Land Use Journal

Road Trip by Noel Kerns

Noel Kerns is a Dallas-based photographer specializing in capturing Texas’ ghost towns, decommissioned military bases, and industrial abandonments at night. Growing up in the central Texas hill country, Kerns developed his photographic skills shooting large format black & white landscapes.  The slow and deliberate nature of the large format photographic process was a perfect launching pad into the art of digitally photographing the nocturnal world.

One of the things Kerns enjoy most about photographing under a full moon are all the latent details, those things which reveal themselves only when you take the time to let the moonlight tell the story. He loves the calm and tranquility of a peaceful night scene, as well as the eerie feeling one can get when shooting an old desert ghost town under a full moon.

When people had trouble paying the rent in the early 1900s, they might hold a party in their homes, with music and dancing, and sell tickets at the door. Now, a nonprofit group is holding a modern-day version of the rent party to shine a light on the growing lack of affordable housing.

The new parties aren’t exactly like the old ones, which were mostly held in Harlem. There’s no dancing, food or tickets. But there is music, as was the case recently in Annapolis, Md., where about 20 people gathered in Tom Wall’s small apartment to help him, and others like him, pay the rent.

Wall, 67, used to be a lawyer in the housing and finance industry. He had to quit when he had a stroke in 2011. But then he and his wife couldn’t pay the mortgage on their house, and the lender moved to foreclose.

The couple moved to the apartment last summer. But Wall’s wife, Peggy, died three weeks later of cancer. He now lives on $2,300 a month from Social Security, but his $1,600-a-month rent eats up more than two-thirds. Wall is like a record number of American families — 11.4 million — that spend over half of their incomes on rent. It’s especially difficult for low-income families, who have little left over for food and other necessities.

Modern Rent Parties Highlight The Need For Affordable Housing

A cartoon by Joe Dator.