Some History on Public Housing

What a treat to log on this morning and see both spirited support and opposition to my anti-demolition post yesterday.  Public housing is a topic that's going to come up repeatedly here, and I'm reminded by one commenter that perhaps we could all benefit from some history on public housing in the U.S.

The major complaint about public housing today - that it "concentrates" poverty and its associated pathologies (crime, etc.) - was made about slums in the 1930s and 1940s.  At that time, public housing was viewed as the solution to this problem of concentrated poverty in slums.  Similar to today, public housing was opposed by private and conservative interests - e.g., real estate developers, Republicans - who did not want the government in the business of developing housing.  Private market interests argued that they were best suited to provide housing.  Well, we see how well that's worked out.  Perhaps most symbiotically with current arguments against public housing, early twentieth century anti-slum arguments were explicitly anti-urban.  That is, "forcing" people to live in overcrowded urban areas was bad for them, fullstop, given the conditions of cities.  Better to remove people from cities and raize the dense built environments than rehab their existing homes, shops, etc.

This is a very ideological position, and one that underpins public housing arguments today.  The majority of public housing is low-rise, small-scale development, but the image of the iconic, high-rise with thousands of crime-ridden, inhabitable units persists and fuels our demolition desires.   How can we have a common sense debate about housing solutions for the poor when we're beginning from a flawed and ideological characterization of one of the major housing initiatives of the 20th century?

Finally, people too often operate from the assumption that public housing was never wanted in the communities in which it stands.  In truth, the first few rounds were built for returning WWII vets and their nuclear families - and segregated for whites versus African-Americans - and were heralded as a terrific, affordable solution for these traditional, breadwinning, deserving working-class households.  As the majority of public housing was built for whites and in white urban neighborhoods, black leaders protested, and in the 1960s - the last full decade of public housing construction - often fought for public housing developments to be built in their neighborhoods.  Other well-intended gestures, including federal changes to income qualifications for public housing that made it accessible for the poorest households, led to public housing's reputation as shelter "of last resort."

As public housing became associated simultaneously with African-American, Latin@ and the poorest families, any dwindling support for it evaporated.  Reagan later slashed public housing funding by 80%, meaning the federal subsidies meant to close the gaps between minimal rents and the cost of operating the developments could no longer sustain the properties.  Quelle surprise!  Buildings and projects fell into disrepair just as the crack epidemic was infecting cities in the 1980s.

So it's no wonder that shortly into Clinton's tenure Congress responded to a Reagan-era report that public housing was "severely distressed" and needing massive overhaul - and in rare cases, demolition.  Take the recession of the 1990s, the decline of urban representation in Congress, the enduring ambivalence we have about cities and the poor, and racism - latent and institutional - and suddenly we had a compelling public need to demolish public housing projects and make neighborhoods and cities safer, more welcoming places for well-behaved, low-income families and their middle-class neighbors who have taken their urban fears and tax-paying lifestyles to the suburbs.

The foreclosure crisis is hitting many of us, at all income levels.  For most of us, we will recover.  The problem of housing our nation's poorest isn't going to go away, and New Urbanist, design-driven initiatives to build affordable housing are not a comprehensive or even adequate solution.  We've got our work cut out for us, and in the interim, we'd be better served not to condemn the poor and their neighborhoods, nor accept the touted successes of demolition programs without closer scrutiny at their associated rates of displacement.