The Excluded Americans, by William Tucker

...Building codes are intended not only to assure safety to the owners and occupants of particular buildings, but also to protect nearby property against the contagious dangers of fire and disease...

...It is never easy to balance the interests of newcomers against the fears of those who already have homes and are worried about their ability to keep up with tax payments as the town they live in grows...

...Its subtitle suggests that misguided government intervention, including rent control, zoning, building and housing codes, urban renewal programs, "slum clearance," and public housing are responsible for the homelessness that has become a problem in many American cities, large and not so large...

...At the same time, the Supreme Court is classifying some zoning restrictions as impermissible extensions of police power, making them unconstitutional "takings" of an owner's property rights and entitling him to seek compensation...

...These questions merely point out that the government programs making housing construction more difficult and causing the decay and abandonment of existing homes, are not the main causes of the current homelessness "crisis," if indeed it should be so categorized...

...They achieve these goals, but at a high cost...

...These documents, running with the land and binding its future purchasers in perpetuity, were used before government developed zoning to take over the function of restricting use and development...

...To families bedeviled with drug addictions...

...Meanwhile, families of greater affluence remain in high-quality apartments that are more spacious than they need, simply because they pay unmatchably low rents for them...

...Does the promise extend to people with severe mental illness...

...Rent controls in Berkeley and Santa Monica have given hate-filled, left-wing local legislators and executives the chance to do tremendous damage to the housing supply, to cause great hardship to property owners, especially small ones, and to create a political atmosphere fraught with anger and resentment...

...Nor does he claim that society has ceased producing new mentally ill people...

...He points out that rent control generally encourages people to stay in the apartment in which they were living when the law became effective, or at least to keep their names on the lease, legally or otherwise...

...Yet, without them, some money-saving innovations may expose the experimental building's owners and the neighborhood to unexpected hazards...

...Zoning, in Tucker's view, is a device for restricting access to the land by poor people and those considered undesirable by the original settlers (who may have moved in six months earlier) because of their religion, skin color, or the shape of their eyes...

...Low-rent, poor-quality apartments turn over so frequently that their legal rent ceilings are much higher than low-income families are able to pay, resulting in vacancies that contribute to the abandonment and destruction of useful living space...

...They tended to keep future owners from selling to members of unwelcome races or ethnic groups, a practice struck down by the U.S...

...Building codes tend to limit the types of approved components or forms of construction so as to increase the use of site labor, discourage competition from out-of-town suppliers, resist innovation, and support unionization...

...Most people are excluded from decent housing because they earn too little money to pay for the complicated artifact housing has become...

...THE EXCLUDED AMERICANS: HOMELESSNESS AND HOUSING POLICIES William Tucker/Regnery Gateway/389 pp...

...Tucker does not argue that the reduction in the institutional population means that 350,000 of the original 500,000 have gained the ability to cope with a non-therapeutic environment...

...The law seems almost deliberately intended to give such persons an opportunity to vent their spleen on people unfortunate enough to own real property that is subject to rent regulation...

...Yet Tucker forgets the connection between personal pathology and inability to find a home...

...or that housing standards must be changed or dropped altogether...

...If no, which tenant is to be moved...

...In what other kinds of environments are troublesome families to be placed...

...Yet, this issue is not at the heart of the problem of the "excluded" people...

...Zoning is now following two conflicting tendencies...

...These programs discourage the construction of new housing, deliberately in some cases, by making housing development more expensive and land less readily available...

...To unmarried teenage mothers and their children...

...While many demolished homes do not meet legislated standards of space, light and air, and physical amenities, Tucker claims that most of the people who had been living in them preferred remaining where they were to the hardship of moving...

...portant role in making the supply of housing unsatisfactory for families at all but the highest income levels...

...There is no fourth choice, and for those families or households incapable of living in a style acceptable to neighbors, not even the monetary solution will bring about housing equality with individual liberty...

...Does a "living environment" suitable for low-income, two-parent families with conventional child-rearing ideas remain suitable after the introduction of families nearby whose behavior radically changes the nature of the neighborhood...

...O f all the government initiatives, rent control, on the basis of its sheer economic idiocy, its stimulation of half-baked and destructive class antagonisms, its corruption of public officials, and its undermining of municipal ratables, ranks first as a troublemaker...

...The environmental movement, whose deeds get no special salutes from Ricker and me, has found new ways to smother development by creating an immense superstructure over existing zoning, calculated either to freeze the present status or to shield it from truly dangerous pollution or other major deleterious influences that would come with change...

...As with other such laws, however, the original purpose soon suggested to local powers ways of stifling new development altogether by making zoning more restrictive, costly, and difficult to appeal...

...In public policy terms, what is the governmental liability for the provision of homes...

...Nevertheless, policy defects play an imRoger Starr is the author of The Rise and Fall of New York City...

...Supreme Court in recent years...

...ticker's account of rent control in action from New York to Santa Monica is as definitive as one could want...

...or that a democratic society must grow accustomed to living in the shadow of a defaulted egalitarianism with respect to the home, the crucial, long-term setting of national life...

...The rents of long-term occupants thus remain far below rents legally chargeable in apartments—usually of lesser quality—that have changed hands often...

...He blames reformers for insisting on new housing for those who can't afford it, and for sponsoring housing codes to prevent older properties being converted from one-family to two- or three-family usage...

...City planners are trying to broaden their scope of zoning control, while major developers write more restrictive rules for the purchasers of free-standing condominiums (no linesfor hanging out the wash, no sandboxes, house painting in approved colors only, etc...

...That means that they must receive transfer payments in one form or another...

...Ricker acknowledges that zoning merely carries on in public form the land controls imposed by developers through private covenants...

...To all of this, Tucker adds the reduction in institutional homes (usually counted as "beds") that accompanied the encouraged (if not entirely forced) eviction of 350,000 mental patients, about two-thirds of the population, during the Carter years...

...Two forms of maldistribution follow...

...And if they are allowed to remain in public or publicly assisted housing, what kind of society will emerge...

...Tucker suggests that the same filtering-down principle that works well with used automobiles, providing aging but usable cars for those who cannot afford new ones, works with housing...

...There's obviously no right and wrong in these aesthetic considerations, but the general principle of zoning, the attempt to limit external costs on existing property owners and users, is reasonable...

...Urban renewal, slum clearance, and the construction of public housing require the destruction of cheap housing that already exists...

...Zoning now makes all new buildings conform in cornice line, bulk, shape, and land coverage to the buildings already erected...

...National housing legislation stipulates that every American family shall have access to a decent, safe, and sanitary home in a suitable living environment...

...It is beyond question that abuses of zoning are becoming steadily more outrageous, raising transitory questions of architectural taste to the status of permanent principles...

...In New York City, judges and hearing officers in specialized courts dealing with housing do not recognize the relationship between the rental income of a building and the owner's ability to keep it in good condition...

...Tucker is on less solid ground when he treats zoning laws and building and housing codes as though they were of equal importance in limiting the supplyof housing...

...The main issue is that the poor can't afford to live in housing of the standards legislated for contemporary use...

...If we accept his estimate that the total number of homeless is less than a million, then for a considerable part of them the problem of shelter does not simply reflect the unaffordability of a new home that meets local government standards of habitability...

...24.95 Roger Starr THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991 39...