Public housing's terrible track record points to irredeemable “flaws,” says Atlantic
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It's about time policymakers like SJ's “learn from the past” on housing, argues Manhattan Institute's Howard Husock in the Atlantic. He traces public housing's failures back to the early 1900s, when many neighborhoods were replaced by gov't-managed housing. The too-predictable result? Low-income/minority families were denied home ownership (and its financial benefits). Also, housing bureaucracies grew strict/unaccountable without market competition.
To hear PHIMBY-ites talk, it’s almost as if public housing has never been tried in the United States. But it has been, mostly to disastrous effect. And the time is right, before a public-housing boomlet gains any further traction, to make clear that American public housing hasn’t just been poorly executed; it’s an idea with inherent conceptual and practical flaws. Those who suffer the most are those it’s intended to help: low-income tenants. …
[In the early 1900s,] Neighborhoods were cleared to make way for public housing, and many of them contained multifamily buildings in which the owner occupied one unit and rented out the others. In 1950, housing census data for Detroit’s Black Bottom area (originally named by French explorers for the color of its topsoil), owner-presence rates ranged from 27 to 54 percent. Similar owner-presence rates could be found in those parts of Chicago and St. Louis swept away by housing authorities.
Clearing such neighborhoods for public housing—which was itself later demolished—stripped African American home and business owners of their assets, and denied them the future appreciation of land value. It is no coincidence that African American financial assets trail those of whites; black migrants arrived in northern cities as public-housing construction peaked. They were steered into institutional living in which they had no opportunity for ownership and were thus denied a path followed by previous immigrants to the cities. A major problem with public housing is that, by definition, it is publicly owned. That means that it denies poor households one of the key means of asset accumulation in America: homeownership, including ownership of two- or three-family homes, whose rental income helps fuel upward mobility.
Large-scale neighborhood-clearing schemes by public-housing authorities are unlikely to recur in today’s political environment in the United States—preventing at least one form of injustice. But this change in circumstance does raise the question of where all the new units sought by today’s public-housing advocates will be built.
There are other fantasies in play. The public-housing dream continues in its belief that public ownership can both be competent and, by forgoing profits, provide better value than private ownership does. In this construct, it is only a lack of money that has led to public housing’s decline. Indeed, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio argues that a shortage of funds has led to the degraded conditions of New York City Housing Authority buildings, in which thousands of tenants, in recent winters, have shivered in the cold and the dark.
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.
Related:
Perspective: San Jose’s affordable housing panel—more of the same
How SJ's rent control, inclusionary zoning policies backfire
Would increasing local property taxes solve housing (un)affordability?
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