Public housing: paradise lost?
Sustainable affordability is tough. People think affordable housing is hard to build and easy to manage. The reality is precisely the reverse: easy to build (just throw money),
hard to own and manage,
requiring periodic revitalization, and very hard to make into a successful community.
The property needs an advocate.
Shelterforce, the bimonthly publication of the resident advocacy group National Housing Institute, carries an insightful review by Ramapo College social work professor Mitchell Kahn:
In a new book, When Public Housing Was Paradise: Building Community in Chicago, J.S. Fuerst humanizes the history of
The sixty-year story of the rise and fall of public housing goes from good (slum clearance, urban renewal) to awful (demolition), like Robert Taylor Homes:
When the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) released its “Plan for Transformation” in January 2000, it was a public acknowledgment of its abject failure to provide safe, habitable and well-managed housing for the 38,000 households residing in the city’s public housing. By its own admission 25,000 units were in need of substantial rehabilitation.
Indeed, not only had the CHA been placed in Federal receivership under HUD direction (a discouraging number the nation’s large public housing authorities have been so treated, including Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Washington DC), but CHA recommended destroying the buildings to save the community:
The plan called for the demolition of 18,000 units, mostly in high-rise complexes like Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. These projects, like many in other cities, had become the poster children for the media’s discussion of rampant drug abuse, gang violence, dysfunctional family life, the evils of welfare and the bureaucratic incompetence of public social welfare programs.
How had it come to this? Public housing (what in the
the earliest form of American affordable housing, had begun in the Depression, with such bright promise, and even stellar early results:
Elizabeth Wood, the CHA’s first director, who served from 1934 to 1954 [had as] guiding principles for managing public housing:
Careful tenant selection
Swift eviction of problem tenants
Promotion of community-building activities.
The lowest-income people and those living in the worst slums were given priority in the new projects, but they were carefully screened for substance abuse and criminal records. All had to pass a housekeeping “home visit.” The majority of households were two-parent families. Female-headed households constituted less than 30 percent. The tenants were poor, but most were employed.
Over time, however, atrophy of zeal and budgetary squeezes led to a softening of management discipline, away from
what works and toward what doesn’t:
Wood’s tenant selection regulations were replaced by a first-come, first-served policy. The projects became inhabited by the poorest of the poor, who were becoming increasingly unemployed and dependent on the insufficient social and community amenities. Management became neglectful of basic maintenance and often failed to enforce rules.
Rules you don’t enforce are worse than useless, because when saints are unrewarded and sinners unpunished, the observant middles herds toward sin. And sin, in this case, is not paying rent, not following the rules, not maintaining and protecting one’s apartment and the community space … and allowing the property to sicken and die.
Affordable housing property management is very hard, much harder than conventional, because affordable housing must have both “mission heart, business mind” and pursue a ‘double bottom line’ — both economic (efficient use of scarce taxpayer resources, protecting the property) and social (delivering affordability). Neither is optional; both are necessary. And they are in conflict.
