Affordable Housing Institute : US

Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]

Earlier this year, as we saw yesterday via this New York Times story, the Atlanta Housing Authority has accomplished an impressive feat: it ended a 73-year policy detour by tearing down the last of its original Depression-era public housing, not because it wanted to exit from the business of housing the poorest of the poor, but rather because it wanted to exit from the business of owning that housing rather than insuring its viability.

I’ve got a beef with the owner …

In doing so, Atlanta was pursuing what we’ve called the essential housing authority:

So what is a housing authority, in essence?  What is the thing that distinguishes it from all other critters?

It holds a public trust — to provide quality housing at very low cost to those who are least able to find it in the private marketplace.  Effectively a publicly accountable charitable institution, a housing authority receives public subsidy, via the indirect collection agent of government — if it doesn’t, the system breaks down completely — and deploys it for the public benefit of affordable housing and healthy low-income communities.  That’s the essential function:

We can expand this single goal into a short menu of activities:

Everything else is a technical function, which means it can be contracted, and if it can, it should.

Yes, we can do that — what do you want done?

The technical functions associated with public housing consist of all those activities that (1) require expertise, (2) benefit from economies of scale, (3) can be performance-audited afterwards (meaning that government can inspect later and determine if the work was properly done)

Thus the essential housing authority is a holding company:

Yet today’s typical housing authority is anything but a holding company.  Instead it’s an insular expanding universe unto itself.

“The only thing we have to fear … is an endlessly expansive housing authority.”

Way back when Franklin Roosevelt invented the public housing authority, the affordable housing ecosystem was primitive, practically clear-cut forest.  Housing authorities took on technical functions because they had to, and today they maintain those technical functions because they always have.   Until recently, housing authorities could ignore the wider world, so they have continued on, doing a little better the same things they did before, and seldom acting upon the radical restructuring that would bring them into a modern holding-company, effective real estate ownership structure.

To become the Essential Housing Authority, Atlanta could not build from scratch; instead it had to extricate itself from the legacy of 15,000 physically obsolete apartments, which made it the city’s (and state’s) biggest landlord. Atlanta did so with a three-step sequence for each affected household:

Three little steps up

1. Convert the assistance from place-based (public housing operating subsidy) to people-based (portable vouchers)

2. Successfully place the newly portable family in private (or public-private) housing throughout the city.

3. Demolish the gradually-vacated legacy public housing.

The Atlanta Housing Authority pays for more residents’ housing these days than it did in the 1990s.

The net result is more people housed, fewer apartments owned by AHA.

But they are scattered throughout the city in mixed-income communities and private housing financed with vouchers through the government’s Section 8 program.

This is bad?

Still, critics of the demolitions worry about the toll on residents, who must [1] qualify for vouchers, [2] struggle to find affordable housing and [3] often move to only slightly less impoverished neighborhoods.

I deplore this superficial evenhandedness, which abdicates the responsibility of forming an opinion of one’s own.

Start with unnamed and unquantified ‘critics’ (do they have a basis for their criticism? Or are they just whiners?).

Whining? Yu-uck

Then add an irrefutable test ‘worry’ – if you cannot criticize the reality, you can criticize what you imagine might become the reality. As to the substantive concerns:

1. Voucher qualification. Anyone living lease-compliant in public housing will qualify for a voucher – and obviously all the relocated residents have done so.

2. Struggle to find affordable housing. That would be more of a concern were it not in the past.

3. Often move … only slightly less impoverished. Moving is a bitch, as we all know.

Let me ask the question in reverse. Suppose we took 15,000 very low income families, living scattered throughout Atlanta. Rounded them up, herded them into mid-rise and high-rise isolated properties, which we then proceeded to under-maintain. The nation would be up in arms at this ‘quarantining of the poor.’

We’ll just move you all in here for the duration

Atlanta has done exactly the reverse – successfully, mind you! – and for its labors, is lambasted by anonymous worried critics.

How will I placate my critics?

Especially in a troubled economy, civil rights groups say, uprooting can lead to homelessness if more low-income housing is not made available.

Yes, it can. But the housing was made available, and has been rented.

Also, what’s this gratuitous ‘especially in a troubled economy’? More lazy thought abdication. The time to worry about relocation is in a strong economy, when landlords might have the luxury of discrimination, or of charging rents higher than the AHA will pay. A down market is precisely when it’s most effective – and Atlanta’s been doing this for fifteen years, across markets bad and good.

Lawsuits have been filed [A] in many other cities, [B] generally without success, that claim that similar relocations violate residents’ civil rights and resegregate the poor.

In that case, [A] why cite irrelevancies that are not comparable, and [B] lose anyway?

The federal government has advocated variations of this approach for several decades, particularly since President Bill Clinton began the HOPE VI program in the 1990s to disperse residents from centralized projects.

Mission main coming down

I’ve posted at length about HOPE VI in my History of US public housing: Part 6, the HOPE revolution.

What replaced the demolition: the new Mission Main

Atlanta may be the furthest along, but its plans to demolish buildings, relocate residents and work with private developers to gentrify destitute neighborhoods are being mirrored across the country in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Miami and New Orleans.

In all of these cities, the family high-rises should be torn down. Yet some people cling to them:

It’s precarious, but it’s mine

[Concluded tomorrow in Part 3.]

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