Three Coasts

I sit on my neighborhood board. The neighborhood is hard to describe briefly. We have a business district, mostly restaurants and boutiques, a public high school, a grade school, numerous churches, and a smattering of city buildings. Our housing stock is old, mostly from before 1910. Some houses are large and beautiful, but most are dilapidated and full of lead paint. Mine, for instance, falls between those two extremes: large, at one time beautiful, and until recently, full of lead paint. I think I could describe the porch as dilapidated.

I’m the secretary on this board. I thought this meant keeping some notes, toting around my husband’s laptop, and sending email messages to other board members, signing off, “respectfully submitted.” But no. It is all that, but it has turned out to be much more. There’s a monthly meeting, another monthly general meeting, decisions to be made, votes about development, extra “emergency” board meetings to attend, and the mail. I have to get the mail. Actually, I don’t get the mail. I don’t have a key to the box. Larry has the key. Larry lives down the street and sits on the board as a representative from a housing corporation. He was bequeathed the key during some past administration, and now it is tradition that Larry goes to the post office, picks up the mail, and gives it to the secretary. Then it is my job to figure out who should get what. Urgent notices from the state, addressed to former presidents from 3 or 4 years ago, are mixed in with junk and bills and payments for ads in our newsletter. Some mail is left in mailboxes—but only after the US Mail has been delivered. Our treasurer wants me to slip his mail between his screen door and front door. The charitable outreach committee head, a Catholic nun who goes by the moniker “Carla Mae,” has me put the mail in a plastic grocery sack and hang it on the door of an apartment building 5 blocks from my house. I don’t even know exactly if that’s where she lives or if that’s just where she picks up her mail.

I’ve been on the board for several months. Nothing spectacular has happened, really. We had a spirit-crushing holiday party. We voted down a snow cone stand that wanted to open in an empty lot near the busiest street in our area. We actually say no quite a bit. No to developers, no to changes in liquor licenses or permits. I’m not even certain if our vote matters to the bureaucratically named Board of Adjustment, but some matters seem to go our way. Others are pet projects of the aldermen and we essentially are silenced.

One of these aldermen—our neighborhood is at the crossroads of 4 wards--asked our board to hold one of those emergency meetings this week, to debate and present a letter to him, either for or against, a health clinic that wants to move to our neighborhood.

This health clinic is expanding. They are currently in a strip mall north of us, on a very busy street with high rise apartment buildings and hospitals nearby. They don’t have any residential neighbors to speak of. They are successful, according to their business director who spoke to our regular board meeting for far too long last month. Financially sound, wanting to expand. Tricky thing is, they want to move to an old glass factory at the eastern edge of our neighborhood. The building sits on a corner on a street that is in transition from boarded up houses and rentals to developments of condos and storefronts. In a few years, if the housing bubble doesn’t totally burst here, it should be a nice residential area with corner stores. It’s not on a bus line and it’s not on a way to anywhere except to people’s homes.

It’s a pediatric health clinic and dental clinic. It is a “free” clinic, with the clientele primarily uninsured or carrying Medicaid cards. Medicaid dental clinics, we are told, are so rare that they draw from all the way out to Sullivan, Missouri. Sullivan is out near where my family camps, it’s that far away.

After the extensive presentation by the business director last month, during which questions like “how many dental chairs will you have?” were answered with lectures on the history of iron smelting and its link to modern dental practice, the board went on to other business. It wasn’t technically in our neighborhood, and we didn’t know if we even needed to say anything about it. We went on to decline to support the local grocery store’s desire to sell 40-ounce beer. Then last week the alderman told us he’d really like our input.

Emails started to fly fast. Lots of “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) feelings mixed with guilt because, frankly, we’re an upper middle class board, and this clinic would definitely be on the edge of our neighborhood with the old housing stock, mostly rentals, some board-ups, more poverty than we’d like to admit. Our zip code has one of the highest rates of childhood lead poisoning in the nation, and except briefly at my house, it isn’t happening on my street. It’s happening in the area around where this clinic wants to move. It is likely that people in my area go to the current location and would be served by the new one.

The more emails I read, the more I felt like we were making decisions in the dark, out of fear of the “other”—whether that other be poor, uninsured, black, not from our street, not from our child’s classroom. Surely we couldn’t make our decision on whether to support this clinic based on either racism (or classism) or guilt about appearing racist. So when my husband got home that afternoon, I took off for the current clinic.

Growing up, I spent a fair amount of time in county health clinics. I had a regular pediatrician, but immunizations often happened at this or that clinic. I’d recently taken my sick older daughter to a clinic down in Houston while staying with my brother. All of my experiences rolled up into on amalgam went like this: institutional, rude, smelling of bleach or urine, and sick people resting in molded plastic chairs despairing of the hope of ever being seen by a doctor.

The clinic I walked into was, frankly, as nice as my daughters’ pediatrician’s office. In fact, when I was pregnant with my first, I had vetoed offices that weren’t as nice as this. The staff was friendly. They introduced me to the nursing director, who told me during our tour that she brings her own children there. She took me around and gave me good answers to my questions. Perhaps it was all propaganda. I left there, though, with the conviction that I would support this clinic’s expansion to our neighborhood, that even if I had to stand alone and write my own letter as an individual, I would do it.

I arrived early to the emergency meeting. We chatted pleasantly, the 7 of us, and then got down to business. I showed my hand early: “I’ve been to the clinic and it’s a nice place.” I expected to get the kind of dismissive comments I’d read earlier in emails: “Would you take your kids there?” or “What if it moved in down the street from you?” I was ready for hand-to-hand combat on these issues.

Instead, another board member had also visited the clinic. Someone had printed out a report about the lack of good dental care for Medicaid recipients in our area. Another member had done some detective work about the clinic’s not-for-profit status and found them to be on the up and up. It became clear that many of the anti-clinic voices from the neighborhood came from developers and investors, not from residents. A free clinic across the street from their projects would be detrimental. Or so they thought.

In the end, after almost 2 hours of presenting our gifts of facts and clarifications, we voted to support the clinic. We did have reservations—traffic, noise, lighting, signage, and other details needed to be addressed. But I had to laugh at myself as I left. I’d come ready for a fight, ready to resign in protest if the opportunity presented itself, and instead got board member stone soup. I think we were all afraid to support it alone, but we each came ready to make that leap armed with information.

Coming soon: yet more meetings. Too many meetings. I can’t keep getting this worked up about them. Unfortunately, I find that this is the only way I can manage to engage in society. I spent 4 years as a new mom, a self-indulgent hermit withdrawn from community life, and now I’m in danger of becoming the topic of a self-help book. Alas.