How to achieve fairness

I am a minority and a Black Man who can testify and agree wholeheartedly with Jacqueline Rabe Thomas’ article on housing in the Connecticut Post on March 19 entitled, “Many ideas, but little agreement, on CT’s affordable housing issues.”

While I concur with its substance, as a homeowner living in Bridgeport all my life, my wife and I have had a firsthand knowledge about what it was like for an apartment to be listed in the paper as vacant suddenly become unavailable, exorbitant, or “just rented.”

Since that has often been the case for many minority community members, they are often forced to rent or purchase a domicile in areas of cities or towns which regrettably could be classified conscientiously or unwittingly as a “modern-day ghetto” in my opinion.

Therefore, as a result of such an agonizing dilemma, minorities, whether they are poor, middle class, or rich, and even welleducated, will or can encounter such a situation as counter to diversity.

These predicaments, Ms. Thomas elaborates, could be alleviated if certain condition were seen as possible obstacles. For example: housing codes, local planning boards, cost of land, building requirements on some properties, the term “affordable housing development,” zoning boards and of course “redlining” that is refusing to sell, rent or lend any land or property to anyone because the person or company are Black, Asian, Latin, “colored” or Jewish. Near the close of the article Ms. Thomas cites the need for greater cooperation between people and governments, local to federal, at all levels.

However, in my opinion, if we, as humans, refuse to recognize that we are creatures of God’s creation and therefore equal to and responsible for one another, fairness in housing will never be achieved.

Peter George

Bridgeport