COMMENTARY
Donn Esmonde: In Orchard Park, elitism turns absurd
The way things are going in Orchard Park, I would not be surprised to soon see checkpoints along Mile Strip Road. Town officials may want to consider building a wall, to keep out city residents, renters, ACLU members, minimum-wage workers and other undesirables.
When you live in an upscale bedroom community, you apparently cannot be too careful about who wants to move in —or, by extension, to pass through.
OK, I am kidding. Sort of. I presume that most residents are appalled about the latest attempt by some town officials to earn Orchard Park the unofficial title of Region’s Most Elitist Community. Snobs R Us.
A nonprofit group recently made the mistake of trying to locate a 43-unit, federally funded residence for lower-income senior citizens in the town. As they say on “The Sopranos,” “Fuggedaboutit.”
I understand the concern over senior citizen housing. We all know how those gray-hairs blast hip-hop at all hours, smoke pot in public, hang out on street corners and spray-paint their gang symbols on buildings.
Actually, that was not the problem. Members of the Planning Board, backed by the Town Board, rejected the senior citizen residence, reported The Buffalo News’ Mary Pasciak, because many of the older folks would not be from Orchard Park. To confirm the “outsider” theory, town officials wanted to check the previous ZIP codes of senior citizens at a similar residence.
Usually, officials looking to keep out the “rabble” will camouflage their intent behind the smoke screen of zoning laws. Asking for ZIP codes is, to fair-housing activists, a smoking gun—evidence that town officials simply do not want “poor folks” moving in, especially minorities. Orchard Park is notably pale. Only one of every 200 residents is African-American.
“Clearly they were trying to determine who would move in,” said Scott Gehl, head of HOME, a fair-housing agency. “This sort of housing is [by law] on an equal-opportunity basis.”
Maybe town officials are wise to protect innocent citizens against this incoming horde. If these senior citizens get a toehold, the next thing you know, an urge to crochet, a yen for sensible shoes and an addiction to “Lawrence Welk Show” reruns might spread like wildfire through the general populace. Restaurants will be overrun with folks demanding the early bird special. The town’s economy will slump as retailers buckle under the strain of senior discounts.
Town officials contend, presumably with straight faces, that a few dozen senior citizens will stretch its first-responder network. “We were hoping [the senior citizen housing] would be for our residents,” Councilwoman Nan Ackerman told The News, “and not a lot of other people.”
There is a bigger picture. This sort of narrow-mindedness is symptomatic of a region with too many governments. The more village, town, city and school district boundaries we have, the more it fertilizes a small-minded us-versus-them mentality. After a while, there are few of “us” and a legion of “them.”
We all shop at the same malls, suffer with the same football team and identify with the same city. We cross numerous town, village and city borders to work and to play. Nonsense such as shoving a Keep Out sign in the face of senior citizens who do not meet a town’s “standards”— as determined by its overprotective political guardians—underlines the poisonous effect of too many boundaries. Erasing town/village borders and vaporizing political offices is not just about saving tax dollars. It is about deflating the mind-numbing pettiness that pits us against, well, us.
Orchard Park officials do not want a few dozen older folks to live there. If that is the mentality of the town, I cannot imagine why those folks would want to.
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