Abstract
Near West Side resident Mike Fiala recollects how his early life experiences shaped his role in Cleveland's Catholic Worker movement. He shares his involvement in activism on behalf of affordable housing and providing services for unhoused people on the Near West Side. Fiala highlights the rise of gentrification in the Near West Side, along with the expansion of St. Ignatius High School. He also recollects his involvement in the 2015 March for Tamir Rice.
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Interviewee
Fiala, Mike (interviewee)
Interviewer
White, Bali (interviewer)
Project
Near West Side Housing Activism
Date
6-10-2024
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
95 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Mike Fiala interview, 10 June 2024" (2024). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 544001.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1284
Transcript
Bali White [00:00:00] Let’s get into it. Hi, all. So I am Bali White, and I am here recording Mike Fiala for the Cleveland Regional Oral History Project. For the record, can you state your name and spell your last name for me, please?
Mike Fiala [00:00:17] Yeah, it’s Michael Fiala, and it’s spelled F, as in Frank, I A L A.
Bali White [00:00:24] Awesome. Could you briefly introduce yourself who you are when you were born?
Mike Fiala [00:00:30] Yeah, I think probably the best way to introduce myself is to sort of situate us, sort of locate where we are, because I really see myself, like, embedded in a place. And so who I am is connected to this space and time. And so, like, the first thing is actually to recognize that we’re in a room, a pretty small room that has some interesting pictures of Cleveland and the Near West Side. And I’ve been in these rooms before with the Kentucky Garden steering committee, because we have our meetings here oftentimes. But we’re also in the Carnegie West Library, which is an incredible space because it’s a magnificent triangular building on a triangular lot. And it actually resonates with my whole history and who I am, because Andrew Carnegie was central to things that have to do with actually building, having this built, I should say, this library. And my parents, my mother and my grandparents were in southwestern Pennsylvania, which had, they were coal miners and farmers, and suffered under Andrew Carnegie and the people who he employed. Frick, who was one of his primary point people for development of coal mines and so he was also a part of- Andrew Carnegie was a part of having Pinkertons kill people in strikes. So I have this incredible tension just being in a location like that. And then the next part of it is that it’s a spectacular building. And people who are my friends, who are unhoused in the winter particularly, but year round, enjoy this space immensely. And this atrium that allows the light in is a magnificent thing. So when I start situating myself, just even this space, it’s a big deal. And then I start thinking, like, there’s a lot more to this space. Like how I live nearby and walk to it, that it’s like, to the north is an incredible Lake Erie. It’s like, you know, within eyesight and very close. And I appreciate that water, because we are in the Lake Erie basin, and the Cuyahoga River is to our east, and, like, to the south is this great, all these watersheds going to the Ohio River. And to the west, there is this incredible long great plains and where the sun sets. So that space becomes a very crucial part of, like, my very being, because the soil and the air and the land and the water is life and that’s what actually is in me. And so when I start thinking about that, like, there’s this unfolding of space and the land and the soil into our very being, to the very marrow of our bones and our flesh. And so when I start thinking of myself as so embedded into space, then I also start thinking about time, how we’re in the year 2024 in the Common Era, and that there were people here before, how my mother came from southwestern Pennsylvania during World War Two and met my father in the steel mills and stayed, how my mother didn’t even speak English when she first went to school at age five and only got a third grade education. So I think about that, but I also think about the people who were here previously, the land of the ancient mound builders, incredible, awesome mound builders from 2000 years ago and 1500 years ago, and their descendants, the Lenape, the Ojibwa, the Iroquois, a whole host of native peoples, and that were on that land, and we fundamentally displaced them and carved it up into real estate by Moses Cleveland. And now we parcel it out and sell it, and it becomes, in some sense, like the central question of how I got involved with housing and land justice. Housing justice really is built on improvements on the land and how the community land trust movement was a part of redefining how we understand land and housing and as an American land reform movement. And I think about Near West Housing Corporation and Ohio City Near West organizations in the neighborhood that tried to and achieved, in some sense, Near West Housing Corporation in particular, created 100 homes for people who, using the low-income housing tax credits for very lower income people. So who I am are these people who are embedded in my very being and we’re so connected that for me, it’s hard to define myself separately from that, but in a larger sense, in a very particular sense, like my parents lived on Fulton Avenue about a mile from here, south near the second district police station. And my brothers were born there. I should say they lived there. They were both born in a farmhouse in southwestern Pennsylvania. I was born, actually, Lutheran Hospital down the street. But my parents, my father built, substantially himself, a house in the great out there, as I call it, on the border of North Royalton and Parma on Sprague Road in 1952 to 1954. So I start off, it was a kind of urban foundation that becomes rural, really, because that far out, we had like a square mile of woods behind us, undeveloped. And I used to spend time there and. But we were focused north, which is Parma, which is very suburbanized. So my early experiences was urbanized, foundation ruralized, with a suburbanized focus sense. And then in 1961, my family sort of fell apart. My mother sold the house. My parents separated semi-permanently, and we moved such that from age seven to age 15, I lived in 13 different places. So that really is a kind of foundational. And I lived on the east side, and I lived in this city, and I lived in Garfield Heights and Maple Heights and in Parma again. So I had all these different experiences and finally spent most of my high school years, three of them, in Parma, and then went off to college. That experience sort of gives me a sense of, like, I’ve lived in the same house since 1981, so that’s 43 years, which is a pretty stable. When I bought that house, the real estate people say, you only stay here seven years. That’s what the routine is. And I bought that house in 1981 at 16% interest rate, which, you know, like, was unheard of and crazy. So that, you know, coming to the Near West Side, coming back to it came as a function of coming out of college and traveling all over the country and living in different places, like Las Vegas, where my brothers were working and doing work there in Las Vegas for six months and living with my uncles a bit, who were farmers in southwestern Pennsylvania, and traveling and doing other things, doing various work. And in the late seventies, I came back to the Near West Side to talk to a Jesuit priest whose name was Tom Leonhardt, because I was searching for something that didn’t- I didn’t even have the name for, but what I was really searching for was community. And so think about what I opened with, the sense of, like, the deep embedding and enfolding of the whole space here from all one thing.
Bali White [00:09:37] Could you actually spell Tom Leonhardt for the record?
Mike Fiala [00:09:41] Yeah. L-E-O-N-H-A-R-D-T. [crosstalk] Yeah. So that sense of community, I didn’t have the word for it, because in some sense, I had channeled the layers of alienation of, like, suburbanization, urbanization, over educated in an elite college because I played sports, and I was recruited to play a sport there. And I had this combination of working class who, people who believed in education. And so I, you know, got one. But I was not sure what to do with my life, which is a lot of the case. Like, do I get on the conveyor belt and join? And I just did not have it in me for lots of reasons. And so I came to the Near West Side and visited with Tom, who I met over the years. He was a Jesuit priest still was. Then he later on left the Jesuits and got married to someone who was also a dear friend of mine, Carolyn. And so I came here looking for something because my life had sort of, like, just not gone, like, anywhere. And I had this intense need to find something, like a way of life. And that really was the beginning of my sort of deep connection to the Near West Side. There was a community that was forming at the time, an intentional community in the Abbas’s Children was the name. It was, I like to describe it, pentecostal charismatic Catholic movement, which is not your typical images of what Catholics were doing, but that era really had this intense sense of the Holy Spirit falling upon us afresh and just incredible energy and vitality. And that really had been a foundational part of my life. Playing sports was like one of the biggest ones. It was like a kind of religion for me. But I also grew up in a very- My mother was very devout and also conflicted about her devotion because divorcing my father in the sixties put her in a very ostracized situation with the church, and she felt thoroughly oppressed and ostracized. And her own behavior, in many ways, also led to some of those things. But that’s a whole long story that’s different. So those layers of my life really were looking for something life giving. And I felt I had experienced it within about six months. I was really taken by the community, the people, people my age, people older. It was intergenerational, children. And we had incredible powerful liturgies and worship and connections of doing things together. And so when I bought that house in literally June 18, in 1981 is when it transferred. I was seeing it as a community house and fostering community. So those things are foundational in a way, or thoroughly, I should say. And I saw myself being on West 38th Street, as partly, as being a foundationally connected to the Near West Side, and seeing how I could be a sense of God’s presence. And I had no idea, in some sense, what I was doing. This is partly the problem. There’s little mentorship in, like, radical life, or we’re also independent minded, that we don’t even know how to hook up with people, but we do inevitably find some niche and we start doing it, and people try to help us. But some sense we have this kind of also radical independence. I like to say that you didn’t end up on the Near West Side unless something really went wrong in that day, because it was a very liminal space, like, I would describe it as the Wild West, lots of, like, challenging intersections. Liminal is another word I use because of the contradictions of urban space puts people into all sorts of situations that are not immediately comfortable. And in some sense, suburbanization is to try to eliminate all these discomforts. But lots of people find that there’s something missing, like it’s hollowed out. Consumption becomes sort of it, more of a focus. And so I had experienced those layers. So that hopefully answers something like your question, Bali. But you can sort of see how I have to walk into it in ways that make sense to me, and that allows me to sort of be better focused on what you’re interested in.
Bali White [00:14:58] You touched base on, actually a couple of my follow-up questions, so that worked out perfectly.
Mike Fiala [00:15:03] Yeah.
Bali White [00:15:04] My next question for you, though, is could you describe what this neighborhood looked like upon your arrival in 1981, in terms of the conditions, demographics, etcetera?
Mike Fiala [00:15:23] Wow, that’s an evocative question. So one way to think about it is, since I went to the high school down the street, the first way to think about coming here is all of us, all of us, if we go back to where we went to high school, pivotal turning point of my life. I would like to describe the Jesuits as saving my life, because, let’s say I was fairly unruly, yet I had, I would respect authority, but not necessarily be easily adaptable. And so playing sports was a helpful and healthy way for me to get out all this intense energy and potentially conflictual energy and so having come back to the place where I went to high school, think about the rush of emotion. Like 14 to 17 years old. I can remember having been held up by somebody at 14,[laughs] coming out of the gym with a friend who wanted my coat. And my friend tells me that I said, no, I’ll fight you for it. I don’t think I actually said that.[laughs] I said no. And then I saw a knife that looked like a sword, but that’s because my eyes were so- I was so scared to death. And, you know, it’s probably, you know, a butcher knife or something. And he pulled it out from behind his coat. And I said, no, I won’t give you my coat, but I’ll give you my watch. I negotiated with him,[laughs] and he took it and took off, you know, interesting. I, you know, I called. I saw the police pulling away, you know, maybe five minutes later down the street. I called out to them. They said, hey, let’s go file a report. I said, no. I don’t need to file a report. I just got robbed, and I’m not if you don’t want to deal with it, that’s your business. I’m not going to deal with it either. So all of that rush of emotion came, and I was hanging out at St. Ignatius High School because the Jesuit priest was, while he was living at St. Patrick’s, we would have worship space in the chapel there at St. Ignatius. So all of this was a nice seam. My later separation from St. Ignatius High School is, like, breaks my heart, and it’s like being a stabbing in my heart, but I love that place. It all fits. We’re worshiping together. This is what I believed in. I finally found a home, and the physical space was, you would have nodes of places, of people you would know, or you would wander by the streets, and, you know, you could make the argument it was extremely run down on one level, right? Because it was old housing and people weren’t redoing much of it. And it was significantly and thoroughly poor. And so, so, like- And while I had grown up in various stages, it was still pretty uncomfortable. You know, I remember, like, trying to get to know people and kids and, like and having a wild party at my house because I had no furniture, and I just had big speakers. And I invited the guy across the street who came. You know, he was maybe in his fifties or forties, and he came and what I remember is he drank a half a bottle of whiskey, and I was, like, blown away. I didn’t realize, like, at the time, I just thought it was bizarre. But what I realize now is he could have had alcohol poisoning from that much alcohol. And, you know, later on, his house burned down ’cause he fell asleep drinking, and he was smoking, and he barely survived. So. And I was getting to know the kids in the neighborhood, and there was buildings right next to me that were in various stages of disrepair and in stress. And so Orange Blossom Press was on in the Schott Building. And what I remember is there was also a bar there, Walt’s Friendly Tavern, which would later become Lozada’s. And there was a garage that had been, was working as a working garage when I moved in. And so it was incredibly hard-working people doing the lower level kinds of work. And there was, like, a furniture store later on in the Schott Building. So it was- The buildings were, like, aging, and the housing had all of the people who were still here. The woman who I bought the house from moved into a nursing home, and the people next door were all related to one another. And so when I start- And just before I arrived, this incredible rec building that belonged to, I think I can’t remember the name of it was, had just burned down because lots of buildings were burning down or being set afire for to get the insurance- And so in that context, there were groups organizing a Near West Neighbors in Action. But then there were development groups called Near West Housing Corporation that just formed in that era of the early eighties, who were trying to save this housing, first of all, boarding it up and then finding methods by which to do that. And that’s where the low-income housing tax credits and my involvement within Near West Housing came, because I was extremely concerned about all of this and the neighborhood, because I had chosen either the worst possible place to ever live or the best possible place. All the action was going to happen. I was so close to Lorain Avenue, basically my picture window in my house faced it for, lots of reasons I won’t describe, but I was as close as you can get to Lorain Avenue, so all of the crazinesses that were there, what happened, and I would even write poems about how people in the middle of the night would be screaming at the top of their lungs, you know, crazed, in some Technicolor, you know, suit of some sort. So that sense of, like, immediate need, crisis and personal, and how buildings were attached to it. Because I had a dream in 1984, after I had been there for three years, I had a dream or a vision, I’m not sure, of all of those buildings right next to me being gone. And I said, oh, my God. No buffer whatsoever from Lorain Avenue. And that led me to getting involved with Near West Housing Corporation. I called Bill Merriman, who was the source of all information on the Near West Side. Most beloved, always caring, accessible, my friend. And I called him up and I said, Bill, I’m really worried. And he said, ah, call Near West Housing Corporation. They’ll help you. And I called them and got to know Chuck Ackerman, and they said, hey, you should run for the board. And so in January of 1985, I ran for the board and didn’t win. [laughs] Then they appointed me to the board because anybody was willing to get involved they either made a new board position or they had an empty board position, and they put me on the board. And that was my beginning of, like, learning the ropes of how things start to happen in my neighborhood and how housing, buildings, and first of all, saving them, boarding them up, and then finding methods, the tools that are provided in various forms of development projects and pro formas that will actually create a project and do that long term. So I think I’m still approximating your questions. Let me also say something about this process. It’s a little challenging for me to generate monologues because my experience is always a dialogue. And while I understand the format, I just sort of want to recognize how storytelling, and in my sense of how the common experience of my community would be, like, we would be in a roundtable all sharing different parts, and it would start, it would start like, oh, yes, and that part of the story and that part and that, yes, and this was the point because I want to decenter my particular details, not to say that they’re not crucial, but it’s really a body that I’m talking about, and it’s actually a political body, and it’s actually what I believe is a mystical body and a mystical body of Christ that connects us all. And that- I’m just bringing forth a kind of grace that I have that comes through me, through a spirit, the spirit that I share with others. Whether we feel it or not, there’s a spirit to this neighborhood of sorts. Right? It’s a certain ethos, a culture. And so it’s a challenge sometimes. To want to generate these stories autonomously, out of context and not in a dialogue in a more direct way with you, Bali, but I respect the format and want to sort of acknowledge that because it has both the sense of, of dialectic and dialogue, looking for the truths and trying to really hear most clearly what I’m struggling to articulate. And it’s also sort of what people like rabbis and people who wrote the stories and the scriptures would have stories they’d talk about, and then they’d revise them and tell it in a different way and tell a whole different part of the present based on those past stories. And so that’s, like, deeply rooted in how I see conversation. Right? Ordinary conversation always has this potential for a deep dive. And we can go back and forth because we live in this very material world, you know, taking in the air and the space and the water and the soil and Kentucky Garden, who’s down the street that we actually raise food at, and how there’s so much lead in the soil. Like, you start to see, hey, thank God that space in Kentucky Garden was saved. All those things are really what I like to emphasize. And so I’m working with this format to try to respect that these are the contexts in which we need to work. Thank you for your patience. Glad to listen to the next response and question.
Bali White [00:26:56] So I’m kind of curious. When exactly did you join the Cleveland Catholic Worker movement? What led you to be a part of that?
Mike Fiala [00:27:05] Yeah, such a good question. Goes right to the heart. Thank you. So the Near West Side is a neighborhood with many layers to it. You can put your toe in, you can put your leg, you can put most of your body, you can jump in and be immersed at layers and layers. So I came through one avenue, let’s say St. Ignatius High School, and my grandparents from down the street, or primarily my grandmother and my parents, but also because of this charismatic community, Abba’s Children, so central. But there had been here a Catholic Worker Community in the late thirties and early fifties that I had never known about. We find all of these things out later. But in the late sixties, a group called the Thomas Merton became the Thomas Merton Community. And even that name is an interesting name. I actually asked them a long time, a while ago how they came to that name, because Thomas Merton is, let’s say, a famous Catholic for some people. The Pope mentioned his name along with Dorothy Day when he came to speak at Congress. Right? People hear Martin Luther King Junior, who the Pope mentioned, and Abraham Lincoln. But the Pope mentioned two other people, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day. Not familiar names among even Catholics. So there was a Thomas Merton Community here that had come in the late sixties, basically, let’s say ’69, for various reasons. This location, rather than maybe Glenville, which they had initially thought of, it was primarily the Corrigans and the Maguires, Father Bob Begin, diocesan priests who had gotten into lots of these issues of antiracism and antiwar activity. They had all sort of started congregating on the Near West Side. To be transformed and forming would be essentially a Catholic Worker Community. They did hospitality for people who are homeless. Hospitality is always an experiment in learning about the truth of, like, how do you really engage relationships, what limits you have, or none. So people were doing that at a very early age, early time, in the late sixties and through the seventies. And in 1984, ’83, ’84, Joe Lehner came to the Near West Side from Mishawaka, Indiana, near Notre Dame. And he was older, he was in his late twenties, which is not the typical Jesuit volunteer, but he had come and said that Bob Begin, who was the priest, who had a lot of resources, because he had, over the years, had really seen like, hey, I’m going to be a conduit for lots of projects. He was known for doing that. Incredible vital force. So Joe Lehner said, hey, I want to form a Catholic Worker Community, and I want support for that from people, particularly I didn’t think he went to Bob Begin, but probably to the Corrigans and others. And he got support and was able to have the Catholic- Have the convent on St. Patrick’s grounds given or available for the Catholic Worker Community to use. In approximately ’84, ’85, they moved in there and paid rent and other things, but minimal, and lived there and did hospitality. And so I was not directly involved in those initial stages. I was involved with- I had gotten married. So Maryellen, who was essential to this whole story, too, is a part of, like, how we formed a community ourselves, and a relationship that would be life giving to our community and so we were forming our relationship. I was working now full-time, and I had gone to graduate school to get a degree to find sort of more stable and ongoing employment. And so lots of my friends were involved with it. And so probably 1989 is really a turning point for me in my involvement, because the West 38th Street had come through, was in a crisis having to do with. This was the era of crack beginning. And the craziness hit, like, the forefront because the guys who I knew next door, the people I known who originally lived there, sort of got kicked out by somebody who had bought the house on a land contract, and he had been smoking dope, but now he got hooked on crack and so now the house next door to me, which is like 40 inches away, three and a half feet, is a 24/7, let’s say drug house, prostitution and other things. And that kind of craziness. Pretty overwhelming, right? My wife would get up in the middle of the night when they’re, you know, having a wild craziness and say, hey, I have to get up in the morning. I have to go to sleep, you know, and they would all be, okay. We understand. Sorry. Think about that. They respect the sense that you have to go to work. Oh, yeah, we’re doing our own thing, but, yeah, we’ll try to stop. It’s hard because we’re, you know, doing all this craziness. So because it was so crazy, I was pretty overwhelmed. Like, I had this vision of, like, powerful presence, like, be transformative and, let’s say, redemptive and part of a transformation of the Near West Side. And then I started realizing, well, what would it be like to be a part of the transformation of just a corner of a block, right? And here it is in my face, and I’m overwhelmed, and I don’t know what to do. And let’s suggest- Or I could say, while I’m tempted and was employed and tried to engage the police, at a certain point, they were totally unhelpful, and there’s multiple levels why that’s the case. So in those days, I didn’t have the full sense of, like, how to deal with this. I would, in some sense, try every strategy. I’m less inclined to see the police solve any problem at this point. But then I imagine maybe. But while they were unhelpful, I engaged my friends, who all believed in nonviolence. And now here’s the rubber meeting the road. I’m in a severe crisis. And we were all pretty pathetic and unable to come up with much other than that, they would hang out with me in my house overnight from 6:00 p.m. till six in the morning. Handful of them, two to three or four people. And the sheer fact of their presence took the craziness out of me. I was no longer oppressed. I was free to deal with the problem. And over time, I engaged the person who was living there, who had owned it on a land contract, and said, hey, your house went up for sheriff sale. I didn’t buy it because it was way too much money. It wasn’t- It was probably $14,000. I went to him and I said, hey, do you want to get out of this? And he said, yeah, and I’ll sell it to you direct. And so I purchased it from him. And the problem is, he hadn’t paid his property taxes, so he got nothing out of it. And so he refused to leave and he wanted to kill me. So this is the context in which the community and the Catholic Worker came to my rescue by presence. So, like, what had been, you know, I had been in contact with these kinds of communities. I had gone to 1980 to hear Molly Rush with Bill Corrigan and Tom Leonhardt, who was a part of the first Plowshares, eight nuclear weapons, Mark VI or Mark IV nuclear missiles, their actions of trying to disarm those things. I had been a part of these communities in loose ways, but now the rubber met the road and I needed them, and they came, and that started to create this deep bond of connectedness. And so I started participating much more thoroughly in community, in that community, so, like- And that there was always overlap, but now was much more personal. And in many ways, I had also left Abba’s Children for lots of reasons that’s hard to describe without giving more detail, but in some sense I had felt like we were to be rooted in the Near West Side and there was a range of what people wanted that was not really just focused on the Near West Side. And they were also profound sort of weaknesses in my own life that I had sort of created serious problems and conflict with the community that sort of led to my sort of like being in a new space and open to the Catholic Worker. I’m going to take a breath and drink some water.
Bali White [00:36:15] Go for it. You had mentioned that housing justice in the Near West Side is kind of key in understanding the type of activism you are involved in. Could you explain to us what exactly your role in providing, I guess, affordable housing for the Near West Side?
Mike Fiala [00:36:38] Wow. Thank you. That’s the perfect question again, partly because, like, all of what I just said to you points me exactly to that question. It’s like so perfect. It’s sort of like you’re socratic. [laughs] You’ve asked the pregnant question. It’s so wonderful and really sweet to be able to feel that connection with you, that you’re like, right on the cusp of that next question, because that’s it. I’m in this incredible space and I believe in these things and we can actually, like, do it in a concrete way. Housing is foundational land justice because you have to have houses on land. And what’s the quality of the land? And what’s the- Because one version of real estate is it’s location, location, location. And now it’s bizarre. Land is so expensive here and it doesn’t matter what the quality of the house is or not. People are going to pay outrageous prices. And so there’s this bizarre, weird, liminal, contradictory sense of space here now. And you’re going back to like your eighties. And, you know, my involvement with the Catholic Worker and how it gave life to these housing projects. Well, the Catholic Worker was about housing foundationally, doing hospitality, welcoming the stranger, welcoming the immigrant, help the migrant, welcoming those who are unhoused, living in community with them under many different and challenging circumstances, helping them to get on their feet, to move on, or long term relationships. So that in the sense that the people who are in the greatest need actually are our most vital asset. What, is that a novel idea? Is that a crazy idea? Is it like absolutely true? Like, think about if we work on making sure that those who are in the greatest need get their needs met, then we’re a community who lifts up that because clearly we have lots of power or we at least have an over education or enough education or all the other things, right? And any of us can go down that road. In fact, if I hadn’t gotten- My mother hadn’t done all this work to make sure I got an education, really valued education because she didn’t have one, I could easily be in the same position. So that doesn’t mean it’s not difficult or those people are unhoused are very difficult, or just needing a relationship or all the things. So if we start with that, and what’s incredible is Near West Housing Corporation was like, right on that. They’re going to actually work with people who they were using low-income housing tax credits, which while that’s an awful way to fund housing, it was the method available, and so they were there to do it, low-income housing, giving financial and housing stability to people who were in great need. Now, there’s lots of problems with the long-term housing tax credits because, like, you have to live there for 15 years to get to own it, which is sort of crazy, and that’s why we can make the argument for the land trust. You’re an owner, and significantly an owner from the very beginning. But, like, it dovetailed perfectly that I was connecting to the Catholic Worker or this neighborhood on multiple levels, that it had a direct effect on where I was living. And here’s an organization who does it. And, like, out of that need and getting involved, I started seeing these things concretely happen, and it happened significantly on West 38th Street. There were housing that they did, low-income housing, tax credit housing, and also Homeward housing, which was actually for middle-class people. So Near West Housing Corporation, as it did, let ten, over ten years significantly affordable housing for low-income housing people. It also tried to adapt to saying, hey, there’s other programs, and the city is really pressuring us not to just do low-income housing. So, yeah, okay, we can sort of adapt and do these things and do middle-class housing. And so there’s people, friends of mine, who live in that former
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