Not In My Back Yard (says the guy who has a back yard)

[ailbhe]

There's a little debate going on around here at the moment. Some of you may remember that ages ago, someone wanted to put a halfway-house for mentally disabled people who no longer needed institutional care but were not yet ready for independent living near us. And the locals shouted it down, on the grounds that it would create a parking problem and the area is too rough and dangerous for such vulnerable people to live in. Rob and I sat at the sidelines and went Tut, tut, but other than writing to my MP (one paper copy and one emailed copy, neither of which elicited a response of any kind) we did nothing at all.

Reading Single Homeless Project want to use the same property as a temporary living space for homeless people to get back on their feet, have an address to get a bank account, a job, etc. There's a local gentleman and at least one local councillor shouting it down, because it will cause crime in this lovely peaceful area, and bring down property prices, which have been going up and up and up and up and up (we could no longer afford to buy our own house, which we've only had about 5 years).

We mostly said "Tut, tut," but then A4 posters started appearing on the lampposts around here, saying "NO say no to rshp in [streetname]" and Rob and I both suffered raised blood pressure when we walked past them, which meant every time we left our house. Then a leaflet appeared in our letterbox, with the same text on one side and an exhortation to stick it up in our front window in the other, and I saw red.

We and some friends of ours had a discussion about what would be best to do. We'd love to tear down the posters, but that makes most of us uncomfortable, bcause it seems faintly unethical for reasons that are hard to pin down. So we decided, instead, to produce our own, with YES instead of NO, and put one in our window and one on every lamppost with a NO poster.

Rob put a few out today. then we went and had tea with friends. The NO poster guy had torn several of them down by the time we finished our tea. So we've decided it's ok to tear down a NO poster where he has torn down a YES poster, but we will leave the other as they are.

It feels rather daring. The NO poster guy yelled OI at Rob just for putting up the YES ones. It will be interesting to see what happens next. The number of posters we can put up as they are torn down is only limited by the number of drawing pins we can muster.

Homelessness is one of the things that really gets my back up.

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