Areas of high crime and poverty need help more than most areas. Providing housing is an enormous challenge. Imagine trying to fix up a building in an area with a lot of crime and poverty. Often you get many people who want to help, but can barely help themselves. After World War II, Newburgh was a big hit. It was one of the top 10 small cities in the United States. As manufacturing jobs from the war vanished, and people left the city, the city began to deteriorate. Poverty, crime, drugs, and bad management undermined the conditions to sustain the buildings of Newburgh. Landlords were powerless to stop it. The politicians and judges let people stop paying rent, let people destroy the housing and let people make a nuisance that drove the good tenants out of the city. By 2010, much of Newburgh was boarded up, broken and vacant. Lately the tide is slowly turning, but is unlikely to change unless tenants are held accountable. Affordable housing is impossible without tenants who maintain the rental unit and pay rent. Small landlords are beat down by the system. During the CoVid-19 pandemic, the government forced landlords to pay for housing for people who could not afford it and people who took advantage of the system. For many tenants, the government gave the green light to stop paying rent, to destroy the building and commit as much crime as possible. Landlords could not enter buildings without putting their lives in danger. Many landlords were forced to house tenants who didn’t pay rent, destroyed the place, and made an endless nuisance. Imagine working for years without pay to provide housing for free to drug addicts, junkies, crack heads and violent people. Landlords provided a critical service to stop the pandemic and the government would not pay a penny, instead, the government made it nearly impossible to evict these tenants.