Post describes her work with the Metropolitan Housing Commission
Post describes how she became the director of the Metropolitan Housing Coalition and what she was able to accomplish during her time there. Based on her earlier work, she brought a clear agenda to the job that she found balanced well with the concerns of the housing advocates she worked with.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Suzanne Post, June 23, 2006. Interview U-0178. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- SARAH THUESEN:
-
Since you brought it up, I want to talk about the Metropolitan Housing
Coalition. When that was founded in '89 or
'88—
- SUZANNE POST:
-
I think a few people first started to meet in '88. They were
mainly community ministries people and then they got a few more people
in as the homeless situation exploded here. Then in '89, they
applied for a 501c3 and wrote a grant to the Bingham Foundation for a
million dollars for seed money for staff. When I walked off the board,
walked off the job of the ACLU, how old was I? I was fifty-seven years
old, no visible means of support. I felt great for about two weeks and
then I started waking up in a cold sweat. I envisioned myself applying
for a job at a convenience store and then I thought, "No, they
get shot. You don't want to do that."
MHC at about that time got a hundred thou from Bingham, not a million,
but a hundred thousand to be used over three years to provide for
staffing. A friend of mine who had been meeting with them came over and
she said, "Suzy, you need to apply for that job.
It's going to be great." I said, "Blanche,
I don't know anything about housing." She said,
"Yeah, but you're the best organizer in the
state." I said, "Blanche, I don't know
anything about housing." It just really
didn't grab me. She said, "Come on, apply."
So I did apply. I got a call. I had an interview with five or six of
these lovely people, a couple of whom I knew. They wanted someone to
work on contract so that they wouldn't have to pay health
insurance. They wanted somebody who would work for twenty-five thousand
dollars a year on contract. I talked to them. I said, "You
know, I've started a lot of coalitions and I think coalitions
can be really effective. I think you're going to find
somebody who can do this job." I said,
"It's just not me. But thanks for the time and lots
of luck."
So I came home and about two hours later, the president of the board
calls me up. He said, "Suzy, what would it take to get
you?" I hadn't even really thought about it. I said,
"It would take twenty-five thousand dollars a year. You pay my
taxes. You pay health insurance. And the executive committee agrees to
meet with me once a week and I don't mean for three months. I
mean ad infinitum, because I don't know a damn thing about
housing." He said, "Okay." So for two years,
we met at a local cafeteria at seven-thirty on Wednesday mornings until
about nine, for two years until we got a new president and she
didn't want to be bothered getting up that early. It was a
shame, because they were getting a lot out of it, they really were.
- SARAH THUESEN:
-
Who all was represented on that executive committee just in sort of
general terms? Were they mainly people who worked directly in
housing?
- SUZANNE POST:
-
Yeah, mainly people who worked directly in housing, with the exception of
the community ministry people who were providing social services to
their service area. Plus the executive director of Legal Aid.
- SARAH THUESEN:
-
That was Dennis Bricking.
- SUZANNE POST:
-
Dennis, uh huh. For awhile—well I guess not. I started to say
for awhile the director of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, but
no, he didn't come. It was a pretty motley
crew. The city's CDBG director, who was Blanche,
she was a really good friend of mine. She and I ran the Impeach Nixon
campaign together and a couple of really great antiwar demonstrations.
We had an antiwar demonstration that had five thousand people after the
Cambodian bombings, which you're probably too young to even
remember, but it was pretty terrifying to us that we would go bomb these
people. It looks like child's play today compared to what
we're doing. It was a good group of people. They were
straight. They were committed. The housing people were profoundly
housers. A lot of the housing people saw housing as a basic human right
and they saw housing as a way for low-income people to accumulate
wealth. When I used to hear that, it set my teeth on edge, but over the
years, I've come to realize how important that is in terms of
having something.
- SARAH THUESEN:
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Building equity.
- SUZANNE POST:
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Building equity in your home is accumulating wealth and without that
home, you know—.
- SARAH THUESEN:
-
What was the general impulse behind starting the coalition?
- SUZANNE POST:
-
Ronald Reagan and the cutback in housing staff and the homeless, who were
becoming more and more visible on ours' and other
streets.
- SARAH THUESEN:
-
Was there discussion in any of the initial meetings about housing
integration as a concern?
- SUZANNE POST:
-
No, that was mine. I mean, that was my issue.
- SARAH THUESEN:
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At that time or earlier or both?
- SUZANNE POST:
-
I don't know about earlier, but what followed me into this job
was economic and racial equity. So one of the first things I did, I
think I worked a year before I did it, I created a Fair Housing
Coalition and it is still meeting, not as vigorously as it had when I
was the director. What I did was I invited all the
organizational members of MHC that had a fair housing bias of some kind,
whether it was the Tenants Association; the banks, which are required
under the Community Reinvestment Act to loan equally; the Community
Action Agency, which was dealing with poor people; the Kentucky
Commission on Human Rights, in which housing segregation is a no-no; the
Louisville and Jefferson County Human Relations Commission. There were
about ten or eleven groups and we met once a month. The purpose of me,
why I did this was I thought that it would beneficial for these groups
to keep each other posted on what was new in the field, because they
were all understaffed and they couldn't know everything there
was to know. That was number one. Number two, I thought it would be
emotionally beneficial for them to get together with their PEERs,
because burnout is so high in so many of these jobs. Thirdly, I thought
that it would be beneficial for it to plan a community program every
April, which is Fair Housing Month. They've been meeting for
fifteen years. I mean, the member ebbs and flows and it's not
the same people from every agency, but it has created a presence.
- SARAH THUESEN:
-
Among the folks involved with that, what's the general
consensus with regard to how much progress we've made since
the open housing movement in terms of housing integration?
- SUZANNE POST:
-
I think that there's generally a consensus that progress has
been made. I think that there is a general consensus that some of the
big problems, the problems that remain, involve predatory lending is a
big one. Foreclosures is a huge problem. I guess those two are sort of
on the top of the agenda in terms of: can anybody move where they want
to move, where they can afford to move? I think that there's
a feeling that that's pretty much okay, but on the other
hand, there's real concern, I think and
I certainly echo it, that federal programs like Hope VI are just
resegregating people.