Rules are Rules

According to Monday October 1, 2007 NY Times front page, many former residents are turning up on the New York City Housing Authority's tabloid newspaper's as "permanently excluded". According to The Journal these individuals have been barred for a variety of reasons. The "Not Wanted List" reason can range from criminal arrests to ''nondesirability'' to ''moral offenses''. Many tenants are up in arms over the banning of people and the public notice posted in The Journal. Taken directly from the article, " 'It's degrading not only for the people on that list but for the family members of those people,' said Damaris Reyes, a resident of Baruch Houses in Manhattan and the executive director of Good Old Lower East Side, a community and tenants' rights group. 'You're trying to keep your business private, and now the whole neighborhood knows that your son or daughter was arrested.'"

Many others express their sob stories about how they can not return to the complex to visit family or friends even after they have "turned their life around".

Quoted from a ban supporter, "'When you get the rotten apples out of the projects, you make it a better place to live,' said Ray Maldonado, 28, a high school baseball coach who has lived in the Wald Houses in Manhattan all his life. 'When I was growing up here, there were so many opportunities to do the wrong thing. I've always said you got to make choices, and whether it's a good one or a bad one, you suffer the repercussions.'"

Maldonado poses an interesting point. How does one go about cleaning up the projects? How does a housing authority keeps it's "good" tenants safe?

My thoughts on this situation are...

• These people knew the rules and chose to break them.
• A little public humiliation just may make families deal with their problems instead of having the courts and/or jails do it for them.
• The article points out that the Housing Authority rules lets a banned person apply for an exclusion lift ''any time a substantial change has occurred". SO... stop whining, get your life together, and be an adult!
  

As an adult sometimes we have to do things we don't want to do which includes following rules and laws. But I guess that's not a strong suit if rules were broke to get banned in the first place.