Low Life: Clearview Estates

Clearview Estate – “Where the future waits for you!”

Clearview Estate was built during the Projects boom of the 1950s when housing estates were a leg up, a place where one could regroup and move forward. The original Estate was a city block with four large fifteen-storey high-rises (two of them connected together); a smaller fifth building was added twenty years after that and by the 80s desperate attempts to revitalize the project led to removing much of the green space in the middle and added town homes that ended up being as neglected as the rest of the Estate. Unlike other housing projects, Cleaview hasn’t been featured in horror movies or was made on land that developers wanted to claim for other uses. The lack of low-rent housing in the city had made razing and rebuilding it not politically feasible so politicians have turned blind eyes upon it.

The Estate was made with noble goals, but almost no maintenance happens – to save money for the city housing authority – and the eventual belief that people living in it somehow deserve to had seeped into popular culture like pus out of a wound. Every election cycle politicians drag out a handful of success stories as though it makes up for the horror stories that go unreported. Clearview isn’t where you go when you hit rock bottom. It’s what happens when you hit rock bottom and are handed a shovel and told to start digging.

LAYOUT

North-East: Crack Towers. Even the management refers to Haversham Towers as Crack Towers. Most of the dealers and customers are small time and the police don’t even bother responding to calls about drug use in the Estate any longer thanks to the reputation of the building. The management does try and root out dealers, but it takes time and tribunals and isn’t always successful – nor safe.

North-West: Concrete Jungle (once known as Greenview Heights) is a concrete slab of a building that was painted green, covered in moss and meant to resemble the parks within Clearview Estate. Theyh saved the money spent on the exterior by not plastering any of the interior. The moss is long gone and the green now resembles some of the more distressing options in the Dulux colour chart. The building is cracked, decaying, moldly and in the worst shape of the four original buildings.

South-West: The Twin Towers, so named because they were connected together at the tenth-storey mark. The only part of Clearview to have underground parking, it earned a new name as the Trade Towers post 9/11 since a lot of the underground parking is used up with various spray paints and cheap chop shops on stolen vehicles.

The South-East addition of Galloway Place – known as the Gallows – is a seven story hellhole, even to the people living in it. Each rentable room can fit a bed and small couch, sometimes a dresser. There is one communal fridge in the hallway of each floor and the basement contains communal bathroom and showering facilities. Clearview lore has it that you can catch STDs just by breathing in the air of the Gallows basement. It’s the last place you live before being homeless, the one place that takes cash with no questions asked.

The Clearview Greens town homes are all similar eighties two-storey affairs with faded green siding. Almost none have working shutters anymore and thirty years of neglect has not been kind to them either.

REALITIES:

Building maintenance is non-existent. Power and water failures are common.

Most everyone uses cell phones linked to the crappy free city wi-fi since reliable internet service is a joke. TVs, on the other hand, aren’t a problem. One company is said to have actually showed up with a SWAT team top guard them while they and installed TVs for four homes and no one batted an eye. (This didn't actually happen, but it's entered local folklore as fact.)

Jobs are scarce, and getting a job rather difficult since many employers automatically dismiss anyone living in Clearview from consideration. Insurance is a joke.
The police tend to only come in cars of two or more, and seldom after dark. While there are gangs in Clearview, the general belief is that the police are the worst gang of all.

The local school – Thompson Farms Elementary – is notorious for its lack of gym, auditorium and even cafeteria, to say nothing of textbooks that aren’t grossly out of date. Typing classes are still taught on typewriters in order to save money.

Things have changed a little, thanks to social media. Some people posted enough photos of the state of decay in washrooms and units that the city had to begin spending some money in cleanups, but unfortunately the moment public attention turns away the city does as well. And the public has a rather short attention span.

Sadly, this isn’t the worst of the projects. Everyone has heard of Henry Horner Homes and Cabrini-Green in Chicago. Everyone knows it could be far worse than it is, but some days that isn’t the comfort it tries to be.


General Note: Despite the conditions of living at Clearview, it is better than being on the streets would be. Building repair is entirely done by local work at best but people do try and look out for each other the same as they do anywhere else. There are assholes everywhere, after all, and where one lives does not change that.