn't sometimes feel discouraged, considering how difficult it is in such suburban surroundings to find dollars that could be used to shelter the rural poor...
...Surely by now the partisans of self-help housing have accumulated sufficient technical knowledge...
...Ask Marie...
...These are all rentals," McCauley wenton...
...It calleditselfSelf-Help Enterprises, or SHE for short...
...Department of Housing and Urban Development, the rural population accounts for roughly one-quarter of the national total, yet one-half of the country's substandard housing— i.e., housing that lacks indoor plumbing —continues to be found in rural areas...
...At present, says Robert Marshall, the recently-retired director of SHE, about 60 self-help projects are operating in 24 states...
...We drove past a cluster of expensive looking ranch houses and new subdivisions...
...Over a quarter of a century SHE has become the flagship of self-help housing's ragged armada, sponsoring more than 6,000 new or rehabilitated homes in seven rural counties...
...Marshall, who this year is president of a group known as the National Rural Housing Coalition, actually understates the predicament...
...Who would have believed that we could really own a house like this...
...That's what selfhelp housing is all about...
Vol. 74 • January 1991 • No. 2
