Racism or Reality?

Photo mydesert.com

In the Valley, there is a mobile home park nick-named Duroville, where 3-5 thousand residents are housed in 300 mobile homes, some of which are 1 bedroom. Yes, that is correct: 3-5 thousand residents occupy 300 trailers. This community has been the target of the court system for several years as it is not just a health and safety issue, but a quality of life issue. Many, many of the residents are young children, children who should not be living in those conditions in the first place.

This mobile home park has no sanitation facilities; there are literally deep trenches into which the trailer portapotties empty and along which the children play. There is no electricity, save for that which is illegally run from a couple of major power poles to the rabbit hutch of family dwellings. There are few paved streets, no trash pick-up, no public services provided. There are approximately 1500 dogs sharing space with the human population. This is a place no one should call home.

To accommodate the seasonal influx of additional workers, those who rent/own the primary residence have tacked on (literally) wooden structures that serve as additional living space. Thus, one mobile home may be encompassed with wooden structures front, sides, and back to accommodate additional campers, putting all of the residents at risk for a massive fire to decimate the area within minutes if it once begins. There are men, women and children living like rabbits in a hutch, living with the stench of sewer in the streets and drinking tainted water, in conditions that rival the darkest slums of any third world nation.

However, it is home to the residents, a point made vehemently by some who are more offended by the attitude that they live in substandard conditions than they are by living in them! All attempts to literally burn this camp to the ground have been met with charges of racism because it is home primarily to migrant workers, and the majority of the residents are illegal aliens. The local judge currently faced with this massive social bombshell once again agreed not to shut it down and, instead, mandated efforts to bring the park up to code, which is laughable as no one has the money to install and maintain an appropriate infrastructure in the best of times, which these are not.

In the past month, the residents have been dismantling the wooden structures, leaving not just the bare metal boxes to stand alone in the winter elements, but forcing all the people who occupied the wooden add-ons to crowd into the trailers to avoid the recent freezing weather. If the situation is not corrected by summer, the temps will soar into the hundreds and there will be no shade provided by temporary wooden awnings that took the place a shade trees and have now been removed. The clean-up of Duroville has already been dragged through system for the past 5 years, with deadline after deadline given to the park owners: isn't it time to be done with it?

People who cannot -- or will not -- provide for themselves sometimes must accept the actions of the society in which they live and have it done for them. The living conditions are not just primitive, but breeding grounds for diseases that flourish in those kinds of environments and then make their way into the general population as the children begin attending school. These residents are already living on public assistance and obtaining free medical care, but the Valley community may also have to pay the ultimate price of this slum when their medical issues become the Valley's.

My theory of life is to lance the boil so it can heal, rather than allow it to fester and become a bigger problem than it would if it were dealt with in a timely fashion. Duroville is a boil that needs to be lanced, regardless of the criticism that action causes in the court of public opinion. If the residents don't know what's best for them, the system has to assure that it happens. Yes, provisions need to be made for housing these people, but many of them can be deported back to their own countries. The documented citizens can be provided with alternative housing, such as the FEMA trailers sitting in vacant lots in Louisiana, even if those trailers are brought into the same area after an appropriate infrastructure has been developed.

Just because people can live like this does not mean they have to or should, or that the surrounding communities must be forced to accept the situation. Americans are afraid to do the right thing because it may be construed by the courts to be the wrong thing to do. The hundreds of thousands of dollars that have spent on the legal system over the past many years could better have been spent dealing with the problem, one way or another.