Bushvilles

Today I rode my bike on South Platte River trail. Starting at my house in West Highlands, I zoomed down the hill to the river at 20th Street, and road northward to where the trail currently ends, at 104th Avenue (at approximately Quebec Street if it went through, which it doesn't). It's September, and I love this month like no other--the sky was a brilliant blue, and (before noon at least) the temperature was just right. The lower angle of the sun we're getting now meant that much of the trail was shaded by the still-green trees, and the contrast between shade and light is especially wonderful right now.

On the way, not long after I started, I came across a community of people living on the banks of the river. This is nothing new, of course. In the 1930s, as my former professor Thomas J. Noel (Dr. Denver in the Rocky Mountain News) is fond of pointing out, the "Platte River Bottoms" were home to thriving shantytowns--Hoovervilles. Every major city had them. More recently, in the early 1990s, the administration of Wellington E. Webb forced the people living near the river between 16th and 20th Streets to move--the city was going to build a park (Commons), and they'd have to find somewhere else to call "home." The new townhomes recently built along Little Raven facing the new park have some of the highest per-square-foot values of any residential property in Denver, and penthouse lofts at 16th and Little Raven sell in the seven-figures. They're elegant examples of late-Modernist architecture, occupied by wealthy empty nesters or credit card-maxed trust fund babies.

What's not so elegant are the campsites further downstream. These are past Commons and City of Cuernavaca Parks, close to where the river skirts Brighton Boulevard on its way to the Pepsi Cola bottling plant and the Coliseum. The people living here can fill a Kmart cart with all of their possessions. They use the river for bathing, and spend their days sitting on benches along the bike trail; these benches were installed in the 1970s when the trail was first built, and the city still maintains them.

But what the city does not do is house them--although His Honor the Brewmeister has some sort of elaborate plan.

Instead, Denver (the greater Denver area, that is) houses the residents of the poorer neighborhoods of New Orleans. There was an empty barracks or dormitory at the former Lowry Air Force Base--a dorm that local homeless service agencies have not been able to get their hands on--and on Monday night they came on a Frontier jet and got housed.

The victims of Katrina need to be housed, of course. To do anything else would not be humanitarian--it would make those who don't like America or Americans right. And while I don't begrudge their presence at Lowry at all, I have to wonder, like Matt wonders, why it is that we can do this for those people while ignoring the needs of others who, just like Katrina victims, are homeless through no fault of their own (I don't mean just the river people; there are many officially homeless people living in temporary housing--motels along East and West Colfax, etc.)

The answer, as far as I'm concerned: we're housing Katrina victims not only out of the goodness of our hearts (there is some of that, to be sure), but because their sudden un-housing was so violent and dramatic. It was all over all media since the 29th of August, and becuase it was so ubiquitous a story, people acted. They don't act to house the residents of the South Platte River Trail (I should mention that I saw more people on my way home, living on the Clear Creek Trail near where it passes under York Street), because that's not sexy.

But beyond the drama of Katrina, there's yet another, more important reason. People have poured out their hearts and their wallets over the past 12 days because it makes us feel good about ourselves. To put it into a tiny little word: it's ego. This is not about them--the poor, under-educated Black people of what is, after all, mostly just another vacation destination for most people--it's about us.

Am I being unfair on upstanding, upscale white Americans? Maybe, but think about this the next time you give a dollar to a cardboard sign-holding person on the corner of Speer Blvd. and Auraria Parkway. Who are you really helping--him or you?