The Road To Hell

I work for a large ``scattered site`` property management company in the City of St. Louis, and often visit the sleazy underbelly of the city as part of my duties. (My job is a bit hard to define; I show apartments for lease, I collect rent, I speak with tenants when there are complaints or police problems, I sign up new clients, I check units for maintenance, and I check to see if properties are vacated. This job is not for the meek or squimish; we occasionally find dead bodies in places, we ALWAYS find roaches and spiders, we go into places full of rat and mice droppings, etc. People with Compulsive Disorder need not apply. Although it can be disgusting and aggravating, I generally enjoy it; it is much like being a cop, although less dangerous. I never have the same day twice.

Recently I visited Hell; more specifically, I visited a crack-infested area of north St. Louis. We have a client who purchased his buildings full of people, and who found that he had been scammed because the previous owner had filled the place with lowlifes from the street so it LOOKED like a full, income producing property. These tenants stole everything that wasn`t nailed down, then left the building in dreadful condition.

Two weeks before my visit, our maintenance staff secured the building with plywood. At that time we had two tenants still living in the upstairs apartments, while the two first floor apartments were vacant. One of the upstairs tenants had returned her keys to our office, and a collegue and I went to check on things.

The building looked long abandoned. Every window on the first floor had been broken out, and all of the back doors were standing open; the vandals had succeeded in cutting through the plywood we had used to secure the doors. They had entered both first floor units, both basement units, and the recently vacated upstairs. There was a huge hole in the side wall of the building where vandals had tunneled through the bricks with the intention of stealing the entire window. (It was obvious that they had thrown the bricks they removed from the wall through the other windows of the building.) Trash and debris was strewn throughout the yard, and the fence had been pulled down.

The basements had been stripped of copper and other hardware.

We went through the vacant units methodically. Inside was pure filth, with trash, dried food, used cotton balls and Q-tips and used condoms on the floors. It was obvious that people were using drugs and prostituting in this horrible place. (I cannot, in my wildest dreams, imagine performing a sex act inside this disease infested place!) Walls were down to bare studs in spots, or had food or human discharge on them. I feared sticking myself with a used needle accidentally.

Fortunately, since there was no heat and the food supply was exhausted, we weren`t met by an army of bugs, as is common. (Have you ever seen a living carpet? It looks like a ragged brown carpet until you see it move!)

We went upstairs into the vacated apartment and found an electric heater running at the head of a bed, and realized that a squatter had just fled through the front door while we were coming up the back stairwell. This place was as trashed and filthy as the others, yet someone was living here! We went down the front and around to the back where our ``tenant`` was waiting for us to leave. He tried to claim that he had come to help the former tenant move, and we chased him away. Of course, he would come back as soon as we left.

While we were talking to our squatter, the one remaining tenant came down to talk to us. She had been living in this apartment with no heat, since she couldn`t pay her gas bill. She had two school-aged children, who are never in school whenever we go to this property, living in this hell-hole. Since the theft of her water lines (they steal them to for copper) she had been without any water, and hadn`t bothered to call this in to the office. They had continued to use the toilet, and the feces had formed a cone which rose above the toilet seat, forcing them to defecate standing up. When they grew thirsty enough, they walked the two blocks to the nearby gas station and bought a bottle of water. No big deal!

Maintenance came with 30 pieces of plywood and extra-long screws to resecure the place (at the owner`s expense) but it won`t be long before they have to head back there to do it all again. We decided to give this tenant notice to vacate, and my co-worker was going to contact family services, because those children were being raised like animals.

The plight of those kids really struck me; they are the walking dead. The boy was undoubtedly going to join a gang in a couple of years and would either be dead on in prison by the time he was 17. The girl would probably become a drug addict (as I`m sure is true of her mother) and would go into the family prostitution business. She would probably die of some easily treated illness after first spitting out a couple of children of her own, thus perpetuating the cycle. I see nothing but coffins in their near futures.

This is what Liberal policies and good intentions have wrought! (What is paved with good intentions?) Feminism, welfare, and the sexual revolution, along with the explosion of narcotics, have completely destroyed the black family. This woman had a father, who was probably a dope-fiend who lived on welfare. In another time, he would have been poor and uneducated, but would have worked and stayed around to care for his children. Thanks to the compassion of the left, he was freed of any responsibility and could destroy himself and everyone around him at his leisure. Because more children mean more government largesse, women in the ghetto become baby factories, spitting out more hopeless welfare recipients and keeping our prisons functioning at peak capacity.

Those children deserve better. They deserve an education, a clean home, hope. The nanny state steals hope. It offers the easy way to live at the expense of real pride and any upward mobility. Sloth is the hallmark of the welfare state, and sloth leads to ignorance and despair.

There is absolutely no reason for a place like this to exist. This building and this family are a monument to the insanity that is Liberalism. Without decades of leftist social experimentation this place would never have been.

But Liberals meant well, they are always well intentioned.

We know what is paved with those intentions; I just made a visit to that place.