I grew up during the bad years. Urban Renewal had come within block of my father’s buildings. New government-subsidized housing projects were competing with old, store-front apartments for the same tenants. The government didn’t have to pay the taxes. The landlord did.

No contest.

I never saw any of my father’s building during their prime. I never saw one of them give him an ounce of pleasure or a penny of profit. Instead, I saw them impose on his very being a depth of exasperation and disillusionment that bordered on grief. And when or if ever I was tempted to understate the horror of owning and managing buildings in slum neighborhoods inhabited solely by welfare recipients well-versed in every aspect of system manipulation, I remember how, during the last days of his life, when semi-conscious from the effects of medications, my father would mutter, not his wife or children’s names in loving delirium, but cry instead to unsympathetic judges that the tenant on Roosevelt Road hadn’t paid his rent in six months…that the woman on Halstead Street had shoved a shirt and two jackets down the toilet to deliberately break the plumbing…that he would fix the furnace on Milwaukee Avenue as soon as he could find a repairman, but that repairmen were afraid of going into the buildings alone.

That …

That …

The four saddest words in the English language are: FOR SALE BY OWNER.