Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from the preceding Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.]
 

[For more on my views of public housing, see Public housing: the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (June, 2006), Public housing’s Gordian’s knot (December, 2006), and The essential housing authority (September, 2007).  Dozens of marvelous photographs are in the LaGuardia-Wagner archives.]

 

As we’ve seen in prior parts of this history of public housing using MIT Professor Lawrence Vale’s comprehensive study, From the Puritans to the Projects, public  housing was a natural outgrowth of the reformist initiatives – first church, then philanthropists, and finally government took on the challenge of providing quality housing – out of beneficence, one might say – to those who could not afford it.  A common theme running through all these efforts was that housing affordability for the poor could not be the province of private-sector robber barons.  Plutocrats and grandees could not possibly care about the poor; they could not possibly deliver housing quality and affordability at the same time.

 

Affordability?  Or economics?  Choose before the ice cream cones melt!

 

By placing itself as the owner/ operator of public housing – as well as its source of regulation and subsidy – government drew all the threads of power into its own hands.  Yet government is not monolithic or steadfast; if anything its behavior is akin to a person suffering from both multiple personalities (many voices in Congress and an administration) and periodic total amnesia (change of government).  An amnesiac schizophrenic is not whom you want doing the very tough job of affordable housing finance and ownership – in fact it’s probably the worst owner you could have.  Its good intentions are no help whatsoever; in fact they shield government from accountability for its own actions.

 

And from mission creep.  It’s entirely understandable, if devastating in the long run, that government would choose to add extra missions onto public housing.  It became the refuge for the poorest of the poor; a device for social change; and a convenient resting place for local patronage. 

 

During a decade (roughly 1963 through 1973), public housing went extremely poor, and largely black.  Several factors combined to make tipping (as it was and is known) inevitable.  The housing was institutional:

 

Elizabeth Wood, consultant hired to assess BHA properties (1962): “According to its image, public housing has inferior architecture; looks institutional; is inhabited by people who are inferior by virtue of their residence or because they are all on public assistance, or because the projects are rife withy crime and muggings, or because they are spied on by management which makes them turn out their lights by ten o’clock but allows crime to rampage.”  Page 284.

With limited resources, public welfare departments used public housing as “the housing of last resort,” the place for the poorest of the poor.  Average incomes plummeted:

“Nationally, between 1961 and 1970, the median family income of non-elderly public housing tenants declined from 47% to 37% of the US median family income, and continued to plummet thereafter.  [By the mid-1990’s, it was 17% of area median, a level consistent with welfare payments — Ed.]

 

Redskirt, New York City: who lives inside?

Facing limited resources, housing authorities sent to public housing their poorest, many of them on welfare:

Beginning in the mid-1960s, as more and more economically desperate families pressed for admission to public housing, service agencies sought ways to place their clients.  As early as 1964, the Welfare Department itself regularly sent letters attempting to intercede on behalf of its clients.  By the end of the 1960s more than two-thirds of household in Boston public housing reported that they had no [legally – Ed.] employed member.  Nearly half of the non-elderly households were headed by a single parent.  Page 330.

By 1966, public housing had become ultra-poor, and predominantly black:

National Commission on Urban Problems: “The statistical data show that public housing is reaching the lowest income families among those who apply.  If anything, public housing developments are becoming isolated colonies of the poorest, least competitive elements of society.”  Page 315

Neither of us really understands why you’re here

Moving to the poorest of the poor destroyed any hope of economic viability short of subsidy.  As I wrote two years ago:

Faced with these new competitors, public housing has gradually become ‘the housing of last resort,’ where dwell ‘the poorest of the poor,’ though neither of these were among the program’s original objectives. 

 

Over time, public housing migrated to a customer base that cannot afford even the operating costs.

Public housing was pushed into this corner by exclusion — each new wave of superior-quality production carved away a top slice of its eligible-resident universe, leaving public housing with income concentration.

In the Fifties and Sixties, urban income concentration meant black.  As a result, public housing’s tipping coincided with two other great waves that shook America in the Sixties: the Civil Rights movement, and the urban riots.  They came together in Boston in a particularly ugly way, with forced busing of blacks from the city, and forced integration of public housing.  Spurred by the Irish-Catholic residents of South Boston, the BHA fought to keep some public housing properties all-white.
 

I grew up in a properly liberal Boston suburb (Marblehead) and like the junior high and high-school kids of the time, and I think it impossible to convey, to a generation reared on multicultural popular figures and diversity curricula, how fearful, vicious, and violent the busing era was.  

National Guard practicing to enforce school integration, 1974, Boston

Driving the suburbs’ resistance, I think, was not just racism and fear, but also the unhappy conflation of race with cities, extreme poverty, and crime – all of it personified in brick in the public housing projects.


Busing protest, 1970

In very short order, we had, played out on our television screens:

Court-ordered busing and public housing integration.

Boston Police escorting children to school

Defiant and sometimes violent confrontations between Boston’s Irish Catholics and police.

Anti-busing rally and protest at Boston City Hall

Pitched battles among gangs at the public housing properties, and national political crisis.

Television played its revolutionary part: we had never seen anything like this happening in real time in our living rooms.  This wasn’t the America of our schoolbooks and our aspirations.  We didn’t understand it – even today, it’s hard to explain.  From the perspective of forty years’ reflection, no one from that era looks good.

Defending Southie against invasion: City councilor Jim Kelley, 1975

Integration took twenty years, and even today, the scars linger.  We can see it in the aging generation of reverse-racist tenant leaders who cling to a shrinking and crumbling power base in tenant-run co-operatives like Bromley-Heath. 

In this political gunfight, public housing as a policy suffered mortal collateral damage.  As the locus of crime and race and poverty, public housing was tarred with a brush that has stained it in the public mind for thirty-five years since.  The projects were seen a failure – a physical failure (deteriorating and wretched conditions), a social failure (crime, unemployment), and a financial failure (sucking Federal money seemingly without end).  Catering to those in the bottom quartile, limited in their revenues too 25% (later 30%) of income, the housing authorities were locked into a money-losing proposition.  Dependent on subsidy, they had to beg for money, and what came from the state or the Feds was never enough.  (In their defense, I note that most housing authorities were shamefully inefficient with subsidy resources, so criticism of fiscal irresponsibility were and today still are often valid.)

By 1968, housing authorities were financially destitute:
 

According to HUD, half of the nation’s eighty major housing authorities are losing money, and seven of the ten largest are near bankruptcy.  Page 337.

 

       
Mill Creek, Philadelphia, built 1958-62

Public housing could not keep itself above water as the cities sank around them.  Indeed, by the mid-1970s the public housing system was (in the words of a court-pointed Master of the Boston Housing Authority):

[a] culture of “no accountability for forty years, except to political favors and poor people who can’t say anything.”  (Page 340)

In 1979, Boston’s housing authority was such a mess that activist judge Paul Garrity put it into receivership, appointing Harry Spence (my ex-next-door-neighbor) as receiver:

Harry Spence recently: older but still optimistic

In explaining his decision, Garrity blamed the BHA Board for “gross mismanagement, non-feasance, incompetence and irresponsibility” that had led to “indescribable conditions” and “incalculable human suffering” in Boston public housing.  “The conditions, he continued [echoing the 1949 housing Act], “were and are indecent, unsafe, and in violation of almost every provision of the State Sanitary Code.  If the BHA were a private landlord it surely would have been driven out of business long ago or its board jailed or most likely both.”  Page 344.

Few other large housing authorities were in any better shape.

Harry’s arrival was greeted with the fanfares normally reserved for the divine.  As Vale puts it:

Spence – a charismatic thirty-three-year-old Harvard Law School graduate who had already won kudos for his leadership of the Cambridge Housing Authority just across the river – remained undaunted.  He had easily won over a selection committee faced with more than two hundred applicants for the receiver’s post (including expressions of interest fro the directors of the rest of the nation’s ten largest housing authorities).  To his many admirers, Spence’s demeanor seemed nothing short of Kennedy-esque – “an attractive, magnetic figure from a privileged background who talks passionately about economic injustice  and the government’s responsibility to the needy, who walks comfortably through Boston’s poorest neighborhoods, and who leaves deprived people feeling that someone respects them and cares about their problems.”  The Boston Globe Magazine put Spence on its cover, photographing him from below so that his head rose confidently above the roofscapes of a troubled development.  Just above Spence, the city’s largest paper posed the editorial question, “Can this man save public housing?”  Page 348.

 

 

 [Concluded in Part 6.]

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