IF IT HAD BEEN MY MOTHER If it had been my mother, heads would be rolling over this one. Of course, if it had been my mother, I would have done the landscaping for her too. Marie Brown is a 77-year-old woman. Yesterday she had a beautiful home in a plush subdivision in a quiet satellite town West of Phoenix. Today she’s a homeless person. This is not a unique story, although the press is trying to treat it like one. Old folks these days want to move into their own little cocoons, not neighborhoods, but stucco-and-tile gulags. They drive through security gates guarded by their fellow seniors, a system so frail a girl scout could compromise it without too much trouble. They pay young contractors thousands of dollars to create eight-foot-high masonry walls, surrounding their community to keep reality out. Then, with the real world absent from their streams of consciousness, they turn bitter and petty, and they start to believe the stuff they read in their own charters and brochures. They become obsessed with the notion that they have some kind of power, when in fact they are simply waiting in a comfortable line, waiting for their baby-boomer kids to take power of attorney from them and stick them in nursing homes to finish out their golden years in diapered dignity. They lose sight of their humanity, and in the process they hurt others, in the name of keeping up the values of the properties in which they spend their borrowed time. If you’re a little kid living with grandma to avoid your abusive parents, you’ve got to go. And if you can’t keep up with the chores, like Marie Brown, they seize your home, auction it off, kick you out, and then go back to their nice, quiet games of bocce ball and shuffleboard. It was probably different when Marie Brown and her husband moved into Westbrook Village in Peoria (www.westbrookvillage.org), back in 1985. Peoria likely seemed a lot farther away from “the city” than it does now. There was not contiguous growth out to the West Valley back then – now it goes well beyond that. There weren’t so many people here back then, either. Now, hordes of retirees flock to this part of the country (although Florida and Texas are fighting hard to get them back) from everywhere. Del Webb’s vision has grown beyond anything he could have hoped for, with the Sun Cities still building, barely ahead of the pace of the buyers. But Marie Brown’s husband died shortly after they bought their home. That’s a tragic fact of life; nobody lives forever, but despite the loss of her loved one, Marie Brown seemed to live a normal life until 1998, when she began slipping in her duties as a resident of Westbrook Village. Oh, to be so honored as to live under the thumb of a homeowner’s association. When they determined that Marie Brown’s landscaping needed a makeover, to meet the community compliance standards, they cut the bushes and trees for her and handed her a bill. Then she stopped paying her association fees, being a member of the great World War II generation and not appreciating being told what to do in such a fashion. Over time, the legal bills came up to, according the association, $27,000. Maybe, as she got older, her mental condition began to deteriorate, as is seen from time to time in people of that age group. Maybe she started pack-ratting things in her home, and maybe she had too many cats (the city removed fifteen or so when they evicted her yesterday). Maybe she had an attitude, and maybe the other neighbors didn’t like her very much. So, to make things right, the Westbrook Village Homeowners Association legally seized her home, and sold it at a court-ordered sheriff’s auction for $52,000 (a fraction of its value), to one of her opportunistic neighbors, no doubt. It is none of our business how that got divvied up. While her good neighbors and the media stood by and watched, Marie Brown was strapped to a gurney and wheeled off to a hospital after sitting outside in the heat for a couple of hours. Police and paramedics refused to force her to accept hospitalization, so the trained professionals obviously didn’t see anything suspicious about her state of mind. That didn’t keep down the catcalls from her vindictive fellow homeowners, who hissed niceties like, “Why don’t you just arrest her?” Anyway. The deal is sealed. The local news might follow Marie Brown around for a while, to see where she ends up and how she does. It isn’t known if she has any relatives or any other properties. Probably not; most old folks who come out here do so for a reason, usually because they have nothing left to stay for “back East”. I don’t know about her situation, and don’t expect much more information to come out about this story, because that’s all it is, a story. Stories come and go in big cities. We sigh and shake our heads when we hear them, and then we focus on our own tunnels some more, until another good story comes along. That might be why Marie Brown chose to live in a nice, quiet subdivision like Westbrook Village, to avoid becoming another story. Like I said, if that was my mother, all Hell would be breaking loose right about now. Hit that link up there. All the information you’d ever want to know about the place is on their website. You can contact them to convey your disgust, if you have any left to dredge up anymore. Paul Heller 08/01/02 << back to the archives
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