Like my mom and I.
And “Section 8” was M*A*S*H talk for “crazy…”
It was clear that Liza Jackson’s luck had changed when she drove her pearl-white Dodge sedan, the one with the huge pink plastic eyelashes over the headlights, into Pinebrook, an eight-year-old subdivision where residents tend to notice cars with huge pink eyelashes.
“There goes the neighborhood,” one homeowner said when she heard that her potential new neighbor had a federal housing voucher known as a Section 8. (…)
She had seen one house, and now she rolled up to another, a tan three-bedroom with red shutters. She got out and looked around, a vaguely glamorous vision crossing the grass in a long, leopard-print dress. She peeked into the windows, making out what appeared to be vaulted ceilings.
“Dang,” Jackson said approvingly.
She put the house, a foreclosure turned rental, on her list of possibilities. …
So for a group of Americans previously blocked from certain neighborhoods by “not in my back yard” politics, high prices and a lack of rental options, this is a minor bonanza. Those with a Section 8 voucher, a key federal program for the poor, are a fraction of those who need it; waiting lists are full and years long. But they are a lucky fraction. In the recession-era economy, the voucher is becoming a golden ticket to almost anywhere, a point hardly lost on Liza Jackson, whose cellphone was now ringing Lil Wayne.
“Yes?” she said, answering in the prim manner she described as her “white voice.” “I had called about the four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath? Yes. Liza. Like Minnelli.”
Jackson and her daughter Sheena, 24, were saying goodbye to a cramped two-bedroom townhouse in Honolulu, a city she described as “not all it’s cracked up to be, if you’re black…”
