Opinion: CA shouldn't strengthen its public housing bureaucracy

Assemblymembers Alex Lee and Ash Kalra (D-SJ) coauthored AB 309, which would establish a CA'n agency over “social housing”—publicly funded affordable units in mixed-income neighborhoods. However, the Atlantic questions if gov't should even be in the property management business, pointing to rampant red tape issues in developments across the U.S.

Government can do many things well. But there is little evidence that property management is one of them. Anyone who doubts that should read Bart Schwartz’s report on the state of the New York City Housing Authority, owner of 324 housing projects and home to as many as 600,000 residents. The authority, he writes, is “bogged down in layers of bureaucracy or a ‘check the box mentality.’ Among the management challenges we see is the tendency to avoid personal responsibility and accountability … It is no surprise to find that there are many obstacles to the successful completion of projects and work orders.”

Red tape was one of the causes of the massive leak Schwartz’s investigators discovered at the Polo Grounds housing development. “Our investigator spoke with the superintendent who advised that it was necessary to build a scaffold to make any repairs because the ceiling was about 10 feet high. He said that he had taken steps to order the lumber and that, once the lumber arrived, he would call the carpenters to build the scaffold and then he would call the plumbers.” Such complications are exacerbated by the inflexibility of union contracts for housing-authority employees—contracts that a pro-labor group such as the Democratic Socialists of America, one may assume, is unlikely to try to modify.

This is the dispiriting reality of life for public housing-tenants—an institutional life in which they have no ability to improve the maintenance of their homes, other than appealing to authorities for help. This is residential life as managed by the equivalent of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

This article originally appeared in the Atlantic. Read the whole thing here.

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