Capitol Ideas/A Cruel Housing Hoax?
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS A CRUEL HOUSING HOAX? K imi Gray is the chairperson of the Kenilworth-Par kside Resident Management Corporation, which manages a much-celebrated 464-unit public housing property in...
...by Tom Bethel...
...One day maybe there would be a big headline and tenant management would be discredited—a ripoff, a cruel hoax on the poor...
...I could see why they would be needing lawyers...
...Because it takes power away from the public housing authorities and puts it where it belongs—among the residents themselves...
...Jack Kemp, the secretary of housing and urban development, said in his office on the tenth floor of the HUD building...
...We would like to ensure that the property remains in low-income hands...
...Along with other black women around the country, such as Bertha Gilkey of St...
...These are fierce women, a black matriarchal elite, armed (by the liberals) with accusation privileges and indignation rights, doubly empowered as women and minorities, emerging now in righteous wrath from the kitchens and sculleries of the social welfare plantation...
...Whereas you and I believe there are ways to release deeply embedded, hidden talents...
...I had made repeated attempts to reach Kimi Gray, without success...
...I think units have to be sold to another low-income person:' Stuart Butler told me...
...For the more than one million Americans living in Federal housing projects," wrote Stuart M. Butler in the Washington Post, "homeownership has long been a distant dream...
...In fact, the 1987 act requires that for each unit of public housing that is "sold," one more unit must be added...
...The plantation owners might have been driven off the premises, but they were still watching and waiting, biding their time, noting every transaction...
...Alan Cranston...
...is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Mitch Dasher was guarded, noncommittal...
...Mitch explained THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1990 11 to the caller that Kimi was "running around" somewhere...
...dozens of photographs of Gray shaking hands with the high and mighty...
...Still no sign of Kimi Gray, however, and eventually Wood went back out into the snow...
...She was "running around," I was told...
...All kinds of bad habits were popping up...
...M itch was concerned that the renovation of the property was lagging behind schedule...
...I sensed more strongly than ever that the plantation owners were watching intently from their bureaucratic redoubts...
...I gathered that sale of the property (from the District's Department of Public and Assisted Housing to Kimi Gray's Resident Management Corporation) still had not taken place—this despite a vaunted key-transferring ceremony in October 1988...
...The entire property is being reconstructed with HUD funds, costing at least $25 million, possibly $35 million...
...He said he's now in the construction business...
...Lost my secretary, she developed a crack habit," Wood continued...
...An outsize wooden "key" symbolized the transfer of ownership...
...Kimi objects to the use of the word "project" and insists on "property...
...He took me down to his office and called Kimi Gray's assistant, a man called Mitch Dasher...
...Over 300 low-income families had been moved out to accommodate the reconstruction...
...As opposed to a developer or a speculator...
...Jackie had to be about thirty years old...
...No windfall profits on this plantation, folks...
...The phone rang...
...This explains why there has not been more liberal grumbling about tenant management...
...Empowerment of Tom Bethel...
...According to David K. Groo, program manager for the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (Robert Woodson, president), which is under contract to the D.C...
...Earlier, Kemp had told me that he prefers the phrase homeownership to privatization because this gives us "the high ground in response to liberals who say: 'They wouldn't know what to do with their property, or they would probably sell it to make a profit, or they would leave it to their children.' All of which we would hold as demonstrably good effects in and of themselves...
...Dasher told me that at Kenilworth-Parkside they have a Latchkey Program, an Enrichment Program, a College Here We Come Program, a Substance Abuse Prevention Program, and a Reverse Commute Program (the latter funded by the Urban Mass Transit Administration...
...They have been in control all along...
...I could see why Kimi Gray seemed unenthusiastic about meeting the press...
...This romantic notion of homeownership is a cruel hoax on the poor," Bob McKay, executive director of the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities, has been quoted as saying...
...He, too, seemed to be looking for Kimi, who (I surmised) might indeed be in a position to decide who participates in these government contracts, and who does not...
...They say it's a 'cruel hoax.' And you know why...
...Three-and four-bedroom row houses will probably sell in the low twenties, Groo said...
...The General Accounting Office had already done an investigation of Kenilworth at the request of Sen...
...There would be gleeful editorials and a New York Times wrap-up telling us that the slaves weren't ready yet...
...They would be so busy, the day would be gone before they realized it...
...But this merely celebrated HUD's "conditional approval" of the sale...
...In Britain, of course, council houses were sold to tenants way below market prices, and if this serves the goal of reorienting the incentives of those on 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1990 welfare, giving them reason to care for the property they can now call their own, that is all to the good...
...The walls were covered with plaques and awards to Kimi Gray, signed photographs addressed to her, one of Dan Rather, one of President Reagan, one of Jack Kemp...
...What incentive, then, will they have to buy in the first place...
...Thomas Jefferson in the eighteenth century warned against the dangers of entail...
...Caprara was the man who dealt with Kimi Gray and KenilworthParkside, apparently...
...These people are perpetually poor.' They believe in the perpetuity of the condition of poverty...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1990 13...
...I told Kemp that Kimi Gray seemed hard to find...
...Department of Public Housing to provide technical assistance to Kenilworth, "the two- and three-bedroom units will probably be sold for $16,000 to $18,000...
...This is reminiscent of the El Salvador land reform (also supported by the U.S...
...Later I read that she had kept him waiting an hour and a half for a "photo opportunity...
...Kenilworth residents will be eligible for low-income (Section 8) housing vouchers whether they buy or rent...
...But when Reagan and then Congressman Kemp picked up the cause—and added the wrinkle of selling public housing to its tenants—red flags went up throughout the liberal community...
...He had worked in a law office downtown, but Kimi Gray had persuaded him to throw in his lot with the poor...
...To some extent Congress is correct...
...But in Washington, conservatives like Jack Kemp and Stuart Butler, director of domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, led the charge for tenant management and ownership—and they convinced Ronald Reagan and George Bush to come along...
...So it isn't like the British version of the sale of public housing, which is free and clear...
...To be concluded in a future installment...
...We have consultants working on this...
...His tone was patient, deferential...
...It can only be sold back to the D.C...
...A solidly built man wearing a belted raincoat came into the office, Willie Wood by name...
...she had shouted in stentorian tones to a tenant-management training group in Chicago...
...But there was no sign of Kimi Gray herself...
...The actual transfer is projected for 1990," according to the recent GAO Report...
...Low-income housing activists have supported tenant management for two decades...
...At Kenilworth, buyers will be able to sell units back to the cooperative, but not profitably...
...housing authority, or possibly to another resident management corporation...
...If all the programs were working, the kids would be inundated," Willie Wood was saying...
...Here they have been kept down for a generation or two, but now are ready to do battle with their overseers ensconced in the welfare bureaucracies...
...government), in which the new "owners" were told that they could not sell their share of the property, nor could the collectivized property be sold (except to the El .Salvador government, which in reality owned it all along...
...And I was out in L.A...
...They will have to sell them back to the resident management corporation...
...But I must alert you...
...We're trying to make this work for low-income Americans," he said...
...A Washington Post magazine profile referred to her as an "irresistible force," physically a "massive figure with short cropped hair, large earrings and several pounds of jewelry around her neck and wrists," politically a lifelong Democrat...
...poor people was a theme close to the heart of the New Left, carried forward into populist citizens' organizations with fanciful acronyms: ACORN, COPS, BUILD...
...Thus the liberal plantation may be slyly expanded...
...No," said Mitch Dasher...
...Or not to be found...
...A change in the law has permitted resident groups to buy, or at least to assume control of, some housing projects, so taking charge of their own lives...
...That's the fear, and I think with justification...
...K imi Gray is the chairperson of the Kenilworth-Par kside Resident Management Corporation, which manages a much-celebrated 464-unit public housing property in Washington, D.C...
...There is a considerable problem deciding the price...
...If any were found, the Washington Post would be informed, probably by anonymous telephone call...
...when we had that shooting at the elementary school...
...So many grants and programs...
...It tends to perpetuate a feudal aristocracy that can neither manage the lands that it inherits, nor sell it to others...
...Or somewhere else...
...On the appointed day it was snowing...
...Kenilworth-Parkside is in the eastern corner of the District of Columbia, east of the RFK Stadium and the Anacostia River...
...They will have a chance to buy the units," Dasher replied...
...In the next week or two I called Dasher several times, but Kimi remained elusive...
...Will the new Kenilworth-Parkside owners be able to sell their units to any buyer...
...Still, I told myself, if the tenants are going to end up owning the whole thing, this will be money well spent . . . "So you made it," said Mitch Dasher, none too enthusiastically, as I made my way into the office, stamping the snow off my feet...
...But thanks to these changes, and the efforts of conservatives, "this dream is about to become a reality . . ." The irony was not lost on David Osborne, who wrote the Kimi Gray profile for the Post...
...When the property is renovated, the tenants returned (those that do), and the sale completed, will the tenants be able to buy their units...
...Kemp leaned across and grabbed my knee "The liberals are saying—you know what they are saying...
...Not any time soon...
...In legal terms, the property is entailed: there are severe restrictions on its resale, written into Section 123 of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1987...
...Or out of town...
...The overall KenilworthParkside property cannot be sold to a developer, nor can parts of it be sold off...
...Dasher was a watchful, quiet, intelligent man, once the chief counsel for the Black Congressional Caucus, he said...
...But the programs did not seem to be working...
...Cirri enant management," then, is 1 an attempt to enhance the value of housing that will remain ultimately under government control, without permitting any of the people who live in it to capture that enhanced value "One of the great fears," Robert Woodson told me, when I asked him if this indeed was the law, "is that the government could pay to renovate these facilities, turn them over to the resident groups, who in turn sell them on the open market, enabling a few families to reap the windfall...
...She is forty-five years old, and was raised by her mother and grandmother in the Frederick Douglass housing project in southeast Washington...
...One or two construction workers could be seen trudging quietly through the snow...
...Most of the buildings were boarded up or under renovation...
...What is it going to take for us to take on some responsibility...
...We are trying to prevent speculation, and to prevent developers from participating in this...
...He played defensive back for the Green Bay Packers in the Vince Lombardi era and was recently inducted into the Hall of Fame...
...The residents also wanted protection from having taxpayers subsidize the windfall of a few people...
...Eventually Dasher told me to come over on Friday, and she might be there...
...Louis, Mildred Hailey of Boston, and Irene Johnson of Chicago, Kimi Gray has been a driving force within the tenant-management movement in the United States...
...The new British owners of formerly public housing are full owners with clear title to their property...
...I couldn't speculate and buy five units for $9,500 each...
...The liberals in the welfare bureaucracies would have their spy-glasses trained on them from afar, looking for any trace of irregularity...
...Kemp summoned an assistant, David Caprara, who arrived within a matter of seconds from some nether region in the building...
...We are trying to hold it to around $10,000 per unit...
...A 30-year-old complex of low-rise buildings, KenilworthParkside is one of fifty-eight public housing projects in the District of Columbia (11,954 units, total operating budget $50 million...
...They still own the property and aren't about to surrender it any time soon...
...I hadseen her on a television series that also featured Friedrich Hayek, and more recently I had enjoyed watching Bertha Gilkey on CBS's "Forty-Eight Hours...
...Apparently an appointment with Kimi could be arranged without too much difficulty...
...By training I am a lawyer...
...Interesting, isn't it...
Vol. 23 • February 1990 • No. 2
