Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from yesterday's Part 2 and the preceding Part 1.]

So far in this three-part post, using as our text this New York Times story, we’ve followed the Atlanta Housing Authority’s fifteen-year quest to reverse the public-policy error of excessively large purely public housing properties with deep income concentration and physical isolation.

Now 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 …

Atlanta has been reforming itself toward the essential housing authority:

As the public body, AHA receives Section 8 voucher subsidies from the Federal government (yellow box), qualifies and places residents (public accountability blue box; program compliance blue box). It further provides asset management oversight on all properties occupied by AHA-assisted residents, whether they have portable vouchers or are part of a HOPE VI or other public-private partnership.

If AHA wants to own or co-own properties (as with HOPE VI), it does so through a series of Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs), each of which owns a single property – and therefore, each of us has separate financial reporting.

By structuring itself into the essential housing authority, the Atlanta Housing Authority is configuring as a Mission Entrepreneurial Entity (MEE), about which I’ve written at length. Some other housing authorities, partly mid-sized ones in the West, are similarly evolving to this better organizational form. In so doing, they have to rehab and reconfigure their housing stock.

Atlanta’s 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.

All of which cities desperately need this reinvention. As I posted on New Orleans a year and a half ago:

[S]ome New Orleans neighborhoods are worse than condemned.

The C J Peete complex before its demolition

Yet before these obsolescent and by now dangerous places can be destroyed, those who would do so must suffer their time in the pillory, as reported in The Washington Post:

Friday, December 21, 2007; 12:55 AM

NEW ORLEANS — Police used chemical spray and stun guns Thursday on protesters who tried to force their way into a City Council meeting, the latest strife over plans to demolish some 4,500 public housing units in a redevelopment project that council members ended up unanimously supporting.

New Orleans police officers subdue protesters at the New Orleans City Council meeting where the council is expected to vote for the demolition of housing projects in the city of New Orleans, Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007. Police used chemical spray and stun guns Thursday as dozens of protesters seeking to halt the demolition of 4,500 public housing units tried to force their way through an iron gate at City Hall.

Take a careful look at that photograph. Three protesters, who appear not hurt but acting hurt. One cop, trying to catch a shaved-head man determined to clutch a fence. One photographer anxious to capture the visual. It’s street theater.

Try as I may, I cannot find a good explanation for the faux-hysterical reactions these demolition proposals inspire, usually among well-educated ill-informed outsiders. Is it a primitive reaction to perceived powerlessness, that they have to act out for the attention it will draw? We’re useless but at least you noticed us, therefore we’ve done our part.

At least you noticed me!

Yet in their posing, the protesters are harming the people they claim to care about, because all they do is prolong the status quo and delay the creative destruction:

Over all, 195,000 public housing units have met the wrecking ball across the country since 2006, and over 230,000 more units are scheduled for demolition, according to the Housing and Urban Development Department.

Built property doesn’t live forever. (I recently discovered that in Japan, where they are used to building with light wood, a house is expected to last no more than thirty years.) Structural materials age and decay; physical systems become obsolescent; technology’s advance raises the market standard. After an interval, it must either be substantially renovated – gut-rehabbed – or demolished and rebuilt. If not, it becomes a struldbrug building, condemned to a life of decrepitude.

Valencia Gardens, San Francisco

Atlanta, to its credit, has been aggressively reinventing the authority and changing its inventory:

Only four of the city’s housing projects remain, along with 13 smaller public housing facilities, mostly for senior citizens, that the city will continue to operate.

The high-rise elderlies are a different case. They were built 20-25 years later, in the great second wave of public housing (1955-1965)

“Atlanta’s plan signifies in a very clear way that the social contract that cities and citizens have with the poor has fundamentally changed,” said Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia University who studies urban neighborhoods. “We’ve decided that the market can function to create housing and the role of government should be to move people into the market.”

If you pay us, we will come

Not quite. The market will always build it if government will pay for it.

Some researchers and policy makers say the model is succeeding. Thomas D. Boston, an economist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who has tracked Atlanta’s housing-project residents since 1995, said those who move are more likely to find work, their children were likely to perform better in school and they report higher satisfaction with their living conditions.

As covered in Saint Katrina?, deconcentrating poverty seems to give those deconcentrated a better chance of success – and that’s only common sense.

The housing authority says the overwhelming majority of residents support the relocations. But critics say [Those anonymous, unquantified, unqualified gripers – Ed.] unsuspecting residents are forced into only marginally better neighborhoods. The vouchers, which usually provide families with $568 to $758 per month, according to the housing authority, are not available to residents with certain criminal backgrounds –

As posted in managing the lifeboats, occupancy in affordable housing should not be an entitlement regardless of your behavior, yet that is the tacit assumption of those who would make it open to everyone.

– and are often viewed suspiciously by landlords in wealthier communities.

Unfortunately, as we saw in Dead-drop housing: Part 1, the value chain, landlords sometimes are right to be suspicious of renter applicants whose background they find questionable.

I spy with my little eye …

Yet suspicion is often cover for racism. Vouchers are no panacea, and there are substantial technical and policy challenges associated with making a voucher delivery system work. Still, Atlanta has an enormous supply of rental housing, and except possibly for Houston or Phoenix, is one of the best American cities to embark on the radical reinvention of a housing authority.

A large majority of displaced residents settle in 10 of Atlanta’s poorest ZIP codes, according to an analysis of housing authority data by Creative Loafing, an alternative newspaper.

Guess where the public housing properties were?

Only about 20 percent return to their communities once the property becomes a mixed-income development, Mr. Boston said.

That statistic cuts both ways; indeed it might be said to be a triumph of the program. We give people choice; we give them the means to be economically mobile; we guarantee they a right to return to their former property (a plank of every HOPE VI or similar redevelopment); and yet 4 out of 5 choose to live elsewhere. Isn’t that a searing indictment of the pre-redevelopment environment?

Yet the Times seems oblivious to the revolutionary success because it is determined to give ‘equal time’ to opposing views, regardless of their credibility:

“Until you have alternative housing that is affordable, available and appropriate, you have no business going into these communities and destroying them,” said Anita Beaty, the executive director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless.

Ms. Beaty may not be the best spokesperson for this issue. Her entity’s Web site is flagged by Google as potentially harmful to your computer, and the second link reveals that Ms. Beaty’s shelter has had the water turned off twice in the last month because it has not paid its bills.

“To disperse these people without giving them alternatives is wrong.”

And is it wrong not to pay $180,000 in water bills, Ms. Beaty?

Atlanta has plenty of alternatives.

Ms. Glover, the executive director of the housing authority and a former Wall Street lawyer with graduate degrees from Yale and Boston Universities, is the architect of Atlanta’s public housing model. She has become well known in housing circles, hailed as visionary by supporters and condemned as ruthless by critics.

Ruthless? Renee Glover

Personally, I think she’s terrific, and has built a strong staff.

Ms. Glover — along with Atlanta’s mayor, Shirley Franklin — was considered by President Obama as a nominee for HUD secretary.

Ms. Glover does not blame the social engineers of the 1930s for creating housing projects.

The state-of-the-art housing and the state-of-the-art car

Their solution worked during the New Deal, she said, but collapsed as public housing became more racially segregated and attracted drug crime.

As I know Ms. Glover knows, the full story is more complicated than that conflation. After World War II, whites fled from the cities, leaving public housing to be both income and racially concentrated, and in the Seventies, the cities hit bottom, taking with them the public housing stock.

The cities have since recovered; public housing largely has not.

These days, Atlanta is again the vanguard in an experiment that Ms. Glover acknowledged could have unintended consequences. But her greater concern, she said, is that cities will safeguard the status quo.

Give Ms. Glover credit for seeing the future, and making it happen.

The vision: an integrated and specialized Mission Entrepreneurial Entity

“For us to think that a program that was conceptualized 70 years ago is still the right answer, it makes no sense,” she said. “Today is a whole new era.”

Vision made reality: Ms. Glover in front of redeveloped post-HOPE VI housing

Good for you, Renee. You did it.

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