The Michigan Daily-Saturday, June 17, 1978-Page 9 eks the( Ogeance that. But change does seem to be coming. While outsiders burn to live in Birmingham, the residents pay incredibly high property taxes. The lack of (developable space) is much like Ann Arbor's - except that it is worse in some ways. The city has a great lack of parking spaces, and many more hungry meters than are in Ann Arbor. "We seem to be going towards becoming a great big city, and we neither have the land, the roads or the sewers to support the kind of crazy development that there has been," said Dorothy Conrad, one of the recalled com- missioners and ex-mayor of Birmingham. "It also changes the feeling of Birmingham. You can have development without changing the whole feeling of the city. But we seem to be getting away from our town image," she added. IN MANY ways, the lack of housing for senior citizens has been one of the city's largest headaches in years. A sur- vey taken in 1970 indicated that many senior citizens in the Birmingham area requested housing, and the 1970 census showed a great number of these seniors to be in the lower- income or very-low income bracket. A 1978 Housing Com- mission survey stated that around 200 elderly residents of Birmingham had requested housing, and had an annual in- come of under $4,000. With the need established, and groups increasingly speaking up for senior citizens, the city formed the Bir- mingham Housing Commission in 1973, to seek out a site to build a project for low-income elders. In conjunction with a department store chain, the commission bought land in the downtown area with"general tax funds later that year. The city approved the purchase of land. After the land sale had been cleared, the housing com- mission began to screen developers for the contract to build the home. THE BATTLE over senior citizen housing began. The company selected by the city commission in an open meeting, a Birmingham church group known as Baldwin House, was given the contract, according to ex- commissioner Conrad, because they had submitted the best design, a 152-unit home which provided the best use of land and which made plans for an underground parking lot, allowing more space for the home itself. None of the other seven developers had made provisions for so much parking. The only member of the city commission who opposed giving Baldwin House the contract was Robert Kelley. "We had some real good bids, from established developers and builders, people with a record, people with a bank account, people who could go ahead and build us a building," said Kelley. Loor. "I have no objection to a church group running the thing, maybe, but they should not be doing the stone and mortar work," Kelley explained. Mayor Robert.Kelley, a veteran in Birmingham politics and the only man who remains from the city commission that sat before the housing proposals were defeated, denied the need for any lower-income housing in Birmingham. "I think people are getting screwed up in this country when they got the idea that the only people in financial need are just the sepior citizens," said Kelley. "I know of no requests. People are just 'interested' in it (low-income housing) ... they want a retirement home, they want a Sun City, Arizona," Kelley said. There is a sizable slice of the Birmingham pride within Robert Kelley. He was a man born in the south who never received a college education, and after serving in the Navy in World War II, spent years in Detroit working in the medical supply business. Bespeckled and grandfatherly, Kelley is symbolically a superb choice for the mayor of Birmingham - a friendly person who speaks warmly but who can be embarassingly blund. His is the honest success story, the fabled tale of up-by-the-bootstraps.(Today Robert Kelley is an executive for the Global Steel Corporation.) Once the voters of Birmingham had approved of the con- struction of the downtown site with a contract to Baldwin House, the city applied to the Michigan State Housing Development Authority (MSHDA). It is the function of MSHDA to allocate state funds to pay for the construction and certain other costs of low-income housing in Michigan. MSDA approved Birmingham's contract with Bald- win, and hammered out a program which would have the state paying for 90 per cent of the cost of construc- tion, with the other ten per cent coming from holders of the private stock that Baldwin would sell. PLANS FOR the construction could not be carried out, however, because of the unavailability of certain money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Where MSHDA would pay to the city costs incurred from building the home, HUD was responsible for sup- plying rent subsidies to the Baldwin House, to supplement the amount of rent the elderly tenants were able to pay. HUD rent subsidies are not given only to elderly low- income citizens, but are handed out on a scale determined by a person's income bracket. Generally, federal housing money is funnelled to cities through their counties. In Oakland County, which includes Birmingham, the allotments of rent subsidies and the qualifications for living in low-income housing are deter- mined by the county's total median income. A per:son qualifies for both rent subsidies and low-income housing subsidies simultaneously in Oakland County by earning less than-80 per cent of the total median income. If one earns less than 50 per cent of the median, he qualifies for very-low income status, which earns higher subsidies. However, just because one has qualified for the subsidies or the housing does not mean they will get them.:In the case See BIRMINGIIAM, Page 14 Illness not metaphor for Sontag Illness as Metaphor, by Susan Sontag. Frarrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York.088 pp. $5.95. By Robin Heywood D URING THE PEAKING tumult of the Vietnam War, Susan Sontag wrote "the white race is the cancer of human history." Therein, a complex issue is made abruptly clear. The use of cancer as a metaphor has a force which implies necessity of ac- tion and severe measures. Both cancer and war have urgent and fatal qualities. War terminology is often used in connection with illness; healty cell in- vaded by distorted cell. The myth of cancer as an epitome of evil provides a handy vehicle to project attitudes about our un- satisfactory social condition. Illness as Metaphor explores the analogies of political disorder to illnesses. From Plato's time until now, Sontag of- fers a neat account of mythology reflecting the temper of the times. The classical and political idea of balance sup- ports the phenomenon of disease mythology in society. Illness comes from unbalance. this enables the reality of illness to become the dump spot for personal fears, societal paranoia and general ignorance. The author states that such a situation causes death to be extra ugly. It further prevents action based on a comprehension of life processes. Problems of growth are avoided while balance and the eradication of disease is worked at through the study of disease itself rather than the whole environment. SONTAG BELIEVE that illness has always been used to emphasize the corruption of societies. The current-day cancer-prone character is described as one being laden with emotional blocks. Cancer is, in the current view, a "steady repression of feeling." In the original form of the fantasy the feelings were sexual. Sontag disagrees with Wilhelm Reich's definition of cancer: "following emotional resignation, a bio-energetic shrinking, a giving up of hope." Sontag succinctly exposes the rich store of disease mythology as such. She does not reject the con- sistent manner in which illness has been seen as metaphor; the reasons for these views are real. But they fade next to the reality of real illness. To resist metaphoric thinking, according to Son- tag, is "the most truthful way of regarding illness and the healthiest way of being ill." Susan Sontag certainly knows. Her own cancer was positively diagnosed twoyears ago.