Trading a Shack for a Subdivision

CRENSHAW, Miss. —  “The Congress hereby declares that the general welfare and security of the Nation and the health and living standards of its people require . . . the realization as soon as feasible of the goal of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family . . .”

--Federal Housing Act of 1949

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The house is crumbling. To call it a house, though, would be to stretch the definition. The place where Monroe and Katherine Presley raised their 10 children is a shack at best, a rickety patchwork of wood planks and chicken wire along a dirt road that has no name.

There is a porch--a few rotted boards jutting out at odd angles--and an awning propped up by crooked 2-by-4s. The door is falling off its hinges; a sheet of plastic makes a lame attempt to keep out the wind. Water gushes through the roof when it rains. Inside, there are two tiny rooms and a kitchen, but no bathroom. There is no indoor plumbing.

Katherine always prayed that God would find a way to deliver her family from this place. Now deliverance, for the Presleys and 19 other poor black families in this little Mississippi Delta town, has finally arrived in the unlikely form of a school bus driver cum politician named Robert Avant.

Today, thanks to Avant, seven brick houses--the beginnings of a 20-home subdivision--rise from a cotton field in Crenshaw. Pipes are being laid, wires for electricity installed. Soon the Presleys will know the whoosh of flush toilets and the squish of carpet underneath bare feet. At 55, Monroe Presley, a son of sharecroppers who has toiled in fields and factories his whole life, will own a home.

“The Lord said he wouldn’t put no more on us than we could bear,” Katherine says, “and he kept his word.”

The story of how a school bus driver stitched together a $1.2-million subdivision for the poor is at once heartbreaking and remarkable--a triumph over both racism and poverty. But Avant, who holds down a second job as county supervisor, does not claim all the credit. He couldn’t have done it without low-interest loans from the federal government. And now the loan money is dwindling, slashed by Congress last year as it tried desperately to balance the federal budget.

So it is with countless government programs that, like rural housing loans, have quietly touched and sometimes transformed the lives of ordinary Americans.

In the peculiar lingo of Washington, these programs constitute “non-defense discretionary spending.” They are a scattered collection of little initiatives--from community development to highway maintenance, toxic waste cleanup to space exploration--often with weak constituencies. And when the budget ax falls, they are the first to get whacked.

Defense will always retain a big chunk of the budget pie. The mega-entitlements--Social Security, Medicare and the like--benefit millions, which enables them to keep the budget-cutters at bay. That leaves non-defense discretionary spending to rid the national checkbook of its red ink.

Robert D. Reischauer, a former Congressional Budget Office director, estimates that the budget-balancing course being followed by Congress and President Clinton will turn back the clock on this spending category to the 1950s, when, for example, there was no interstate highway program, the government scarcely funded health research and federal aid for disadvantaged public school students did not exist.

“Many of these activities would have to be scrapped,” writes Reischauer, now a Brookings Institution fellow. Although he finds that unlikely, supporters of individual programs are braced for the worst.

“Nobody would dare raise their head against affordable housing,” says Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat whose Mississippi Delta district--the second poorest in the nation--encompasses Crenshaw. “But you will raise your head by saying, ‘We need to balance the budget, and this is what it takes.’ ”

Bare Shelter for a Family

Monroe does not begrudge the budget-cutters. “They just don’t know,” he says forgivingly, in the patois of the South, “how they brothers and sisters are living over the hill.”

Life, for the Presleys, is set to the rhythm of the seasons. On sticky summer nights, they retire early, turning out the lights to keep mosquitoes from swarming around the bare bulbs that dangle from their ceiling. On icy winter mornings, they bathe in foot tubs before the open flame of a rickety gas heater. The contrast in temperatures is so stark, Monroe Presley says, that “your skin open up when it hit the cold air.”

There are no closets in the Presley house; clothes hang on a makeshift rack. There is no kitchen table, no kitchen cabinets. Dry goods hang from the ceiling in plastic grocery bags, which helps keep them out of reach of the “unwanted visitors” who scamper through the holes in the floor. When the railroad rumbles past, the whole place shudders as though it is about to collapse.

The Presleys and their children, ages 8 to 22, have called this place home for 21 years. Katherine Presley, 41, has lived half her life here. Privacy is scarce. The couple and four children share a bed and a fold-out cot in the only bedroom. The remaining four (two now live on their own) sleep in what they call the front room, huddled under blankets on couches.

The smell of gas from the heater is overpowering; Katherine jokes that the family heats the heater, not the other way around. The wiring is a spider’s web of extension cords and makeshift outlets--a fire hazard to be sure. When nature calls, there is only a bucket.

For years, until Avant intervened, the Presleys paid $100 a month in rent. They did not move because there was nowhere to go; Katherine says all the available rental properties in Crenshaw were in similar shape, or worse.

The Presleys are not alone in living this way. Nearly half a century after Congress declared its lofty goal of “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family,” housing advocates say that promise is depressingly out of reach.

America’s rural housing crisis is tucked away in corners of the nation that most people will never see--the hollows of Appalachia, the colonias dotting the South Texas border, the farm worker shantytowns in California’s Coachella Valley, just a short drive from the wealthy tourist mecca of Palm Springs.

When Clinton and Congress talk about housing, they inevitably focus on cities. But the situation in rural America is just as dire. There are 2.5 million substandard housing units in rural areas, compared with 2.4 million in cities and 1.2 million in the suburbs, according to the Housing Assistance Council, a Washington-based advocacy group.

As the nation approaches the millennium, 418,000 rural households lack running water. And housing advocates say Clinton’s goal of bringing running water to every home by the turn of the century--the so-called Water 2000 initiative--is not likely to be met.

“Well,” said Clanton Beaman, a longtime housing advocate in Mississippi, when asked about the prospects of Water 2000. “We can always dream.”

A Soggy Cry for Help

It was not the lack of water but rather the abundance of it that brought Avant into the lives of Monroe and Katherine Presley.

“It was raining in the kitchen so bad,” Katherine recalled, “over the stove and the table. I said, ‘Lord, show me somebody I can go to and talk to about helping me.’ I kept on praying, and a voice came to me and said, ‘Go to Avant.’ ”

The Presleys had known Avant for years; long before he was elected to public office he drove their children to school. What they did not know about this roly-poly 46-year-old with the easy smile was his fierce determination. On his jacket he wears a pin his mother gave him of an open Bible bearing the phrase: “I can.”

In 1978, a bridge collapsed underneath Avant’s bus on a remote road. The children were not hurt, but the rear wheels got stuck in a creek and the vehicle had to be hauled out of the muck. Avant complained to the local Board of Supervisors about the condition of the roads. Nothing was done.

It made him so mad, he decided to run for supervisor himself.

There had been no black supervisors in Panola County since Reconstruction. Avant ran as a Democrat; the five board members were Republicans. During the campaign, someone set fire to the lumber Avant was using to build his family a house. An anonymous caller warned him that “we’re not gonna stand for [a black person] running for supervisor in Panola County.”

It took three tries, but in 1988 Avant finally won. He had never been to a supervisors’ meeting. He didn’t even know where the county offices were.

His goal, at first, was to fix the bridge. Within a year that was done. Then he began hammering his fellow board members on two broader themes: water and housing. There was no infrastructure, he told them, to entice developers to build better housing--no sewer systems, no running water.

There was also no political appetite for Avant’s agenda. “Housing,” Avant said, “was not a priority for them. Water was not a priority.”

In 1992, Panola County applied to the federal government to become a Rural Empowerment Zone, a designation that would help the county boost its ailing economy. Avant, sensing an opening, asked the county administrator, David Chandler, to ride with him to Crenshaw to take a firsthand look at poverty.

To say that Crenshaw is off the beaten path is an understatement. Just 900 people live there, 80% of them black. There is not much to the town: a dilapidated main street with a couple of liquor stores, two gas stations, a restaurant and a bank. The only industry is a rubber-hose factory, where Monroe Presley works. Says Bruce Bolen, the local Agriculture Department official supervising Avant: “You don’t go through Crenshaw going to nowhere.”

Although Avant did not know it at the time, he and Chandler, who is white, had much in common. The county administrator grew up poor, the son of sharecroppers, in a house with no indoor plumbing. And he is as fierce a believer in civil rights as a white man in the Delta can be.

Avant took Chandler through the white side of Crenshaw, with its neat clapboard homes and tidy front porches. Then they drove through “the colored side” across the railroad tracks, with its rundown trailers and “shotgun shacks” with three and four cars parked out front--a sign of too many families living in space intended for one.

For Chandler, it was a painful journey to the past. “It put me back to how I was raised.” When he met the Presleys, he said, his heart nearly broke.

‘Sweat Equity’ and a Loan Fund

By this time, Avant had given himself a crash course in the intricacies of the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Service, known until last year as the Farmers Home Administration. Of particular interest was the self-help housing program--a sort of modern barn-raising effort in which low-income people build their own neighborhoods.

Self-help works like this: The government grants money to nonprofit groups, which put “sweat equity” developments together. The prospective homeowners may then use a second program, a loan fund offering mortgages at interest rates as low as 1%.

During the last three decades, the Section 502 Single Family Home Ownership Program--as the loan fund is known--has helped more than 2 million rural Americans buy homes, either on their own or through self-help plans.

Four years ago, when Clinton took office, the taxpayers spent $242 million on Section 502. This year they will spend $83 million. In contrast, the mortgage interest tax deduction, which helps middle-class people buy homes, is projected to cost $53 billion this year.

To stretch its remaining dollars, Congress has increased grant funding for self-help, ensuring that most of the Section 502 loan money is funneled into these developments. But that has shut out people living in areas where there is no organized building activity--people like the Presleys, until Avant came along.

Congress also has shifted from direct loans to loan guarantees: promises to pay back private bank loans if the borrowers default. That has shut out the poorest of the poor, people who don’t have good enough credit to borrow from banks--people like the Presleys, who were once turned down for a bank loan to buy a mobile home.

“For them,” said Rep. Thompson, “the government is the lender of last resort.”

Town Transformed by the ‘Projects’

There is perhaps no more passionate advocate for rural housing in public life than Rep. Thompson. In the last 20 years, his district has been transformed by federal dollars as neat little red-brick houses and apartments have replaced entire communities of shacks.

Thompson’s hometown, Bolton (pop. 500), is one that was brought back to life. Two decades ago, when he was mayor, Thompson persuaded the Farmers Home Administration to finance a 40-unit apartment complex there under a program that, like Section 502, has recently been slashed to one-third its former size.

“We moved people from places that you wouldn’t imagine,” Thompson said. “A lot of them had no running water, holes in the roof, holes in the floor, you name it.”

Of the 40 original families, 17 are still there. Thompson credits these apartments with saving his town, giving people a reason to stay at home instead of moving to the city. In Bolton they call these apartments “the projects,” but there is hardly any similarity with crime-infested urban housing projects.

“When you say projects in rural areas,” the congressman explains, “you are talking about some of the nicest housing in town.”

Building the Foundation

Avant and Chandler thought they had a pretty good shot at persuading the lender of last resort to do for Crenshaw what it had done for Bolton. They did not expect it to take five years.

Their first hurdle was convincing Avant’s fellow board members that it was a good idea. Chandler was the strategy man; he knew enough not to pitch the project as housing for poor black families.

Instead, he dangled dollar signs before the supervisors’ eyes. With 20 homes worth more than $50,000, the development would add more than $1 million to the county tax base. And, he told them, it wouldn’t cost the county a penny. They gave it the green light.

Finding families who were willing to invest their own labor in exchange for a brand-new house was easy. Avant and Chandler took out newspaper ads, and the applicants flowed in like water through the Presleys’ roof.

Getting them qualified for mortgages was another matter. Their credit histories are pockmarked and their checking accounts nonexistent.

The hardest part was finding six acres. Most of the vacant property in Crenshaw is held by white farmers, none of whom, according to Chandler, was particularly enthusiastic about low-income housing. Finally, Avant found one who would sell--at $6,000 an acre, twice the going rate.

But there was a hitch: The houses needed sewers and water, and the cotton field was nowhere near the county system. That meant the Panola board would have to kick in money after all--about $100,000 in materials and labor--to lay the lines. Quietly, Chandler told county workers to do the work.

“You do what you have to do,” he said.

Dreams of a Garden and Sweet Pecan Pie

The mortgages came through last May. Monroe Presley keeps the settlement papers--USDA Promissory Note in the amount of $54,640, final payment to be made June 6, 2029--tucked in an aging metal lockbox. He fondles the documents with a mixture of wistfulness and pride. They make him wish his parents were alive to see their son a landowner. “My mama,” he said, “she never did get a chance to see things change.”

The groundbreaking was June 7, a rainy day in the Delta. The soggy red “gumbo” soil stuck to everybody’s feet. The Panola County supervisors were on hand to stick shovels in the ground and get their pictures in the local paper. Thompson was there to deliver a speech about how tough it is to focus on work and school when you don’t have a clean, dry place to sleep.

For the Presleys and six other families who will be the first to move in, the seven months since have been a blur of late nights and weekends spent unloading trucks, propping up walls and hammering nails into 2-by-4s. They have named the subdivision Renaissance. Avant’s wife picked the name because it means rebirth.

Not just a development but a neighborhood has been built. The Presleys will live next door to Lora Ann Turmin, whose two young sons suffered lead poisoning in the house she lives in now. Jearlean James, whose family has camped with relatives since her house burned down, will live across the way.

Monroe Presley likes to dream of what his new life will be like. He envisions planting a garden--greens and peas, okra and corn. He can see Katherine in the kitchen, with its smooth Formica counter tops and fine oak cabinets, the brass knobs all shiny and bright.

He imagines her fixing a pot of beans and some sweet pecan pie. “She don’t cook enough sweet stuff,” he said. He imagines the children having a clean place to study and himself awakening after “a good night’s rest, where you don’t have to worry about catching rain in pots and pans.”

As for Avant, he was recently elected president of the Panola County Board of Supervisors. He still drives his school bus, and, with each stop, he has a story to tell. This house has a roof that leaks. That one has no running water. As he drives past the Renaissance subdivision, a quiet smile crosses his face. There are just a few finishing touches left--the kitchen linoleum, the bathroom sinks.

Before long, there will be a new stop on his route.