The stereotypical image of public housing in America is of rundown buildings, urban blight and Dysfunctional housing authority In a seemingly never-ending crisis. Residents deal regularly Poor living conditionsIncluding thermal failure, pest infestation, mold and leaks. And public housing projects are often available Areas with concentrated poverty and underdeveloped, racially segregated neighborhoods.
After all, America’s public housing has been experimented with Seen as a failure — so much so that housing authorities have Offload some of their responsibilities to the private sector.
But the death of public housing was not an inevitable result. As my colleague Rachel Cohen points out, other countries have successfully pulled it off. Governments around the world have shown that they can Management of mixed-income housing developments that have reliable maintenance and upkeep and that public housing does not have to segregate the poor from the middle class.
So why was the age of public housing in the United States so bad?
A daring experiment that was designed to fail
Federal government plans to build public housing began in the 1930s, as part of the New Deal, a Efforts to create jobs during the Great Depression and address the nation’s housing shortage.
But the effort to destroy public housing is as old as the effort to build it. Opposition was intense from the start. Many American governments did not like the idea of using their tax dollars to subsidize poor people’s housing and real estate developers. was concerned about competing with the government.
The Housing Act of 1949, which aimed to provide “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family”, strengthened America’s public housing plan by investing heavily in the construction of new housing units. But by then, the federal government was already in place undermined his own stated plan Capped construction costs (which encouraged the use of cheap materials and discouraged modern machinery) and allowed racial segregation. Congress also destroyed the ability of public housing authorities to raise revenue through rents in 1936 when it passed the George-Haley Act. Income limit established Who can qualify for public housing — making mixed-income public housing models impossible for federally funded projects.
As housing projects began to attract more black residents, white people who lived in public housing began to leave, especially after the Civil Rights Act of the 1960s. Racial discrimination in housing is prohibited. This is partly because the Federal Housing Authority More people are being pushed to own homes and extended its loans to whites, helping white families move out of the projects. Black families did not have the same opportunities.
“You see a change in racial makeup, which only adds to the pattern of stigma and administrative neglect that characterizes so many housing authorities,” historian Ed Goetz. told The Atlantic In 2015.
Starting with President Richard Nixon—K The US government announced that became “the largest slum in history” and Deferred federal spending On subsidized housing — public housing began to face severe austerity measures and has never recovered. Federal investments have shifted away from building new public housing units and toward housing vouchers and public-private partnerships.
In the following decades, public housing began to decline in quality and Congress Funding a program to destroy Dilapidated public housing units and their replacement with newly constructed or renovated mixed-income developments. but According to the National Low Income Housing CoalitionThis destruction was an “overcorrection”; Public housing simply needs more funding and better management.
It doesn’t have to be this way
America’s public housing was an ambitious program that has faced consistent efforts by lawmakers to undermine it. Throughout the program’s history, legislation deliberately limited its potential to suit the needs of Americans. In addition to the George-Haley Act, laws such as the 1998 Faircloth Amendments make a ceiling Ownership of public housing authorities on the number of houses allowed.
But that doesn’t mean public housing in the United States is completely out of luck. The general picture of decay and neglect ignores the many positive experiences of people living in government-run housing. As Goetz, a professor of public policy at the University of Minnesota, writes“The story of American public housing is one of quiet success drowned out by loud failures.”
More than that 2 million people live in public housing In the United States, and without it, many of them would struggle to find affordable shelter. Indeed, there are countless stories of people whose lives would be worse without public housing. Mike Connolly, a Massachusetts state representative who has proposed expanding public housing, is an example. “Personally, I see [public housing] As a success I grew up in a public housing project in Norwood, Massachusetts,” he told me. “Having that stable environment — not being subject to eviction, not being subject to a certain cost burden around housing — I think was really awesome for me and allowed me to develop into someone who’s doing a lot of good. Life.”
These bright spots show that there is a solid foundation that the United States can build on rather than abandon its public housing experiment. “I think so [public housing] As a successful program that has provided low-cost, moderate-quality shelter to millions of people across the United States for nearly a century,” Paul E. Williams, executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise, told Vox “Its ability to do more has been hampered and limited by policy mistakes over the past 80 years.”
So if America wants to be a public housing success story, it can. It has to stop sabotaging its own efforts to get there.
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