Congress in Crisis: The Economies of Public Housing
Tucker, William
William Tucker THE ECONOMIES OF PUBLIC HOUSING Forget the HUD scandals. The real scandal is that most Americans haven't a clue as to the progress made under Presidents Reagan and Bush in getting...
...Emboldened FHA officials . . . told builders they could inflate their cost estimates, their land prices, their architectural and other fees...
...The lesson is clear...
...In suburban Redwood City, for instance, vigilantes recently burned down twenty single-family-home construction sites, causing $2 million in damage, after the city council lifted a two-year building moratorium...
...Conceived in the depths of the Depression, the Housing Act was perceived both as a way of providing decent housing for the poor and as a method of reinvigorating the housing industry...
...After a fast start, building was interrupted by the war, but by 1954, there were about 500,000 units around the country, most of them in low-rise projects...
...Anderson also put the spotlight on the obvious scandal—that hundreds of thousands of poor people were being removed from their homes and left with no alternative housing: If standard housing is available at rents they can afford in convenient locations, why haven't they moved long ago...
...This has long been abandoned and the federal government now supplies $1.5 billion in operating subsidies and another $1.5 billion in modernization funds, which go for long-term improvements...
...The federal government would pay the difference between 25 percent of the tenant's income (since raised to 30 percent) and the "fair-market rent" of an "acceptable" dwelling unit...
...In 1965, housing expert Charles Abrams, in his book The City Is the Frontier, looked back at the outcome of this program: For twelve years, the . . . arrangement sanctioned by Congress went on without investigation...
...Only seventeen years after it was constructed, the 3,000-unit Pruitt-Igoe complex was dynamited as "uninhabitable...
...The answer can be found by looking at the vast differences that occur from city to city...
...If it takes a federal initiative to overcome these local policies, then the solution—strange as this may sound—probably does lie in Washington...
...The projects themselves would be operated by the municipal housing authorities...
...It wasn't entirely the fault of the designers...
...How did the Reagan and Bush Administrations manage to pull off this revolution in the face of so much indifference, hostility, and misinformation...
...In Boston, for example, 40 percent of all vouchers are being returned unused because the recipients can't find apartments, even with federal subsidies...
...In a 1942 New York Times article, officials claimed that juvenile delinquency had been all but eliminated...
...For one thing, federal low-income housing assistance has not declined, but is considerably higher than it was in 1980...
...Both cities have strict zoning and rent control...
...Also he pays dearly for his supplies from manufacturers, since in many cases they, too, produce during only part of the year and for the rest must let their plants stand idle...
...While an average of 10,000 public-housing units were brought on line each year during the late 1970s, the figure has risen to more than 20,000 in the 1980s...
...Houston, for example, is a growth-happy community with no zoning and rental vacancies of 18 percent...
...On a national average, the amount of income paid in rent has risen steadily from 23 percent in 1973 to more than 30 percent today...
...They each went on the payroll for $20,000 a year...
...In 1988, Time magazine could write: "The redevelopment binge of the '50s and '60s came disastrously close to indulging the American antiurban instinct to the point of no return...
...Congress, however, was still somewhat wary...
...As late as 1965, residents in Chicago projects underwent annual housekeeping inspections...
...There were already tens of thousands of units in the pipeline from the Carter and Ford years...
...Those that have allowed the market to operate do not...
...The real scandal is that most Americans haven't a clue as to the progress made under Presidents Reagan and Bush in getting rent vouchers to those who can't afford the high cost of housing in our overregulated urban markets...
...As public housing starts have fallen, homelessness has risen...
...As perhaps not enough people have pointed out, this "influence-peddling" hardly differs from the influence-peddling congressmen practice every day in trying to steer federal dollars into their own districts...
...Yet these 15-year schedules—in real estate terms—gave the owners a very short-term interest...
...In New York, the figure is 60 percent...
...After achieving some early successes, in the 1940s and '50s, public housing by the 1960s was also running into difficulties...
...By 1987, 31 percent of households below $5,000 were receiving federal assistance, while only three percent of households in the $20,000$25,000 range were being assisted...
...Louis in 1955, it won a major design award...
...A proposed provision of the National Affordable Housing Act of 1989, sponsored by Senators Alan Cranston and Alfonse D'Amato, which would force cities to justify "all policies that effect return on residential investment"—meaning rent control—certainly bears watching...
...Perhaps they were not aware of it...
...Yet they never bother to ask what it is that makes housing plentiful in Houston and almost unattainable in New York, San Francisco, and Boston...
...Over 20 percent of sales had gone into default when the program was halted in 1973...
...The question has become even more relevant as the nation's housing stock has improved over the years...
...each got his $6,000 back in a few weeks, and when the building was completed, there was $2,450,000 left over from the mortgage, which they promptly pocketed...
...Given a federal mandate and federal dollars, however, cities began doing something they had wanted to do all along—demolish their black slums...
...A new unit of public housing now costs the government about $9,000 a year...
...As urban renewal collapsed in disgrace and as the mandate for public housing projects came into doubt, the Johnson Administration took a new tack...
...In short, the easy analysis that the housing crisis originates in Washington does not stand up...
...When civil liberties groups took up the cause in the mid-sixties, the gates flew open...
...The rising numbers of homeless are obvious to anyone who walks the streets of Washington or San Francisco...
...Urban planners, she noted, had an extreme aversion to commercial uses and would rather surround buildings with green lawns and "keepoff-the-grass" signs than stores where people could buy a cup of coffee or pick up a newspaper...
...These tasks, if they are to be discharged, must be tackled by government with a large-scale program of housing accompanied by city planning...
...The main reason authorizations have been reduced is that the Reagan Administration began to get the country out of the expensive, long-term business of building housing and into the far more sensible strategy of issuing rent vouchers...
...In one sense, then, the solution to the housing problem does lie in Washington...
...A family can spend its voucher anywhere it wants, moving across the country if it likes...
...So why do we build special housing for poor people...
...Builders did not hesitate to oblige...
...National rental vacancy rates are at 7.8 percent, the highest figure in two decades...
...He cannot meet the real problem of labor costs . . . because his operations are too sporadic and do not permit him to invest capital in equipment that would economically permit all-year work...
...Although almost completely unrecognized, then, housing vouchers have been one of the success stories of the 1980s...
...The recent scandal at HUD is hardly the first time a federal housing program has collapsed in charges of corruption...
...Louis are plagued with unused, boarded-up buildings, rather than housing shortages...
...As homelessness becomes a perennial issue, as thousands of protesters march on Washington shouting "Housing, Now...
...The lesson to be learned was simple...
...The cities would then demolish existing housing and sell the empty parcel to private developers...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1989 plexes quickly became "vertical ghettoes...
...The lesson to be learned from the "608 scandals" was simple: trying to give subsidies to the builders of housing, rather than the tenants themselves, is a risky business, prone to corruption...
...Finally, the HUD scandals, egregious though they may be, are really not much more than a sideshow to the whole housing situation...
...Meanwhile, the supposedly moribund American housing industry was going on the greatest building binge in history...
...The money paid to James Watt and the late John Mitchell was not embezzled out of the federal treasury...
...Unfortunately, these high-rise cornThere is no denying that there is a housing crisis, yet paradoxically the nation has never been better housed...
...as reports of scandal at the Department of Housing and Urban Development mount, the "housing crisis" appears to be rising to the top of the nation's agenda...
...Many poor people still spend an inordinate portion of their income on rent...
...Recommended by housing experts as diverse as Richard Muth of the American Enterprise Institute, Anthony Downs and Henry J. Aaron of the Brookings Institution, and the Kaiser Commission on Housing (appointed by President Lyndon Johnson), housing vouchers have long promised to solve the problems that have plagued public housing...
...I f bogus concerns about "spending 1 cuts" were the only measure of the general misunderstanding of the housing situation, that might be tolerable enough...
...Tent cities have sprung up in New York and Los Angeles...
...When they get around to admitting that vouchers do work, critics argue that they should be made an entitlement, like food stamps...
...In fact, probably the best way to appreciate the accomplishment is to spend a few minutes reviewing the history of public housing programs...
...The sense that the private building industry was not up to the job of building America's housing continued to dominate federal policies after the war...
...This older housing was quickly occupied by blacks, Puerto Ricans, and other urban immigrants...
...When private development was attracted, it was often necessary for cities to subsidize it anyway, further reducing the scant advantages...
...The result was the introduction of housing vouchers in 1984...
...In 1946, one of the first things Congress did was to transform Section 608 of the Housing Act of 1942—designed to build GI housing—into a large-scale program for private apartment production...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1989 29...
...Unions, church groups, and other amateurs all failed at a phenomenal rate...
...In 1984, the figure fell to zero and has not risen above 6,000 per year since...
...Under Section 235, poor people would be helped to buy their own houses with special FHA mortgage guarantees...
...In January 1973, he placed a moratorium on all federal housing programs and asked Congress to come up with something manageable...
...The planning and architectural communities generally lent their approval...
...The thread of the argument usually runs like this: (1) The Reagan and Bush Administrations have made vast cuts in federal assistance to housing...
...A fourth category, "moderate rehabilitation," was added in 1978...
...Even discounting inflation, this is an increase of more than 75 percent...
...When the huge Pruitt-Igoe complex opened in St...
...Most privately sponsored projects were syndicated through- real estate trusts, which concentrated on the accelerated-depreciation benefits...
...In 1937, when federal public-housing programs began, substandard housing `the slums"—was still a compelling concern...
...Cities like Detroit, Chicago, and St...
...The Section 235 program proved to be the biggest boondoggle...
...Anti-growth sentiment is rife in the Bay Area...
...The administration threw out the new-construction program and tried to eliminate the rehabilitation programs as well...
...More and more, people are saying "Not in my back yard," and more and more municipal governments are letting them have their way...
...Milton Friedman had been a proponent for decades...
...The number of substandard units has shrunk to insignificance...
...In 1982, the President's Commission on Housing reached the same conclusion—current housing stocks are adequate...
...2) Homelessness is the result of the federal government's failure to build new public housing...
...The con artist himself often made the $200 down payment, leaving the owner to pick up only the small monthly mortgage payment...
...Certificates were also made good for fifteen years—far longer than a tenant was likely to stay in one place but tailored to meet the needs of the housing providers...
...Most of the money went to low-income housing anyway—the only question was which state or municipality would get it...
...A whole web of deception was spun which made it possible for the knowledgeable to build projects with costs running into the millions without investing a dime...
...The mortgages insured by FHA so far exceeded investment that builders withdrew millions above what the project cost...
...Yet by 1973, both programs had collapsed in disgrace...
...Operations and maintenance expenditures would be paid for out of the rents...
...The "housing crisis" is a local problem...
...Under Title I of the Housing Act of 1949, cities were allowed to designate residential areas as "slums" and acquire them by eminent domain...
...The Reagan and Bush Administrations have set us on the road to solving the 50-year-old riddle of how to provide housing assistance to the poor...
...Nor can private investment create a stable pattern within which our cities can develop adequately with regard to their functions of work and life...
...Vouchers do not promote segregation or concentrate poverty, since tenants are not restricted to government projects...
...Authorizations have declined because the federal government now commits itself to five-year vouchers rather than to 40-year mortgages...
...Low-income housing has been helped immensely by a zoning reform that has allowed private investors to build single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels...
...The federal government would reimburse cities for two-thirds of the cost...
...Instead, we set up programs like food stamps and Medicaid that help the poor participate in the general economy...
...How to account for such poverty in the midst of plenty...
...Much of the nation's housing was woefully inadequate and in need of replacement...
...Three days after Nixon left office, President Gerald Ford signed the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, which finally changed the emphasis of federal programs from housing construction to rental allowances...
...Then, in 1984, the administration persuaded Congress to fund a true housing voucher—a five-year commitment that the tenant can take anywhere...
...The 50-year effort to build public housing has always been dogged by an obvious question: Why is it necessary for the government to build housing in the first place...
...Instead, tenant income is the problem...
...If people need food, does the government go out and start running farms...
...In the 1960s, many cities had vacancy rates between 15-20 percent and worried about having too much housing...
...When the new projects began running into management or maintenance problems, the investors walked away, once again leaving the FHA holding the bag...
...HUD Secretary Jack Kemp's suggestion to sell public housing to tenants is another step in the right direction...
...Once again, the rent certificate did not go to the tenant but to the landlord or developer who built or rehabilitated the project...
...In 1979, it authorized 54,000 new units of public housing...
...In cities like Philadelphia and Detroit, the houses began to fall apart within months...
...Under the leadership of Reagan HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce and his executive assistant, Deborah Gore Dean, HUD squandered millions in federal housing funds on political favoritism and middle-class subsidies...
...When a group William Ricker, our New York correspondent, is currently a media fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...John Burns, director of the San Jose Housing Authority, recently reported that, for the first time, people who become eligible for public housing units are asking for vouchers instead...
...Facing a balky plumbing system or failed boiler, the new owners—unacquainted with the exigencies of home ownership—often went to the bank demanding the necessary repairs...
...Even as the administration unraveled in Watergate, Congress was forced to rethink the issue...
...At first, "the projects" had been limited to the "submerged middle class" of the Depression —people who had middle-class habits but whose fortunes were ruined by the Depression...
...Housing authorities prided themselves on 100 percent rent collections...
...This meant building 600,000 new units of public housing per year at a time when annual production had never exceeded 40,000...
...Few people are now willing to venture exactly what Congress thought was going to happen...
...They are merely commitments to spend money in the future...
...Since the 1970s, a consensus has emerged among housing experts that—except where the market is distorted by no-growth and rent control—the nation essentially has enough housing to meet people's needs...
...These include: (1) its tendency to concentrate the poor and promote racial segregation, (2) the inequities created by giving a very large subsidy to only a few of the people who are eligible, and (3) the tendency of many federal housing programs to wind up benefiting the middle class...
...Yet the amount of money spent each year may increase—and actually has...
...Landlords often give away several months' free rent just to lure tenants into their buildings...
...So, the obvious question arises, if federal vouchers are such a success, why is there still a housing problem...
...As the efforts of private construction have brought nearly all the nation's housing up to adequate standards, however, this argument has faded...
...Concentrating on the suburbs, the industry provided home ownership for millions of people not previously believed capable of affording it...
...Yet such an expensive program seems unlikely in light of current budget restraints...
...The trail is marked by fiascoes like urban renewal and "vertical ghettoes," wends its way past many failed "public-private partnerships," and leads through the numerous embezzlements and rip-offs that have dogged previous programs...
...Section 236 fared little better...
...Finally, vouchers are better targeted to the poor...
...Yet when cities that have overregulated find themselves facing a low-income housing shortage, they rarely blame themselves...
...Under the program, the federal government would only supply the funds to build the housing...
...HUD regularly asks for 100,000, but Congress cuts the request back...
...None of thiscan be credited to the Reagan and Bush Administrations, which have been phasing out public housing construction...
...As this "submerged middle class" moved on to home ownership, however, the housing authorities were left facing an ever-dwindling constituency...
...In 1961, Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, arguing that urban renewal and high-rise public housing projects were tearing apart the social fabric that held cities together...
...The point neither the critics nor the press recognizes isthat authorizations are not the same thing as spending...
...His new book, The Excluded Americans: Homelessness and Housing Policies, is being published this December by Regnery Gateway...
...When owners found themselves facing thousands of dollars in main-tenance expenses, they walked away, leaving the FHA holding the bag...
...A t the same time, there is no denying that there is a housing crisis...
...The 236 program proved notable for the remarkably poor performance by non-profit organizations—often seen as the salvation for housing problems...
...She thinks everybody can live in Greenwich Village," is the common reaction...
...It is tangible in many parts of the country and particularly acute in certain metropolitan areas...
...Anderson may be dismissed as a troglodyte," wrote one critic, "but some of his charges are annoyingly hard to refute...
...The dream of a benevolent, government-sponsored environment for the poor seemed to be coming true...
...Over 40 percent of tenants now pay more than one-third of their income in rent and 15 percent pay more than half...
...The best assistancewould be to provide rent supplements to help low-income households pay for the housing that is available...
...The idea had been kicking around for decades...
...In 1964, Martin Anderson—then a young graduate student at MIT, later President Reagan's principal domestic policy adviser—published The Federal Bulldozer, which pointed out that, even on its own terms, urban renewal was a failure...
...Perhaps even more significant, only 13 percent of the people who got homes actually proved to be poor...
...Louis and Detroit cleared huge neighborhoods which then stood vacant for over a decade...
...The San Jose Mercury News immediately wrote a paternalistic editorial chiding poor people for preferring vouchers and urging them to stick to good old public housing...
...Altogether, then, it is clear why the people have come to realize that private enterprise, under present conditions, is simply unable to build and maintain satisfactory Federal housing assistance has not declined, but is considerably higher than it was in 1980...
...One basic argument for public housing was that the government was needed to do the job...
...There are now about 221,000 vouchers in circulation with 50,000 more being issued every year...
...Projects quickly "turned"—their elderly white tenants and stable black families fleeing—and public housing was on the way to becoming the drug battlefields of today...
...Con artists went out and found dilapidated urban dwellings, gave them a paint job, and then lined up poor people to buy them...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1989 27 homes in large cities on a scale of rentals that the low-income families can afford to pay...
...Overcrowding is essentially a thing of the past...
...This was one impoundment of funds that stuck in the courts...
...In effect, the tenant became a pawn moved around the board by bureaucrats and developers...
...The very act of marching on Washington begins with the assumption that the solution to housing problems lies with the federal government...
...For a while, the housing authorities tried to stick to the old ways...
...The vast stretches of vacant lots were hardly rebuilding the cities' property-tax base, he noted...
...Even critics of vouchers admit they seem to work in cities with adequate housing markets like Phoenix and Dallas, but are all but useless in cities with tight housing markets like Boston and New York...
...While Los Angeles is trying to condemn the last of its SRO hotels because they could not withstand major earthquakes, San Diego is building new ones...
...As a result, even though Section 8 of the Housing Act set up a system of rental supplements, the program soon became almost indistinguishable from all that had gone before...
...As James Hughes and George Sternlieb point out in The Dynamics of America's Housing (1984), there is now one bedroom for every American...
...Housing is affordable and homelessness is relatively low...
...Tenants seeking federal assistance also seem to prefer them...
...In these circumstances, adequate maintenance, rather than new construction, has become a much better strategy...
...More poor people could be served at less cost in bigger buildings...
...Indeed, since the 1970s, the problem in central cities has more likely been too much housing, which led to the abandonment of sound stock...
...The problem is not the ability of American industry to produce housing...
...The third, although accurate in some respects, is essentially beside the point...
...Yet even then, much housing was still available...
...The problem is where to put the housing...
...What is remarkable is that, in the midst of all this, the press and public have managed to miss what is perhaps the biggest housing story of the 1980s—the long-sought introduction of an efficient, economical system of housing vouchers that have replaced public housing construction and revolutionized federal housing assistance...
...Writing in the New York Times Magazine, in 1939, Albert Mayer, a Times' reporter who wrote frequently about housing, argued: The small-scale, speculative nature of the private production of houses entails wastes which the builder can counterbalance only by low wages and inferior construction...
...There was never any provision for replacing existing slums with federal public housing...
...Cities and metropolitan areas that have practiced exclusionary zoning and rent controls have a housing problem...
...Her book, roundly condemned by enthusiasts of redevelopment, is still scoffed at in planning circles...
...The promise of the voucher system is that it doesn't have to happen again...
...It had been mentioned in the 1937 debates and Charles Abrams recommended it in the 1960s...
...The number of households receiving housing assistance has risen from 3.1 million in 1980 to 4.2 million today...
...Once again, only 43 percent of the tenants actually proved to be poor...
...Under Section 236, private and non-profit groups would be encouraged to build multifamily rental housing with "shallow" subsidies that would reduce mortgage interest rates to one percent and provide special allowances for accelerated depreciation...
...Among the professionals working on limited profits, the rates were seven and 31 percent respectively—still high compared to the normal two percent rate of failure on profit-making ventures...
...In San Diego, where voters have twice turned down rent control, vacancies are at a normal six percent and homelessness is low, despite the city's proximity to the Mexican border...
...The idea of simply handing money directly to tenants and letting them spend it wherever they wanted ran against their basic instincts...
...Never one to do things by small measures, Lyndon Johnson announced a plan to replace all 6 million substandard dwelling units in the country within ten years...
...The program in which influence-peddling occurred —the moderate rehabilitation program under Section 8 of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 —makes up only a small part of the federal assistance programs...
...of Washington housing activists was photographed picketing Dean's Georgetown townhouse last summer, the argument came full circle...
...Instead, it concentrated spending on the Section 8 existing-housing program...
...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1989 Yet paradoxically, the nation has never been better housed...
...At some point, Congress or the President is going to have to face up to the problem of disruptive local regulations...
...It was the portion of these programs that Congress refused to drop that became the focal point of the HUD scandals...
...FHA would then insure a mortgage on the leasehold and upon default would have to pay the fictitious rent for the duration of the lease...
...People are without housing in New York and Los Angeles because of stinginess and corruption in Washington...
...It would try to involve the private sector in the production of public housing...
...Consequently he pays a scale of wages that is higher because the workmen cannot count on steady employment...
...Although it is generally forgotten—even by supporters of public housing—one of the major arguments for public housing was that the building industry—made up as it is of thousands and thousands of small developers—was simply too small and inefficient to provide Americans with housing...
...Nor were existing residents promised anything more than vague "assistance" in finding new housing...
...Foreclosures on the non-profits ran at 33 percent for senior-citizen projects and 65 percent for low-income family projects...
...We don't deal this way with other commodities...
...It was paid by private developers trying to get federal funds directed into their communities...
...3) What federal programs remained have been done in by scandal...
...The "608 scandals," which finallyblew open in the 1950s, were the nation's first great housing scandal...
...But it completely undercuts the argument that a lack of new public housing is the cause of homelessness...
...This spreading abandonment was called "urban blight...
...The commonly acknowledged goal of urban renewal was to "attractthe middle class back into the city" by replacing slums with new housing for the middle class...
...In city after city, residential areas were leveled without anyone having the slightest idea what would be put in their place...
...At the same time, the suburban boom also emptied the cities...
...By this time, President Nixon had had enough...
...Trying to give subsidies to the builders of housing, rather than the tenants themselves, is a risky business, prone to corruption...
...The housing authorities came under tremendous pressure to open up their doors to the most pathological of the poor...
...The early tenants were often called "the aristocrats of the slums" and admission was regarded as a ticket to upward mobility...
...Inheriting the program a year later, Richard Nixon and his HUD secretary, George Romney—to everyone's surprise—made it work...
...T he Housing Act of 1937 is gener- 1 ally regarded as the start of federal housing programs...
...The FHA, under extreme pressure to loosen its standards, guaranteed the mortgage (often with a kickback to the FHA official...
...The ambitious Housing Act of 1968 introduced two new programs—Sections 235 and 236...
...Besides being cheaper and more efficient, vouchers end up in the hands of the right people...
...Urban renewal was quietly put to death by the Nixon Administration in 1974...
...The resistance of Charleston, S.C., and Savannah to Great Society efforts to clear their slums account for those cities' remarkably intact historical districts today...
...Nashville tore down an entire black area, arguing it was an "eyesore...
...Three speculators put up only $6,000 for a $12,500,000 project in Virginia...
...These reductions are responsible for the nation's alleged housing shortage...
...Actual outlays rose from $5.7 billion in 1980 to $13.8 billion in 1988...
...The newspapers, however, didn't approve...
...At the same time, for reasons that made sense in terms of utilizing urban land, the housing authorities began to build high-rise projects...
...In 1974, among households making less than $5,000 in 1987 dollars, only 16 percent were being served by federal housing assistance, while six percent of households making between $20,000 and $25,000 were being assisted...
...If the poor need medical care, do we build poor people's hospitals...
...Instead, they run to Washington...
...Some [builders] made dummy leases between themselves and wholly owned subsidiary corporations at a spurious rent for ninety-nine years...
...I n answer to urban blight came a 1 program called "urban renewal," which became perhaps the biggest federal housing fiasco of all...
...The first two premises are incorrect...
...It hasn't been easy...
...The answer is local housing policies...
...The National Low Income Housing Coalition, which recommends such a plan, has estimated it would cost HUD $35 billion a year—about triple its current budget...
...If this is the case wouldn't it be far simpler and much cheaper to advise people of these attractive bargains without going to all the trouble of tearing their houses down...
...Vouchers, on the other hand, cost the government $4,500 a year, providing the average tenant with a $325-a-month rent supplement at little overhead...
...Condominiums start at $50,000 and luxury apartments rent for $350...
...The housing industry can produce all the housing we need...
...The bill set up Section 8 "certificates" covering three different categories: (1) new housing, (2) existing housing, and (3) substantially rehabilitated housing...
...In the end, urban renewal ultimately fell victim to the rising political consciousness of blacks themselves...
...This is why the Reagan and Bush Administrations have been able to expand housing assistance while holding back spending increases and cutting budget authorizations...
...San Francisco, on the other hand, is so opposed to development that it has limited the construction of new office space to the equivalent of one large building per year...
...The most commonly cited figure is budget authorizations for HUD, which have been reduced from $32 billion in 1981 to $7 billion in 1989...
...Three years later, the effort was nearly on schedule, with 1.3 million new units constructed...
...Most important, because vouchers cut costs in half, more people can be served with the same amount of money...
...When the Reagan Administration came to office in 1981, it found that the Section 8 program—which was supposed to give power to tenants—had simply become another version of public housing...
...Yet as long as municipalities are allowed to wall themselves off, restricting development and protecting the interests of current residents at the expense of newcomers and outsiders, we are going to have a "housing crisis...
...After lying dormant for almost a decade, the energies of American reform movements have finally begun to coalesce again around the issue of housing...
...In a familiar pattern, the subsidies had drifted up toward the middle class...
...Satisfying as this scenario may seem, it does not describe the nature of the nation's housing situation...
...Unmarried mothers were banned and families could be evicted if a member was a drug addict or if a breadwinner was in j ail...
...When Congress finally attached realistic relocation expenses to the program, it died of its own weight...
...Secondly, although the Reagan Administration cut authorizations for new public housing units, that did not bring public housing construction to an end...
...The new Federal Housing Authority (FHA) was called in to guarantee mortgages and encourage builders to put up new housing...
...What does that say for the reduction in budget authorizations from $32 billion to $7 billion...
...By the 1960s, the old standards were coming under severe pressures...
...The city has had rent control since 1979 and rental vacancy rates are below two percent...
...Not for nothing was the program nicknamed "Negro removal," and much of the early rhetoric of the civil rights movement was directed against it...
...In Stockton, California, urban renewal leveled thirty-two black churches...
...The answer is that, despite their many, many advantages, vouchers can't work in a city where overregulation has restricted the availability of housing...
Vol. 22 • November 1989 • No. 11
