Why My Job Is Important

Stories like these make me ache. And they're all-too-common. Cities decide that they'd like a better (wealthier) class of people than the older, poorer, or darker-skinned folks that currently occupy some of their neighborhoods, so the cities take by force homes that weren't for sale, caring not at all what happens to the displaced residents as long as they're not delaying construction on the new development. We've failed as a country if we can allow situations like the one described below.


War hero who battled Nazis fights for his home
Wednesday, December 7, 2005
By JEFFREY PAGE BERGEN RECORD

You have to admire people like Johnnie Stevens, a man who decided he would not back down when the government came calling to say it wanted - coveted is more like it - his house in Carteret.

Why should he give the old place up? He has lived in Carteret for the last 50 years, has been in his home for the last 12. This guy is no Johnnie-come-lately to Carteret. Nor is he a grumpy old misanthrope telling Carteret to go to hell. In fact, in a way he is Carteret. He's well-liked around town. He has been a football coach, and the borough even named a day care center in his honor.

So why should this old sick war hero be forced out of his home in order to allow the borough to take possession and then deed the property to a developer who will turn around and build luxury condos and shops? They call it redevelopment. You would not be over-dramatizing it if you just cut to the chase and called it a travesty.

Stevens is 85. During World War II, he won three Purple Hearts and two Bronze Stars for his exploits as a member of the 761st Tank Battalion, the renowned all-black unit that stormed across Europe after D-Day under George Patton. He was there when the 761st liberated some of the death camps. After the war Stevens made a life for himself in Carteret. He drove buses.
Now he is sick, diagnosed with lung cancer and living with an oxygen tank. His doctors give him two more years, tops. His wife is 80. She has cancer, too.

The Stevenses are some of the people being hassled by local governments everywhere that want to seize their homes and turn them over to builders who will jazz up the neighborhood with some apartments there, some fancy shops here, and high sale prices all over. This is the kind of seizure no one thought possible. Sure, the government always had the right of eminent domain. It could take a property for use by the public. For example, your home could be taken, leveled, and the property used to build, say, a new library or a new ambulance building. But lose your place so some rich people with no place to go can have a place to live in your town? Who thought that could happen?