On Monday we visited the “Fuggerei” in Augsburg. Jakob Fugger was one of the first international corporate bankers way back in the 1500’s, back when Christians still worried about whether charging interest was usury. He grew very wealthy, and worried whether this might become a problem in the afterlife. With a small sliver of his fortune, he decided to build a settlement of houses for poor Catholics. ( The Catholic part was important because he lived in Martin Luther’s times and didn’t want to encourage the enemy.) The rent was fixed at 1 Rhenish guilder per year - I don’t know how they calculate the conversion, but this year the rent is 88 cents in Euros. Residents have to be of good character and pray for Jakob Fugger’s soul three times a day, though apparently nobody checks up on the prayers. It’s the oldest subsidized housing in the world.
The Fuggerei is a pretty orderly place - grids of streets, the first place in Augsburg that employed house numbers. One of the units is a museum, so you can see how the residents lived when it was first built. What caught my attention was this piece of information: Fugger was motivated to build the housing because during the boom years of the early 1500’s the divide between the rich and poor was growing ever wider, and skilled craftsmen, as well as daily laborers were plunged into poverty as prices rose and wages fell. Each home, though small, has it’s own entrance, and there are small gardens. Fugger wanted to be sure that the residents be treated with dignity and would have privacy.
Today, while walking through the Roman Museum in Trier, I learned that here too, people became suddenly impoverished through economic shifts they could not control, although here the cause was the disintegration of the Roman Empire. These ebbs and flows have been going on throughout recorded history. I wonder why we can’t keep that in mind and work to deal with it, instead of blaming the victims?
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