Affordable Housing Institute : US

When seeking to house the poor, we have two macro-level choices on assistance-basing:

We know that’s the goal, which way do we do it?

1. Place-based. Build quality apartments and move people in to those apartments.

2. People-based. Give people subsidy that enables them to make effective choice and find apartments in the market.

Neither strategy is perfect, and between them theory ebbs and flows based on which failed more recently.

Diametrically opposed choices, with inadequate information

People-basing allows people to filter into their communities. It’s more organic and complementary to the marketplace. It doesn’t arouse developer ire, and because the people choose their own housing, they have what HUD came to call the “shopper’s incentive.” Having privately owned, professionally managed rental apartments also accords more with the American ethos. Economists also love it, because it comports with their vision of how things ought to work as it is taught in the economics textbooks.

Yes, we both agree, choice is better

But people-basing is unsatisfying to politicians. A family living quietly in market housing is politically visible, and when elected officials put out more funding for portable assistance, the result is a piece of paper, not a move-in. Vouchers are also an indirect execution – government relies on a counterparty (the landlord) to deliver quality accommodations if properly motivated. Conversely, place-basing is direct – government can take action, and the result is ribbon-cuttings.

New housing, and we all get credit

Place-basing also has a primitive common-sense: people lack housing. Okay, we’ll build some! Such a spirit motivated Franklin Roosevelt in 1937, as revealed in this New York Times story:

June 21, 2009

Atlanta Is Making Way for New Public Housing

ATLANTA — In 1936, Atlanta built Techwood Homes, the nation’s first housing project.

First Federal housing project. Boston had an earlier state-funded public housing property.

FDR dedicating Techwood in 1936

These properties, Atlanta among them, were seen first and foremost as slum clearance. If thy housing offend thee, ran the thinking, pluck it out and build quality housing new.

By the 1990s, a greater percentage of the city’s residents were living in housing projects — sprawling red-brick barracks that pockmarked the skyline — than in any other city in America.

Place-basing adds to supply, and more homes are better than fewer homes; plus place-basing and production tend to hold back rent increases. (Public housing was designed with cheap rents, based on costs, that everybody paid. Originally it had no deep income subsidy.) It enables concentration of services (e.g. in elderly or disabled properties), and enforcement is more direct (you can always find the owners because you can attach their assets).

Yet place-basing risks resident exploitation through deteriorating housing. It’s expensive. It limits residence choice. It’s institutional, often looking little different from a prison. If under-funded, it dies slowly, and in dying slowly, it destroys families and communities.

Pick a country, any country – public housing has a visible ethos

As an example of the destructive environment in isolated high-rises, I wrote at length regarding the Paris riots of November, 2005; see City of light, city of flames, L’horloge orange, France: riots, jobs, and housing, France: Tinder, meet match?

Clichy-sous-Bois, after the riots

As I put it back then, to fix French housing policy: tear down the high-rises:

Monolithic structures are suitable only for clones.

High-rise public housing never works.  Never has worked, never will work.

Pruitt-Igoe, vandalized (circa 1968)

Pruitt-Igoe, being depopulated (circa 1968)

Tear them all down and build proper communities, with lower density, low-rise, mixed use, and mixed income.

Remarkably, wonderfully, Atlanta has succeeded in doing just that:

Now, Atlanta is nearing a very different record: becoming the first major city to knock them all down. By next June, officials here plan to demolish the city’s last remaining housing project, fulfilling a long and divisive campaign to reduce poverty by decentralizing it.

Amazing how much inaccurate oversimplification can be packed into a single phrase. Allow me to explode it:

Taking it apart takes it to pieces

Long. Yes. Demolishing Atlanta’s public housing took over a decade, a process begun with the HOPE VI redevelopment of part of Techwood Homes into Centennial Place for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games.

Divisive. By definition, I suppose, anything that lacks unanimity could be seen as divisive. In my experience, demolition of obsolete and decrepit public housing is divisive only in that some few people – residents, some resident advocates – raise a ruckus, or express a litany of conditional doubts, views we’ll see echoed throughout the Times’ article.

Reduce poverty. Wrong – that’s not why public housing is deconcentrated – indeed, it’s not the raison d’etre of public housing at all. Public housing exists to house the poor in decent, safe, and sanitary accommodations, to create the opportunity for poverty reduction but not to do it directly. The purpose of deconcentrating public housing is simply to move people out of unacceptable housing into better housing, better neighborhoods, with better schools.

Mixed-income developments oriented toward families, with trendy shops, golf courses and Y.M.C.A.’s, are emerging where bleak, uniform towers once stood.

What rose where Techwood had been: Centennial Place

This is bad?

Displaced residents are receiving vouchers to move to private housing.

This is bad?

Well built, but obsolete, under-maintained, and unhealthy:

Clark Howell Homes, Atlanta, 1990s

A landmark experiment in housing the urban poor in large government-run facilities that began under the New Deal is being undone.

This is bad?

Over the past 15 years, Atlanta has bulldozed about 15,000 units, spread across 32 housing projects, some of which once contained as many as 2,500 residents.

We had to destroy the exoskeletal shells to save the families: demolishing obsolete Atlanta public housing

As I’ve previously written, some properties need to go somewhere to die, because their exoskeletal structures are so outdated it becomes impossible to maintain people in market-quality accommodations without changing the entire structure.

I have previously written that zoning is destiny. To which add another: building skeleton is destiny. From some destinies, one cannot escape.

From some construction mistakes, you may never recover.

When in doubt, build a bigger skeleton. One day your successors’ successors will need it.

Imagine the muscles we could put on that

Not only are individual building structures constricting, so too are excessive densities, and deep concentration of severe poverty.

“We’ve realized that concentrating families in poverty is very destructive,” said Renee L. Glover, the executive director of the Atlanta Housing Authority. “It’s destructive to the families, the neighborhoods and the city.”

Right, right, and right.

Renee L. Glover, executive director of the Atlanta Housing Authority, at a redeveloped property. Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times

I’ve worked off and on with Ms. Glover on panels and workshops. She’s good people, and she really knows what she’s doing. More to the point – at least for the skeptics and rational paranoiacs, she is committed to the cause of affordability, as demonstrated by Atlanta’s reinvention of itself into the essential housing authority:

The elimination of housing projects does not mean the abandonment of public housing. The Atlanta Housing Authority pays for more residents’ housing these days than it did in the 1990s.

How did Atlanta do it? By strategically reinventing itself into the Essential Housing Authority.

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

Send post as PDF to