Category: Subsidy

Rehab deferred is rehab denied: Part 3, future

5 February, 2010 (10:35) | Apartments, Essential posts, Housing, New York City, Public housing, Subsidy, Theory, US News | No comments

By: David A. Smith
 
[Continued from yesterday's Part 2 and the preceding Part 1.]
 
In using the New York Times’s superficial examination of the Ingersoll and Whitman public housing properties in New York City to bring out the challenges facing not just these two large properties but the entire legacy public housing inventory, we have so far [...]

Rehab deferred is rehab denied: Part 2, present

4 February, 2010 (10:53) | Apartments, Essential posts, Housing, New York City, Public housing, Regulation, Subsidy, Theory, US News | No comments

By: David A. Smith
 
[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
 
Yesterday we visited Ingersoll and Whitman Houses, two large public housing properties in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, where the New York Times showed the obligatory photographs of empty apartments and broken windows before giving an assemblyman a platform to spout complaints about the invisible ‘administrative management’ that makes [...]

Rehab deferred is rehab denied: Part 1, past

3 February, 2010 (11:03) | Apartments, Essential posts, Housing, New York City, Public housing, Regulation, Subsidy, Theory, US News | No comments

By: David A. Smith
 

What bureaucrat can we blame for this?
 
The New York Times story inspiring this post follows the time-honored journalistic formula for spotlighting a problem to deplore: start with an incontrovertibly deplorable problem, chase it with a provocative quote, and skate superficially through the background. 
 

It’s simple, class; to publish, you must write
 
Someone had [...]

Managing the lifeboats

11 March, 2009 (10:05) | Boston, DTA, Government, Homeless, Housing, Massachusetts, Policy, Rental, Subsidy | No comments

The ship is sinking. 
 

Women, children, and credited cast members first
 
You have lifeboats in the water.
 

 
But you have fewer lifeboats than passengers.
 

We thought they were enough, for the ship could never sink
 
What do you do?
 

Get away from the wreck as quickly as possible?
 
As reported in the Boston Globe, that dilemma confronts Julia Kehoe:
 
Julia E. Kehoe, [...]

Lord Wellington’s lament: Part 4, ‘those people in our midst’

24 July, 2008 (09:23) | Local issues, Policy, Public housing, Slums, Subsidy, US News, Vouchers | No comments

[Continued from the previous Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.]
 
Correlation, as we have drummed into our heads in logic class, is not causation, though it definitely has meaning.  Hanna Rosin’s lengthy Atlantic article about the correlation between increased inner-ring suburban crime and the dispersal of formerly public housing residents via vouchers after demolition assembles [...]