Dear editor,

Lyndon B. Johnson has to be smiling in his grave.

His 1965 “war on poverty” is alive and doing fine. The reason I know this is from your Friday article, “Affordable housing needed,” then in your weekend edition, “Housing authority eyes decentralization.”

When are people going to realize that the bigger the “War on Poverty “ grows, the smaller the “American Dream” becomes. Ms. Heard, the housing authority’s executive director, feels like we are obligated to spread the low-income housing families in different neighborhoods around town, not to sound hard-hearted Ms. Heard, I owe them nothing. If they don’t like the neighborhood they live in, I suggest they get them another 20-hour-a-week job.

The day the government quits enabling people, that is the day they will change the course of their lives. They may want to say that they can’t find a job, I personally know of two longtime manufacturing companies in town. One of these companies it took three weeks to feel one shift, the other is still looking for people that want to work — not a paycheck, but work for their paycheck.

But why work? If it’s not the job you want, you can go to the post office and survive. I don’t know if you remember this, about nine to 10 years ago the city of Atlanta was going to build a 20-unit, low-income housing development and was taking applications for apartments that were four years out. They had over a thousand people line up over the three or four days for an application. I saw the lines on the morning news — 1,000 people, 20 apartments, four years away — all I could think was you have no ambition to better yourself over the next four years, is this all you want out of life?

Mr. editor, I would like to convey to Ms. Heard I want to see everyone do well in life, and in a perfect world, it may be a good plan. I think you can get the real-estate companies in LaGrange to stand with you and this plan of mixed-income communities, ‘cause it won’t be long before “For Sale” signs will be going up.

Ms. Heard, one request: before you get the City Council and the Troup County commissioners to sign off on the program — and you will, that’s just the way they spend our monies — would you be so kind as to go to 105 Ridley Ave. and ask Mrs. Sherri Brown and her Circles of Troup, with all the money we have given her, “Why do we still have poverty in Troup County?” It was their job to end poverty in Troup County.

Mike Moses

Lagrange