COMMENTARY
Donn Esmonde: For Orchard Park, time is standing still
She could not understand it then. She does not understand it now. More than two decades ago, Millie Goodenough tried to do something sensible in Orchard Park. Little did she know.
Goodenough asked Town Board members to open the town’s doors to affordable senior citizen housing. She might as well have asked them to run naked down Southwestern Boulevard.
“The answer I always got [from the board] was, ‘We’ll look into it,’ ” she said. “And nothing ever happened.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The Buffalo News reported last week that Orchard Park officials slapped down a proposal for affordable senior citizen housing. It opened old wounds for Goodenough.
“I thought, ‘. . . Here we go again,’ ” she said. “The idea that this is still being fought [against], it just revived all of the aggravation I got.”
There is a black man in the White House. Gays have comfortably come out of the closet. Women have climbed the higher rungs of power. A lot has changed in the last quarter-century. Orchard Park has, apparently, stayed the same.
Town officials contend that there is a zoning problem, although they acknowledge that they do not want “outsiders” moving in. Push past the excuses, and here is what you find: Snobbery, discrimination and a delusion-feeding isolation that makes people believe that a few dozen older folks will change the character of a bedroom community of 28,000.
“It won’t change anything,” Goodenough said this week. “People won’t even know the difference.”
She is 83, widowed, lively. In her apartment, she showed me a folder filled with letters to town and housing officials, remnants of a battle lost. She is the classic enlightened citizen whose good idea was discarded by those who are paid to serve the community.
Goodenough headed a seniors group in the town about two decades ago. Members kept dropping out. Retirement or spousal death deflated their incomes. So they had to move to West Seneca or Buffalo, because there was no affordable senior citizen housing in the town. That is what prompted Goodenough to ask the Town Board to build some—mainly so its own senior citizens could stay.
Goodenough said she got anonymous letters and phone calls about letting “those sort of people” into Orchard Park. She said people said the same thing to her at public meetings.
“I’d always answer, ‘What sort of people?’ ” she said. “Look in the mirror. Maybe you’re one of ‘those people.’ ”
Years later, Orchard Park’s only HUD-financed, lower-income senior citizen complex is on the edge of town, apart from other development. And there is a waiting list. The need that Goodenough pointed out decades ago remains. “After all of these years, there still is not a change of mentality in this town,” she said. “It’s a shame.”
I understand the appeal of Orchard Park. The village is attractively quaint. The town is quiet and safe.
But to anyone who believes in strength through diversity, that exposure to people of other races and cultures broadens each of us, Orchard Park is not nirvana. It is 98 percent white and resolutely upscale. Homogenization apparently feeds paranoia. The notion that a few dozen seniors would be the civic equivalent of a “gateway drug,” opening the door to mayhem and decline, to me, sounds ridiculous.
If this is the price of isolation, send in the crowds.
“It was like this wall of discrimination went up, and it just got higher and higher,” remembered Goodenough. “It was frustrating. I feel like I failed.”
No, Millie, you did not fail the town. The town failed you.
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