[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 listed:

If only we could see them that clearly

Challenges facing Ingersoll/ Whitman

1. Illegitimate birth.  The properties were temporary housing turned over to New York by the Navy after World War II.

2. Decades of non-reinvestment.  Our whole public housing delivery system is a Gordian knot catching the properties in a dependency trap: starved for resources.

3. Warrant-of-habitability risk.  A landlord that rents a substandard apartment is liable to the resident for damages, and housing authorities are uniquely vulnerable to such litigation.

4. Brass-ring capital planning mentality.  Scarcity of funding prevented incremental improvements over time, leading to obsolete apartments needing a comprehensive and expensive overhaul.

5. Funding cuts after housing authorities’ plans were made.  Funding promised at one time would be unpromised later, necessitating painful reductions in scope even as costs rose.

Ingersoll and Whitman face three additional challenges:

Getting out of these bond covenants is just the first problem

6.         Resident-relation complexities

Public housing residents are government customers.  Years and decades of observation have taught them to expect promises from their government, and then to be disappointed. 

Anxiety remains high at Whitman and Ingersoll, tenants, elected officials and community advocates said, because unoccupied units have been used by drug dealers, vandals and squatters, and so many apartments have sat empty for so long.

Public housing residents have unusually powerful political voices:

They attributed the delay to … the complicated process of relocating hundreds of tenants with different housing needs at different times.

It’s always easier to renovate a property if the residents are moved safely off-site, but so powerful is the distrust and paranoia within the public housing community that most authorities have long ago acquiesced to the enormously more tortuous procedure of rehabbing with the residents in place, by shuttling them about on the same site:

New Orleans public housing tenants: maybe wrong, never silent

The first tenants were relocated years before construction started. Residents could transfer to other apartments in their developments or elsewhere in the city, or receive a federal voucher that would allow them to move into subsidized private housing.

One would think that a generous offer – move out of a crumbling, decrepit apartment to other public housing apartments (that you approve), or receive a portable voucher and move to an apartment that will take a voucher.  But wait, there’s more!

Lynn Godfrey, a Housing Authority spokeswoman, said the agency had tried to minimize the disruption, in part by paying moving expenses.  “Given the huge mass undertaking and what we will accomplish at the end, the hope is that people will feel that it was well worth it,” she said.

All of this is entirely for the current residents’ benefit, but as we know no act of generosity goes unquestioned:

Yet skepticism — and a lingering suspicion — remains. “It looked more to me like they wanted to get the people in an exodus, to move them out of here as quickly as they could,” said Edward Carter, 76, a longtime tenant at Whitman.

Activists from Community Voices Heard, New York City

That’s utter nonsense, of course.  The property is encumbered by a permanent deed restriction that can be lifted only with HUD consent.  Nevertheless, paranoia strikes deep, fostered by the enemies within.  Here, for instance, is a comment about Ingersoll from August, 2007:

There is a HUGE rumor mill about anything regarding these projects (or any projects). A real estate broker trying to sell a desperately overpriced building across from projects told a friend that, “It was okay to speculate because the Jews had bought the projects and everyone was going to be moved out.” This is a freaking quote.

Seventeen years ago when my daughter was born, my hospital roommate lived in the Whitman houses and she told me – in all seriousness – that Chase was buying out tenants but they were trying to force people out and she knew people who refused to move whose windows had been shot out by the bank.

Another friend, who lives in projects out in Coney Island repeated the same rumor – almost word for word – several years later about the buildings she resides in.

It’s a scary rumor mill anywhere else.

These rumors are ineradicable.  As the Times notes:

An area on the rebound: Fort Greene, Brooklyn

[The renovation plan] has fueled rumors, repeatedly denied by the agency, that low-income residents are being pushed out to convert the buildings into private luxury housing as Fort Greene gentrifies.

Where Fort Greene’s upwardly mobile want to live

Even long-delayed good news barely makes a dent:

Residents received some good news last month, when the Housing Authority held a ribbon-cutting for a $7 million community center on Myrtle Avenue. It had been expected to open in 2004.

7.         Promises made before funding was rock-solid

Confronted with the brass-ring challenges mentioned before, NYCHA elected to proceed with some of its plan:

So far, 611 units have been renovated and are occupied, with construction under way in some buildings but not yet in others.

A 2006 report by the city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., found that thousands of apartments at Whitman, Ingersoll and five other developments remained empty longer than necessary because the agency removed units from the rent rolls “well before it had a clear idea of how or when it planned to proceed” with construction projects.

Comptroller Thompson speaks after the fact

That’s easy to say after the fact; I have a more sympathetic view.

People are not numerate; they hear financial changes but have no tactile convertibility between the numbers and the changing scope and expectations.  Thus, when NYCHA promised to do such-and-such provided so-much money came through, people heard only the dish, not the price.

The project was announced in 2002, and work began in 2006. 

More than likely, when NYCHA started, it thought the money would be there. 

The Housing Authority told residents in October 2004 that the renovations were expected to be completed in five years. This past April, officials said the project was instead scheduled for completion in February 2012.

When bad things happen to good economies, the result is scope shrinkage, something residents and the general public want not to hear.

I’m sure I don’t want to hear what you’re saying

Apartments awaiting renovations at both complexes have been vacant for an average of four years, according to the housing agency.

That’s what happens when funding is interrupted.

8.         The pure-public ownership model

We know who should fund it; who should own it?

I’ve written extensively before about the essential housing authority, into which today’s housing authorities should evolve:

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.

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. 

I am a universe unto myself; everything is encompassed within me

The future essential housing authority will be a publicly accountable Mission Entrepreneurial Entity, one that can finance its own improvements, buy and sell its own properties, and contract with private entities to do things at which private developers excel – like construction:

The agency is spending more money to renovate the two low-income complexes than a developer recently spent building a $152 million condominium tower nearby known as Toren.

Much of this difference is explained by the handicaps under which NYCHA operates – an argument to contract out those functions.  It’s much easier to avoid picking up unfunded mandates when you have restricted the government’s role to its essential functions, and outsourced the rest to the private sector.

Michael Kelly, the housing agency’s new general manager, said it had “turned the corner” on the project, which is being accelerated with $108 million in federal stimulus money and which comes at a time when public housing authorities across the country have chosen to demolish, rather than preserve, many of their buildings.

“This level of reinvestment suggests that NYCHA is committed to providing public housing resources for folks for generations to come,” Mr. Kelly said.

If anybody can move NYCHA out of its legacy of command-and-control functions toward its future essentiality, it’s Mike:

Seeing corners around the bend? Mike Kelly, new general manager of NYCHA

He has his work cut out for him:

Challenges facing Ingersoll/ Whitman

1. Illegitimate birth.  The properties were temporary housing turned over to New York by the Navy after World War II.

2. Decades of non-reinvestment.  Our whole public housing delivery system is a Gordian knot catching the properties in a dependency trap: starved for resources.

3. Warrant-of-habitability risk.  A landlord that rents a substandard apartment is liable to the resident for damages, and housing authorities are uniquely vulnerable to such litigation.

4. Brass-ring capital planning mentality.  Scarcity of funding prevented incremental improvements over time, leading to obsolete apartments needing a comprehensive and expensive overhaul.

5. Funding cuts after housing authorities’ plans were made.  Funding promised at one time would be unpromised later, necessitating painful reductions in scope even as costs rose.

6. Resident-relation complexities.  Public housing residents’ fears about being relocated or gentrified cannot be placated except by rehabbing with them in place – adding to the costs.

7. Promises made before funding was rock-solid, leading to painful and poorly understood reductions in rehab scope.

8. The pure-public government ownership model, instead of reinventing into the essential housing authority.

Eight challenges are enough, aren’t they Magic 8-Ball?

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[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 such a convenient whipping boy.

As an elected official, I wield the flail on whom I choose

Yet, overlooked by the Times and by the fulminating assemblyman, Ingersoll/ Whitman are emblematic of the challenges facing US public housing, which go far beyond one bureaucrat, one property, one city, or even one era. 

Yesterday we identified:

Challenges facing Ingersoll/ Whitman

1. Illegitimate birth.  The properties were temporary housing turned over to New York by the Navy after World War II.

2. Decades of non-reinvestment.  Our whole public housing delivery system is a Gordian knot catching the properties in a dependency trap: starved for resources.

These two are bad enough; what follows makes it even more difficult.

More problems for a pure-public owner

3.         Warrant-of-habitability requirements

While more than 130,000 families are on the waiting list for a city public housing apartment, hundreds of units at the Ingersoll Houses and the adjacent Whitman Houses are vacant — 923 out of nearly 3,500 units, according to the landlord, the New York City Housing Authority, the city’s public housing agency.

Obviously, this is a terrible shame, but for many of these apartments, NYCHA has done the right thing, in view of the warrant of habitability risk.  Simply stated, in New York:

Tenants are entitled to a livable, safe and sanitary apartment. Lease provisions inconsistent with this right are illegal. Failure to provide heat or hot water on a regular basis, or to rid an apartment of insect infestation are examples of a violation of this warranty.  (Real Property Law §235-b)

A vacancy at Ingersoll

If a landlord breaches the warranty, the tenant may sue for a rent reduction. The tenant may also withhold rent, but in response, the landlord may sue the tenant for non-payment of rent. In such a case, the tenant may counter sue for breach of the warranty.

Actually, for landlords it’s worse than this; breach of the warrant of habitability allows enterprising public-interest lawyers to sue for damages.  Housing authorities are a sitting duck defendant – they cannot leave, they cannot file bankruptcy (they’re an arm of the city), they cannot plead insolvency.  NYCHA is confronted with apartments like these:

Someone had pried open the metal door of an 11th-floor apartment at a public housing complex in Brooklyn with what appeared to be a crowbar, leaving a gash near the lock.

Teenagers who broke into a vacant unit in the building recently left the door unlocked.  One evening, there was a bicycle next to the refrigerator, gang graffiti on the walls and a condom wrapper on the floor. The light in the kitchen still worked.

An apartment that suffers too much interior damage goes past the point of operational reparability, known in the lingo as a down unit.  It has to be secured, and often it is cannibalized – fixtures removed to repair other apartments.  With half a century of under-maintenance, it would be surprising if NYCHA didn’t have a significant inventory of down units.

NYCHA’s Chelsea-Elliott housing property

That leads to …

4.         Brass-ring capital planning mentality

When a public housing property’s problems compound beyond its ability to solve them, the housing authority pursues a comprehensive revitalization: one massive upgrade of everything, all at once:

Agency officials defended their handling of the renovations and their oversight of the vacant units, and described the work as the largest public-housing renovation project in the country.

They attributed the delay to the broad scope of the project, which has included combining some apartments in developments that are more than sixty years old ….

)

More of Roosevelt’s legacy: Archdale Village, Boston

Brass-ring thinking is imprinted in public housing authorities because of their dependency schema.  Public housing has no replacement reserve; its properties generate no positive cash flow (that’s why it needs operating subsidy).  It has no ability to borrow long-term and finance improvements.  Thus it is operating sixty-year-old high-rise buildings.  Built before we worried about lead-based paint, much less asbestos, radon, or mold.  Built before broadband, before the personal computer, before television even.  Public housing has not kept up with the evolving modern home.  These properties have missed a half-century’s worth of trends in affordable housing.  Electrical circuitry is beyond obsolete; so too plumbing and piping.  

Now comes the magic moment when just possibly we might get funding.  We have to do everything at once: the physical reconfiguration, the upgrades, the operational improvements. 

The original renovation plans included improving elevator service, adding floors to buildings and reconfiguring some apartments to add space by reducing the number of units per floor.

I knew I’d grasp it eventually

The scope expands, and with it the cost, and the timing, and the complexity:

The Housing Authority told residents in October 2004 that the renovations were expected to be completed in five years. This past April, officials said the project was instead scheduled for completion in February 2012. The total cost has now reached $248 million, nearly triple the $83 million the agency said it would cost in 2004.

Once one has committed to a complete repositioning, not just fixing some down units, arises the next challenge: residents in place.

5.         Funding cuts after housing authorities made plans

Because of their dependency schema, housing authorities basically have no money of their own. 

How the other half lives: Riis Houses, New York City

Anything they need for large-scale upgrading or renovation must come from Uncle Sugar, which exercises the sovereign’s prerogative of insisting on approving the plans in detail.  That’s a challenge because gut rehab of occupied apartments is much more complicated than building new:

The agency is spending more money to renovate the two low-income complexes than a developer recently spent building a $152 million condominium tower nearby known as Toren.

Partly this is due to governmental self-imposed restrictions like union rules, Davis-bacon, and prevailing wage.  It’s also because of protracted delays:

The majority [of the vacant units – Ed.] are unoccupied because of a costly, long-delayed modernization project that has forced ['Caused' is more likely – Ed.] hundreds of tenants to relocate.

I expect that, in anticipation of funding – which was probably promised – NYCHA in turn made promises to residents and began prepping the buildings for renovation by relocating residents on turnover.

Who promises more wins … doesn’t he?

The original designs were changed because of a lack of financing, and the plan to add floors was dropped.

Each time one redoes the design, some sunk costs become unrecoverable, and the overall project cost expands.

Some non-recoverable costs there …

[Continued tomorrow in Part 3.]

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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 pried open the metal door of an 11th-floor apartment at a public housing complex in Brooklyn with what appeared to be a crowbar, leaving a gash near the lock. No one was home. But then, no one is ever home: Apartment 11D was vacant. So was 1E — insulation covered the door’s missing peephole — and at least two dozen other apartments in the 11-story building at the Ingersoll Houses in Fort Greene.

 “This is a classic case of administrative mismanagement,” said Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol of Brooklyn. “It’s really pathetic when you think about how long this has taken and how administratively they could have done it better.”

Assemblyman Lentol knows who he wants to blame

While Mr. Lentol is of course entitled to his opinion, he’s wrong.  His explanation fingers the convenient whipping boy of faceless bureaucracy, rather than seeing Ingersoll and Whitman as archetypal of what’s wrong with the Gordian knot of our whole public housing delivery system, and how rehab deferred is rehab denied.

To give Mr. Lentol his due, the situation is utterly unacceptable:

At Ingersoll, the windows of a few empty units have been shattered.

Empty windows are invariably broken, and broken windows invariably lead to broken rules.  A streetscape of physical neglect leads to a society that neglects its laws.

Teenagers who broke into a vacant unit in the building recently left the door unlocked. One evening, there was a bicycle next to the refrigerator, gang graffiti on the walls and a condom wrapper on the floor.

Ingersoll in Fort Greene, Brooklyn

Like many New York City public housing properties, Ingersoll is large:

Raymond V. Ingersoll Houses in Brooklyn has 20 buildings, 6 and 11-stories tall on 22.9-acres with 1,802 apartments housing some 4,532 residents. Completed February 24, 1944, it is bordered by Park and Myrtle Avenues, Saint Edward’s and Prince Streets.

And it’s named after an inspiring figure:

Raymond V. Ingersoll (1875-1940) served as Parks Commissioner and Brooklyn Borough President and was a staunch advocate for Public Housing. He also championed broader public use of parks, playgrounds and beaches. He was instrumental in the consolidation of the subway systems, creation of health centers, a central library building, the Brooklyn College campus, Brooklyn Civic Center site, and better roads and parkways linking Brooklyn to the other boroughs. He was a member of the State Commission which revised tenement and housing laws in 1928-29. Ingersoll strongly advocated non-partisan municipal government. He once wrote: “The dreamer dies, but never dies the dream.” Ingersoll Houses is in Brooklyn.

Dreams notwithstanding, empty apartments are temporary houses of crime; they invite neighborhoods to become slums.

At Whitman, 17% of the units are vacant. At Ingersoll, nearly 35% are empty.

To form a viable civil society, properties need high occupancy.  Anything above (say) 15% vacant has probably double the security risk.  Anything above 30% vacant is asking for a crime plague, and it becomes essential to board up the buildings to prevent vermin human and animal.

“As these renovations have been taking place over the last several years, Whitman and Ingersoll have had a ghost-town-like feel to them,” said Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn.

Assemblyman Jeffries worries about ghost towns

No question about it, that much vacancy is a threat

A woman who lives in the Ingersoll building with the vacant unit with the missing peephole said it had been used recently by crack dealers. While crime has increased slightly at Ingersoll and Whitman — with 58 felony assaults and other serious crimes reported this year, as of November, compared with 49 in the same period last year — Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said there was no “crime trend” related to the vacant apartments.

No trend, just chronic crime, and it will persist until Ingersoll is substantial improved.  Will it be?

Michael Kelly, the housing agency’s new general manager, said it had “turned the corner” on the project, which is being accelerated with $108 million in federal stimulus money and which comes at a time when public housing authorities across the country have chosen to demolish, rather than preserve, many of their buildings.

An optimist after thirty years: Mike Kelly

I’ve known Mike Kelly many years; in that interval, he’s run the Washington DC Housing Authority, and before that, the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO).  Not only is he a centurion of public housing, he’s among the most capable and  best-respected executives in housing authorities nationally, and currently president of the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities (CLPHA, rhymes with laffa).

A noble motto: wish it were truer

“This level of reinvestment suggests that NYCHA is committed to providing public housing resources for folks for generations to come,” Mr. Kelly said.

How did Ingersoll and Whitman get to this sorry state, with these protracted delays and unfulfilled promises?  The inter-related causes are emblematic of public housing’s challenges.  Ingersoll and Whitman demonstrate why, if we do not comprehensively remake the delivery system, and enable entities like NYCHA to become essential housing authorities, all of public housing will face the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come with futures like theirs.

The reasons are legion.

1.         Illegitimate birth

Ingersoll and Whitman were developed in haste:

Ingersoll and Whitman are among the city’s oldest public housing developments — both comprise a total of 35 6-story, 11-story and 13-story red-brick buildings completed in February 1944.

What Brooklyn looked like when Ingersoll and Whitman were being developed

They were built amidst emergency:

The upgrade is long overdue, as the buildings have been out of compliance with the buildings code ever since they were transferred by the US Navy to the city. Did you catch that? The city has been running the complex for decades under conditions that it would never allow a private owner to. The shortcomings include everything from a lack of real kitchens in some units to insufficient light and air levels.

New York City family, 1944; the little boy at lower left grew up into …

Hector Elizondo, age 73 in 2009

2.         Decades of non-reinvestment

For the first decade after their completion, Ingersoll and Whitman probably received little upgrading, because New York was in the midst of a major demographic and real estate boom driven by returning GI’s eager to start families. 

Agency officials have said the units were built as temporary housing, with many providing cramped living space, like kitchens in living rooms or hallways.

As I’ve previously written, temporary structures can become permanent; housing constructed mainly for emergency shelter can petrify into the residential landscape:

The temporary usually becomes the permanent, as our humble Quonset Huts show:

The Quonset hut of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church served as the center of Catholic life in Barrow until 1993. The church replaced the hut with a wood-framed structure.

With some adaptability, and possibly some easy-disassembly features, reusable shipping containers could represent the embryo house, giving people a nexus around which to establish a tenure and tenancy and gradually improve and personalize their homes.

Martie Rozkydal and her granddaughter, Julia Nesslage, beside the hut they painted together, 2003

After World War II, New York City adopted rent control as a ‘temporary emergency’ measure, and it remains today, a harmful anachronism that I’ve analyzed and criticized in many other posts.  Public housing’s funding structure is equally anachronistic, as I detailed at length in public housing’s dependency trap:

Public housing in the United States was established in the 1937 National Housing Act. Way back then, there were no state housing finance agencies, no GSEs, no FHA mortgage insurance, no specialized business of affordable housing, virtually no mission-oriented sponsors. Back then, affordable housing meant slums, rooming houses, or tenements.

Chicago, 1910

Like many a chief executive elsewhere around the globe, facing failing urban housing markets, Roosevelt decided to put the Federal government directly into the housing business, so the 1937 Act established a four-point structure:

1. Public ownership. Direct public ownership of the housing.

2. Local ownership. Even if funded from Washington, each property to be owned by local housing authorities.

3.  Up-front grants, grant-based funding of all capital costs, therefore no debt.

4.  Cheap rents, set at the cost of operations.

Later, when it became clear that the poorest of the poor could not afford even the cheap rents, two more planks were added:

5. Mean-tested rents, set at a percentage (initially 25%, today 30-32%) of each household’s income.

6. Federal operating subsidy to bring Net Operating Income back up to zero. (Later, realizing that zero NOI also precludes capital improvements, HUD added the concept of modernization funds.)

For the last forty years, these six elements have formed public housing’s operating paradigm.

Whitman today: recognizable to Roosevelt

In such a structure, and with public housing’s deliberate and unconscionable Federal under-funding over the last decade and a half, public housing has been starved for resources for which no amount of scrambling for short money could compensate.

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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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, the commissioner of the Department of Transitional Assistance, which oversees state shelters, said the system is “overburdened” and must change to provide services more equitably.

Trying to provide services equitably: Julia Kehoe

[Full disclosure; I worked with Julia when she was executive director of the Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership.  MBHP does great work, and Julia's good people, so I'm biased. – Ed.]

Key to these programs is the department’s name, Transitional Assistance.  As the Web site says:

At DTA, we provide individuals and families with food assistance, job assistance, cash assistance and emergency shelter.

DTA administers benefits such as Food Stamp Benefits, Transitional Aid to Families with Dependent Children (TAFDC), Emergency Aid to the Elderly, Disabled and Children (EAEDC) and Emergency Assistance (EA).   Because DTA emphasizes transitional assistance, recipients are encouraged to participate in education, training and job search activities to assist in obtaining employment, which helps us all achieve our potential and maximizes our independence.  With our support, our clients are given the tools to improve their lives. 

Basically, you have two choices:

Fill the lifeboats with the first in, and then repel all boarders.

Have a rotation, some in and some out of the boat.

Leo, you’ll have to understand, I’m in the lifeboat

If you’re going to choose a rotation, what rules might you select?

Less than two years after vowing to end homelessness in Massachusetts, the Patrick administration has proposed new regulations that it acknowledges could force hundreds of homeless families back on the street.

Consider me exasperated by the sophist false dichotomy set up in the opening sentence.  Supply is not being cut.  Rather, in forcing ‘hundreds of homeless families back on the street,’ as the Globe puts it, the Patrick Administration is proposing to bring hundreds of other deserving families off the streets. 

The regulations, scheduled to take effect April 1, would deny shelter to families who:

1. In the last three years, had been evicted from public or subsidized housing, or ‘had abandoned such housing’ without good cause. 

2. Fail (a) to meet a new 30-hour per week work requirement or (b) to save 30% of their income. 

[Both sentences rewritten for clarity. – Ed.]

So we have two tests. 

1. Were you in affordable housing and then left it, either because you were kicked out or because you walked away without a good reason?

2. If we have been giving you free housing, have you put the time to use (the work requirement) and put aside the money you’d otherwise have had to spend on housing?

Do either of them seem unachievable to you?  Unreasonable?

I take some convincing

What about these rules?

They also would:

3. Reduce from six months to three months the period families can remain in shelters after their incomes rise above state limits.  [Emphasis added.]

4. Force out families absent from shelters for at least two consecutive nights as well as those who reject one offer of housing without good reason.

5. Deny benefits for families whose members have outstanding default or arrest warrants.

6. [Deny benefits to] those whose only child is between ages 18 and 21, unless the child has a disability or is in high school.  [In our society, 18 and above is a child no longer. – Ed.]

Do any of those seem unduly draconian to you? 

Thought not

Some thought so:

Advocates for the homeless decried the proposal, which comes at a time when more homeless families are seeking beds in state shelters and remaining there longer. This month, the state is providing shelter for a record of nearly 2,700 families – one-quarter of them cramming for weeks at a time in expensive, often unsuitable motel rooms.

Whatever the choices, it’s not easy

“This is not the time to change the safety net,” said Robyn Frost, executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless. “The number of people in need of shelter is like nothing we’ve ever seen. There’s never been such a desperate need for housing, and these changes could be devastating. They couldn’t come at a worse time.”

Don’t mess with my safety net when I’m falling on it

While I understand Ms. Frost’s concern for her constituents, the issue isn’t whether we need more homeless housing – we do – but whether, given the finite supply, we give it to those where it will make the most difference.  Hence, I’m with Ms. Kehoe:

“It is certainly not our intent to be punitive, and we understand the difficulties families are facing,” Kehoe said. “But we are responsible for transforming the system, and particularly at a challenging time, it is absolutely critical that all stakeholders need to work together to make sure that families have the greatest chance of moving out of shelter and poverty.”

And she has the evidence on her side:

While hundreds of families will likely lose their shelter beds, she said the changes would open space for qualifying families, many of whom the state is now paying an average of $85 a night to stay in motels. Last week, more than 630 families, including about 1,000 children, were staying at motels, waiting an average 22 days for a spot at the state’s 59 shelters.

Thus we have families staying in motel rooms – at the state’s expense (average $85 a night, or a whopping $2,550 per month) – because there is no room in the homeless-shelter lifeboats. 

Sometimes the choice is living in a car

By reducing those eligible for shelter, Kehoe said the new regulations would save the state $520,000 this fiscal year and more than $11 million in fiscal 2010. “Given our limited resources, we wanted to encourage people to find housing or stay where they are, rather than encouraging them to come into the system,” she said.

Now are you more willing to push out into the market those who have been evicted from affordable housing, who haven’t used their time in the shelter to work or save a little money, who are staying in the shelter even though their income has risen, and so on?

I haven’t finished using it

There’s also the Law of the Observant Herd: forcing out those who aren’t diligent or who disrespect the benefits they are receiving sends the best possible signal to all those who are wondering which behavior to adopt.

But those who work with the state’s neediest residents said the new “harsh restrictions” will only make it harder for the homeless to find a way out of poverty.

They will make it harder for some homeless; they will make it easier for some other homeless.  A rotation policy isn’t anti-poor.

They said many of the regulations are open to interpretation and risk being applied unfairly if a shelter director doesn’t consider an explanation reasonable.

Keep thinking!

That’s always true of any regulations.  The alternative is to save everybody, which the state can’t afford.

But Kehoe insisted the regulations will be applied fairly and noted they provide exceptions for:

Families trying to pay down their debt

Those who hold jobs that might make them reluctant to accept a housing opportunity too far away

Others who can’t find affordable housing after their income rises above welfare limits.

Hard to argue with any of that.

You think it’s hard to argue?  I’ll show you hard to argue!

She and other state officials said the regulations are part of the administration’s effort to overhaul the shelter system by more quickly moving the homeless into more permanent housing. In 2007, state officials moved the last homeless family out of a motel and heralded it as part of their new strategy to help all of the state’s homeless find permanent housing.

So the state was making progress — then the recession hit, and the demand has spiked.  (Rents are down a little, not enough to make a difference in housing consumption.)  That spike has spurred the state to innovate in pursuit of efficiency:

As part of that plan, the state recently merged the welfare agency’s emergency shelter programs with housing programs run by the Department of Housing and Community Development and is now planning eight regional networks to better coordinate homeless services and housing.

Homeless shelters aren’t affordable housing, although they can overlap in customers and purposes. 

And this month, the state revised the way it pays shelters, holding back thousands of dollars in payments until homeless families are housed.

‘Pay for performance’ should work for shelters as much as it works for the sheltered. 

The state now withholds its final payments for a year after the family leaves the system, as part of an incentive for shelters to extend their services to help keep the families housed.

Our goal, remember, is to get people out of shelters and into self-sufficiency.

“We know the severity of the problem, and we’re trying to provide a comprehensive approach,” said Bob Pulster, executive director of the state’s Interagency Council on Housing and Homelessness.

Pulster (on the left), seeking a comprehensive approach

He and others said they expect to receive millions of dollars from the federal stimulus package, which they hope will ease the state’s growing burden.

But they said federal money won’t stop the new regulations from taking effect – and the imminent changes have Grace Monteiro worried.

The 28-year-old mother of a toddler has been in and out of shelters and apartments for several years. In the fall of 2007, six months after landing a $15-an-hour job as an administrative assistant, she was forced to move out of a shelter because she exceeded the income requirements, which is now an income of $1,578 a month for a family of two.

Ms. Monteiro and her son appear to be the archetypal customer we are trying to help – someone who is teetering on the cusp of self-sufficiency. 

”It’s a catch-22,” Grace Monteiro, with her son Keegan, said of housing regulations for the city’s homeless. Monteiro, 28, has been in and out of shelters and apartments for several years.

So she moved into an expensive studio apartment – she couldn’t find affordable housing in time – but she had trouble balancing the rent with her other expenses.  Within a few months, Monteiro lost her job [What reason? – Ed.] and she and her son moved into a state-subsidized motel room and then back into the shelter system.

She says three months isn’t long enough for many families to find affordable apartments, which are increasingly scarce.

Certainly, there’s no doubt that affordable apartments are hard to come by here.  Ms. Monteiro needs roommates or a sharing arrangement.

As a result, she thinks the new regulations will just encourage more parents to avoid working.

“It’s a catch-22,” she said. “I want to get a job, but I’m afraid to get a job. I don’t want to repeat what happened last time.”

Although I’ve never been homeless, I’m convinced that you are what you live in – and if you’re homeless, you cannot possibly be as effective in your life and your work as if you have some stable housing.

“Because if I don’t have housing after three months, then what? This just makes it harder to do the right thing.”

The right thing is to find a way out of the poverty trap within three months, or manage the lifeboats to give someone else a try to do so. 

Kate, honey, don’t you think it’s my turn in the lifeboat?

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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 a meaningful set of examples showing that, yea verily, when you move people who had been living in family public housing, crime goes with them.

Now, you criminals just stay on your side of the yellow tape, okay?

Who lives in family public housing?  As it is the housing of last resort (and many of its administrators think of it in those terms), in general it is the poorest of the poor.  In America, people who are extremely poor are economically impaired.  Economic impairment comes from many things:

Age (which we can exclude from consideration here, since most elderly public housing is separated from family)

Mental illness

Substance abuse

Illegality (people who must conceal themselves from the formal system)

Unwed motherhood

It’s one thing to be under-educated and single; it’s quite another to have a small baby (or two, or three) at home.  If you’re nineteen and are mothering a newborn, you’re not likely to be viable in the work force.  Conversely, if you’re a young father not married to your child’s mother, and you’re involved with illegal activities, you have multiple incentives not to marry her, including the convenience of an undocumented, no-questions-asked pied-a-terre in her apartment.

If only it were as few as 20,000

Fixing poverty isn’t just about allowing people to move; it’s about cracking a complex web of dependencies.

In the most literal sense, the national effort to diffuse poverty has succeeded. Since 1990, the number of Americans living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty—meaning that at least 40% of households are below the federal poverty level—has declined by 24%. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. Recently, the housing expert George Galster, of Wayne State University, analyzed the shifts in urban poverty and published his results in a paper called “A Cautionary Tale.”  While fewer Americans live in high-poverty neighborhoods, increasing numbers now live in places with “moderate” poverty rates, meaning rates of 20 to 40%.

Yes, that’s what happens – if you take the same number of poor people and simply relocate them, then more places will have some poor people and fewer will have all the poor people.

This pattern is not necessarily better, either for poor people trying to break away from bad neighborhoods or for cities, Galster explains. His paper compares two scenarios: a city split into high-poverty and low-poverty areas, and a city dominated by median-poverty ones. The latter arrangement is likely to produce more bad neighborhoods and more total crime, he concludes, based on a computer model of how social dysfunction spreads.

Galster’s working on his models

I suspect Professor Galster is working with a version of the Law of the Observant Herd, on an infectious theory of criminality.  What’s clear is that just moving somebody doesn’t make them better; it creates the opportunity for a person to be better – and that requires the person to notice the opportunity.

5.         You don’t change the habits of a lifetime just by a single move

Even though you are what you live in, the habits of a lifetime take more than a move to break:

In my visits with former Dixie Homes tenants who’d moved around the city, I came across the same mix of reactions that researchers had found. The residents who had always been intent on moving out of Dixie Homes anyway seemed to be thriving.

After all that has gone before, this is an enormous statement.  The purpose of vouchering out public housing was never ipso facto to eliminate poverty; rather, it was to give people trapped in wretched housing circumstances a chance for a better life.  If the only thing public housing deconcentration does is liberate those who want liberation, that by itself is an achievement: one to build upon.

Those who’d been pushed out against their will, which was the vast majority, seemed dislocated and ill at ease.

Nobody got pushed out against his or her will.  Residents had a right to return if they met lease-compliance terms.

But I also met La Sasha Rodgers, who was 19 when Dixie was torn down (now she’s 21). “A lot of people thought it was bad, because they didn’t live there,” she told me. “But it was like one big family. It felt like home. If I could move back now, the way it was, I would.”

As I’ve written elsewhere, a slum is a community, with its internally organized rules and laws.  Order is imposed, albeit usually by force not by law. 

Do what we say and nobody gets hurt

The social services Betts is recommending did not lift masses of people out of poverty in the projects.

My experience with public housing leads me to question whether the services were provided, or provided well.  Most housing authorities I know are underfunded, even being systematically starved, and hence understaffed.

The problems of poverty run so deep that we’re unlikely to know the answer for a generation. Social scientists tracking people who are trying to improve their lives often talk about a “weathering effect,” the wearing-down that happens as a lifetime of baggage accumulates. With poor people, the drag is strong, even if they haven’t lived in poverty for long. Kids who leave poor neighborhoods at a young age still have trouble keeping up with their peers, studies show. They catch up for a while and then, after a few years, slip back. Truly escaping poverty seems to require a will as strong as a spy’s: you have to disappear to a strange land, forget where you came from, and ignore the suspicions of everyone around you. Otherwise, you can easily find yourself right back where you started.

That is lovely, eloquent writing, and sound analysis.  But if so, and if we know that concentration in bad housing adds to it, should we not start with that as a first action? 

Conclusion

The only virtue of concentrating poverty is political avoidance.  By warehousing the poor in what was once ‘decent, safe, and sanitary’ housing, we can claim to have addressed their needs even as we conveniently can overlook ‘those people’ in our midst.

Cabrini-Green: might as well be prison

Dispersing the poor is good for the poor.  Maybe it’s not enough – some people never cope with leaving, at least not without help.  Maybe it creates new challenges for immigrant communities (as, throughout history, immigrants arriving in any community have created challenges).  Then maybe those are challenges we had better tackle, rather than wistfully imagining people were happier in their public housing ghettos.

“Publish and be damned.”

The Duke of Wellington

I’ll be damned if I read a blog

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