Tim Lira > Recent Status Updates

Finished the Psalms…. Finally.

I was so moved by the bilocation told starting on page 57. This truly is miraculous, brought tears to my eyes.

Just finished up Judith. What a woman!

Finished up Nehemiah!

Done with 2 Chronicles… that one was a grind.

Finished 1 Chronicles!

Fantastic so far… the first half of 1st chronicles was a grind. The chapters that are all lineages are a tough read.

Book I hits hard… and it’s only about his childhood. The closing prayer on page 24 is beautiful. “So you will preserve me too, and what you have given me will grow and reach perfection, and I will be with you; because this too is your gift to me — that I exist.”

Returned to library. Start back up from here

Great for being 100+ years old. Mystery, murder. Has me blowing through the pages. Great first step into westerns.

The Ford plant and UAW were finally going to build housing in Milpitas for African Americans. However, the city raised the price to connect the sewer by 10x for each house, making it unaffordable for the low-middle class auto workers from being able to afford anything being built. The city did this only because the neighborhood was going to be integrated.

Chapter 9 is about local segregation tactics. Ben Gross, Chair of the Ford Plant’s Housing Committee, was trying to build a neighborhood around Milpitas for black people. He tried to develop 4 different sites, each time the local government deliberately rezoned the area to industrial to prevent a black neighborhood going up.

I was really interesting to read the chapter on the 2008 recession. Lenders (I.e. large banks) targeted low income and typically black borrowers with “subprime” loans to get them to over borrow on houses they couldn’t afford. When the borrow inevitably defaulted, the banks would get more in return on high interest rates. Black people were targeted with the belief they wouldn’t know they were being exploited.

Block busters would do a number of things to try and cause white flight. They’d have black woman walk the streets with a stroller, have black men drive around blasting loud music, they’d stage a realtor and black “buyers” and have them knock on doors asking if the house was for sale. All to cause property value to crash, buy it up, then sell it at inflated prices to black families.