The Chris Moeller Archives

Ice cream, you scream, we all scream for fair housing laws

The municipality of Black Jack, Missouri-- whose council plans to evict unmarried couples with multiple children living in their home-- is the same St. Louis suburb that I serviced by ice cream truck in the summer of 1994. I recall, actually, that it wasn't much of a town at all, just a traffic intersection or two. The big "map on a board" I was given on the first day of my route had "Black Jack" written in magic marker across the top of it, but I would say that I more accurately sold to customers in eastern Florissant, and by nightfall, an unincorporated area of new cul-de-sac housing directly north-- and sold to customers, that is, who didn't run screaming in the heat from a loudspeaker piping Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" across an eight-square-block radius. I remember distinctly that there was a Dollar General store in Black Jack, but the city council part surprises me.

It goes without saying that this type of housing discrimination is insane, hardly worth the harangue really. But I'm compelled by these periodic stories of archaic laws still existing on the books in various locales, either because governments never got around to changing them or because witless bureaucrats don't feel they have the authority to overturn them. Maybe I've got it all wrong, though. Maybe this little old river town-- swallowed almost in whole by suburban sprawl-- really is an ass-backwards burg looking to cast out the heathen Kurt Russell-and-Goldie Hawn-wannabes and restore a 19th Century morality that never was, but I'm tempted to give the benefit of the doubt to a community that took the "Choco-Taco" so warmly to their bosom.

posted by CM @ 5:30 PM