Suburban Guerrilla
Bovard, James
James Bovard Suburban Guerrilla HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros thinks inner-city poverty and violence will disappear if transplanted to outlying areas via such seedy programs as Section 8. T he...
...In the 1960s, it was thought that a temporary burst of government aid would lift the poor once and for all...
...Achtenberg intends to revolutionize the enforcement of fair housing regulations by forcing local governments to rely on an "effects test" of housing discrimination—basically claiming that any locale with significant separation of racial and income groups must be presumed to be in violation of fair housing laws...
...HUD requires Section 8 recipients to pay between 10 and 30 percent of their income for rent, and the government picks up the difference...
...Last September, Cisneros warned, "All of the money that we might put into public housing . . . will not be successful as long . . . as America is a society divided spatially...
...I sold it at less than what I could have made in order that the company had a better chance to be stable over the long term...
...Few of the "working poor" that the Clinton administration is so exercised over will get to take part in this exodus, for only residents of public housing or other HUD handout recepients are eligible to move to "low poverty areas"—i.e., affluent areas...
...Cisneros called economic integration an "over-arching objective," and, as the Washington Post noted, "ordered his agency to advance economic integration at every...
...The primary activity of many of the organizations is to send "testers"—one black, one white—to apartments to see if landlords refuse to rent or show apartments to blacks that are shown to whites...
...federal rules forbade it from removing the family from the program...
...indicate a [illegal] religious preference...
...For those remaining it leaves the prospect of a smaller number of low rent units...
...According to HUD, the median rent in Plano is only $586 per month...
...Much of the resistance apparently stemmed from a HUD rule that required landlords to give subsidized tenants 90 days before eviction...
...These are terrible neighbors...
...GAO concluded in a 1980 report, "The high rents and quality of [Section 8] housing invite resentment on the part of the taxpaying public who see their subsidized neighbors living in better accommodations than they themselves can afford...
...A significant movement of the poor out of the city would accelerate abandonment of residential buildings and threaten to undo recent gains of the 1980s in housing rehabilitation...
...Cisneros did not reach agreement with the company within the 60-day limit set in his letter of personal commitment...
...Federally Built Wastelands Such hardball tactics are mystifying, given that Cisneros knows a good deal about his agency's history...
...In a tour of a Chicago housing project on June 17, President Clinton endorsed the searches as a way to secure the residents' right to "freedom from fear...
...Achtenberg declared last September: "Part of the problem has been HUD's lack of resolve to essentially use its money programs in a way to further fair housing goals...
...This time, HUD is usneighborhood of subsidized families about six years ago turned a borderline neighborhood into a slum...
...Insofar as CAM receives contracts as a result of minority preferences, and since Cisneros has become, in the words of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, "the Clinton administration's chief defender of civil rights," continuing to use Cisneros's name could benefit the company...
...The charge is being led by HUD secretary Henry Cisneros and HUD assistant secretary for fair housing Roberta Achtenberg...
...tion's two-year $60 billion Housing Choice and Community Reinvestment Act, which will not only tighten HUD's control over where Americans may live, but enhance the prerogatives of the welfare lobby...
...Vouchers entitle welfare families to live in apartments with rents as high as $1,657 for a four-bedroom apartment in some areas—a higher rent than the vast majority of American renters are now paying...
...J.B...
...At Taino Towers in New York City, HUD paid for a gymnasium, greenhouse, and even an indoor swimming pool for the subsidized residents...
...According to the Clinton administration, America is suffering a great injustice because people who do not Springfield Housing Authority...
...Sixty-five percent of Cook County's Section 8 families, the vast majority of them headed by unemployed females, are clustered in fourteen south suburbs...
...It took only four years of the federally insured mortgage program to reduce a neat, middle-class neighborhood into a shattered, decaying slum...
...But HUD makes little or no effort to verify the income of Section 8 recipients or to insure that they actually pay their small share...
...HUD sent in officials bearing tens of thousands of Section 8 certificates for eighteen months of nearly-free housing for the favored poor...
...For landlords, the guaranteed subsidy payment proves a stronger incentive than the desire to maintain a safe building...
...What it basically provides is a system of welfare dependence...
...They now amount to a project to dictate where welfare recipients live in every county, city, and cranny across the nation...
...Joseph Richardson of the St...
...The Detroit News opined that the program was turning Detroit neighborhoods into "'ghost towns' where a handful of families exist amid vandalized and fire-gutted homes...
...HUD has an expansive interpretation of what constitutes an ad violation: "References to a synagogue, congregation or parish may...
...CAM), which now manages over $500 million in funds...
...the local public housing authority reached an agreement with the plaintiffs to relocate some of the poor into Omaha's nicer suburbs...
...Section 8 currently gives $7 billion a year in rental subsidies to roughly 2 million families...
...Sixty-five percent of Cook County's Section 8 families, the vast majority of them headed by unemployed females, are clustered in fourteen south suburbs...
...The Post succumbed to lawsuit threats and imposed upon advertisers a requirement that one in four models be a minority...
...Not only do Section 8 recipients reap a financial windfall, but HUD also forces landlords to treat Section 8 renters better than renters who pay their own bills...
...Yet at the same time, Achtenberg was storming into southern California with a "strike team" of twenty enforcers to force landlords to toe the line...
...As Howard Husock, director of case studies at the Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, wrote in the Wall Street Journal: Scattering subsidized housing breaks the unspoken rules of housing, and thus inspires bitter opposition...
...The two meetings held to protest the 'problem' were standing room only...
...Louis in late 1991, St...
...28 The American Spectator September 1994 lic housing projects in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, and New York to move into surrounding middle-class and affluent suburbs...
...Louis was approved in February 1992, alderman Marit Clark promised to "go to war" if Section 8 landlords did not evict troublemaking tenants...
...Cisneros apparently won Langfelder's support by threatening to withhold a $20-million HUD grant to the house than to sell it...
...The American Spectator September 1994 29 Among the roughly 8,000 families receiving federally subsidized Section 8 rent certificates in Boston, most are concentrated in Roxbury and Dorchester...
...opportunity...
...Achtenberg declared in early February, "We are aware of the existing patterns of residential segregation that are so dramatic and pervasive in the L.A...
...HUD also devastated Chicago...
...Basically, it seeks to end the stigma of welfare by granting welfare recipients the lifestyle of self-reliant upper middle class...
...The Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council saw the ad and filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Equal Rights Division, accusing Jacobson of illegally stating "a preference or limitation based on marital status in violation of the Wisconsin Open Housing Law...
...Louis alderman Jack Garvey complained, "I do want to get funding but I don't want to put the neighborhoods in my ward at risk...
...The Reagan and Bush administrations generally relied on an "intents test"—requiring that a conscious racially biased intent be proved before a fair housing violation could be said to exist...
...HUD requires Section 8 recipients to pay between 10 and 30 percent of their income for rent, and the government picks up the difference...
...Names of facilities which cater to a particular racial, national origin or religious group such as country club or private school designations . . . may indicate a [illegal] preference...
...In 1993, Section 8 certificates were used to entitle low-income/welfare families to move into an apartment complex in Silver Spring, Maryland, that includes a heated pool with water jets, microwave ovens, and "deluxe modern kitchens with convenient breakfast bars...
...The sale agreement contained a stipulation that Cisneros's name would be removed from the company name...
...The Dallas Business Journal reported on March 4: "Secretary Cisneros said he has objected to the continual use of the name...
...The housing organization that provided the subsidy had thrown up its hands...
...His constituents, he said in the Chicago Sun-Times, "have been able to pull themselves up by the bootstraps to be here...
...Section 8: HUD'S License to Sow Chaos Though Section 235 was an unmitigated disaster, its driving principle—using tax dollars to forcibly mix different economic classes—has re-emerged as the cornerstone of federal housing policy...
...Public housing residents had sued in 1990 to end the alleged segregation of poor blacks in public housing...
...Most poor rely on the low end of the rental market for their housing...
...HUD has indicated that it hopes to greatly expand this program in the future...
...Investigators revealed in April that 390 of 400 Section 8 certificates distributed by the District of Columbia since 1990 were given to people who had paid bribes to housingofficials...
...Janice Stanfield, a HUD housing management specialist, said: "Section 8 is not intended to isolate people or limit them to certain parts of town...
...Cisneros declared on March 17: "Communities that thrive are communities that are home to people of diverse incomes...
...Not suitable for pets or children...
...But neither Cisneros nor Achtenberg shows any concern about the track record of their own programs...
...In May 1989, after ending his fourth term as mayor of San Antonio, he created the Cisneros Asset Management Co...
...Section 8 recipients can also pull down a neighborhood because of the paralyzing red tape that HUD imposes on private landlords who want to evict trouble-makers, hooligans, or deadbeats...
...HUD continues to devastate neighborhoods, due to the bankruptcy and deterioration of thousands of HUD-financed apartment buildings across the nation...
...Achtenberg declared last September: "Part of the problem has been HUD's lack of resolve to essentially use its money programs in a way to further fair housing goals...
...assistance for mothers on welfare...
...State legislators and city councils are increasingly forcing pension funds to set aside a percentage of their total assets to be handled by minority-owned firms...
...the local public housing authority reached an agreement with the plaintiffs to relocate some of the poor into Omaha's nicer suburbs...
...opportunity...
...While Cisneros enjoys speaking of his experience in running a "private business," CAM's success is due largely to government mandates and its founder's status as a Hispanic...
...At the Morningside apartments in Chicago, subsidized residents enjoy a billiard room, library, and an arts and crafts room...
...The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) has conducted warrantless sweeps of residents' apartments, searching for guns and drugs...
...Federally Built Wastelands Such hardball tactics are mystifying, given that Cisneros knows a good deal about his agency's history...
...HUD backed down from its latest advertising crackdown after its efforts were exposed by the Washington Times...
...The fair-housing crusade is good politics, of course...
...Race, Crime, or Welfare...
...In May, HUD raised Section 8 subsidy levels in Plano, Texas, to $750 for a two-bedroom and $900 for a three-bedroom apartment...
...According to HUD, the median rent in Plano is only $586 per month...
...He admitted to Congress in June 1993 that "HUD has in many cases exacerbated the declining quality of life in America...
...CAM was selected earlier this year to handle 10 percent of the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport pension plan, in part to allow the airport to achieve its goal of placing 10 percent of the pension fund with minority-owned firms...
...The St...
...opportunity...
...The Chicago Tribune in 1975 denounced the Section 235 program for causing "the decay of hundreds of good neighborhoods": No natural disaster on record has caused destruction on the scale of the government's housing programs...
...A federal jury in 1992 awarded $850,000 damages to a black Georgetown professor and two housing groups in a lawsuit they filed against an Arlington, Virginia, real estate developer who had used only white models in Washington Post advertisements...
...The most serious problem with the program was housing abandonment—since most families had almost no equity in their homes, it was cheaper for them to abandon the work cannot afford middle-class housing...
...Several other Yellow Pages publishers admitted that they were being pressured by HUD to change their policy regarding religious symbols in ads for nursing homes...
...Newspapers, developers, and realtors are increasingly being hammered by expansive interpretations of the Fair Housing Act Amendments of 1988...
...Now, we are debating where to distribute a permanent crime-ridden underclass that has been created by government programs...
...Thus, the more social deviancy encouraged by government housing handouts and regulations, the more racism politicians claim to find...
...HUD also devastated Chicago...
...To be eligible, recipients needed to have held a job for at least a year and to pay at least $221 a month in rent...
...Section 8 is the flagship of the Clinton administration's effort to impose racial and economic housing quotas on American suburbs...
...in the 1990s, "Within walking distance to synagogue" is an actionable offense...
...Cisneros has doubled spending for the Fair Housing Initiatives Program, which bankrolls local fair housing councils...
...At that time, the local public housing authority was already operating a program to move selected tenants out of the projects into thirty-eight single-family homes it had bought...
...Cisneros and others are pretending that the high crime rates in public housing are the result of the number of stories in public housing complexes, rather than the web of irresponsibility and viciousness created by paying generations of people to become government dependents...
...Trent estimated that trial expenses for the ad violation would have cost him $500,000, so he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection...
...Some critics view HUD's effort as a $200-million public-relations extravaganza for the Clinton administration...
...I don't know what you are writing about," he said...
...When Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and Chicago Housing Authority chairman Vince Lane announced a new plan in April to export public housing residents beyond the city limits, dozens of suburban mayors denounced the proposal...
...At this writing, Congress is on the verge of approving the administraJames Bovard is the author, most recently, of Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (St...
...Section 8 is the flagship of the Clinton administration's effort to impose racial and economic housing quotas on American suburbs...
...Section 8 recipients can't be punished—by losing their eligibility for rent subsidies, for example—for bad behavior...
...This time, HUD is using the Section 8 program, passed by Congress in 1974, to provide direct rent subsidies to low-income families...
...Janice Stanfield, a HUD housing management specialist, said: "Section 8 is not intended to isolate people or limit them to certain parts of town...
...Vouchers entitle welfare families to live in apartments with rents as high as $1,657 for a four-bedroom apartment in some areas—a higher rent than the vast majority of American renters are now paying...
...Cisneros apparently won Langfelder's support by threatening to withhold a $20-million HUD grant to the house than to sell it...
...Section 8: HUD'S License to Sow Chaos Though Section 235 was an unmitigated disaster, its driving principle—using tax dollars to forcibly mix different economic classes—has re-emerged as the cornerstone of federal housing policy...
...Detroit City Council President Carl Levin called it "Hurricane HUD...
...The January 1993 shutdown destroyed over a hundred jobs...
...Cisneros told me: "I concluded on my own that despite the financial loss associated with it, that I would separate myself from the company...
...Last September, Cisneros warned, "All of the money that we might put into public housing . . . will not be successful as long . . . as America is a society divided spatially...
...Last December, Cisneros got Ossie Langfelder, the mayor of Springfield, Illinois, to reverse his stand and endorse HUD's scattered-site housing program for the Springfield area...
...HUD establishes the Section 8 subsidy level (so-called "fair market rents") by comparing rents in each geographical area...
...Section 8: HUD'S License to Sow Chaos Though Section 235 was an unmitigated disaster, its driving principle—using tax dollars to forcibly mix different economic classes—has re-emerged as the cornerstone of federal housing policy...
...But neither Cisneros nor Achtenberg shows any concern about the track record of their own programs...
...Particularly hard-hit was Detroit, where Mayor Roman Gribbs declared that a single abandoned house on a block "becomes a magnet for vandalism, crime, fire, blight, drug addiction, and other kinds of socially pathological forces...
...Section 8 is hailed by many liberals for giving lower-income people "freedom of choice" in housing, But in Chicago, where thousands of Section 8 certificates have been distributed, public housing residents have flooded a handful of communities on the city's southern edge, turning parts of some towns into a "Section 8 corridor...
...The Elm Street Plaza project in Chicago advertised that its Section 8 apartments included all the "luxury amenities" one would expect...
...Federally Built Wastelands Such hardball tactics are mystifying, given that Cisneros knows a good deal about his agency's history...
...Between 1970 and 1976, HUD took over 13 percent of the housing stock in Detroit-25,000 homes—after owners abandoned the houses or defaulted...
...HUD even warns of lawsuits against housing developers who do not patronize foreign-language newspapers: "The use of English language media alone or the exclusive use of media catering to the majority population in an area, when, in such area, there are also available non-English language or other minority media, may have discriminatory impact...
...Not surprisingly, Section 8 recipients enjoy far more comfortable housing than many working Americans...
...Public housing residents had sued in 1990 to end the alleged segregation of poor blacks in public housing...
...Lieut...
...In February, two church-affiliated nursing homes in Minnesota announced that they had been required to expunge Christian crosses in their ads in the Yellow Pages as a result of HUD pressure on the Yellow Pages publishers...
...The voucher by drawing people out of these units and into the middle of the market is also pushing buildings off the market...
...H UD' s scheme to use Section 8 to hand welfare recipients upper-middle-class housing will likely be a dismal failure...
...The act created the Section 235 program to provide heavily subsidized loans for low-income families and individuals to allow them to buy homes, with special According to the Clinton administration, America is suffering a great injustice because people who do not work cannot afford middle-class housing...
...CHA officials have complained that they are forbidden by federal regulations from even checking if applicants for public housing have a criminal record...
...many tenants abuse the rule to avoid paying any rent for their last three months...
...Pamela Price told the Los Angeles Times in March that "this is like Christmas" after she used her new Section 8 certificate to move into a luxurious apartment complex with a heated swimming pool, four spas, six tennis courts, and two air-conditioned racquetball courts...
...Few of the "working poor" that the Clinton administration is so exercised over will get to take part in this exodus, for only residents of public housing or other HUD handout recepients are eligible to move to "low poverty areas"—i.e., affluent areas...
...Clark added, "I get as many complaints from my black constituents as I do from whites...
...Cisneros is launching an ambitious plan to use the $25-billion HUD budget, federal regulations, and federal lawyers to greatly increase the power of bureaucrats and politicians over private housing decisions...
...In Boston late last year, Cisneros warned: "We risk a societal collapse by the first decade of the next century if we tolerate racism and the economic isolation of millions of people...
...Jacobson had rented the cottage to a single individual shortly after the ad appeared...
...The more blacks and Hispanics rely on Section 8, the more landlords' resistance to Section 8 regulations could be portrayed by politicians as racial discrimination...
...The Detroit News opined that the program was turning Detroit neighborhoods into "'ghost towns' where a handful of families exist amid vandalized and fire-gutted homes...
...June Ridgway of the Detroit Board of Assessors declared in 1976, "HUD has cost every citizen in Detroit 20 percent on his house...
...But HUD's methodology has an extreme upward bias, partly because many HUD administrators want to bankroll low-income families to live in upper-class neighborhoods...
...It's not by accident that Achtenberg calls the pending legislation "the largest investment in civil rights that the federal government [has] made in the past fifteen years...
...C isneros is moving aggressively to relocate black welfare recipients to middle-class white areas in and around Omaha, Nebraska...
...That price was a fire-sale price—it was not the normal process...
...HUD has indicated that it hopes to greatly expand this program in the future...
...GAO concluded in a 1980 report, "The high rents and quality of [Section 8] housing invite resentment on the part of the taxpaying public who see their subsidized neighbors living in better accommodations than they themselves can afford...
...HUD continues to devastate neighborhoods, due to the bankruptcy and deterioration of thousands of HUD-financed apartment buildings across the nation...
...Last January, alderman Paul Beckerle protested that neighborhoods throughout his ward were being dragged down by a crime wave generated by recent Section 8 arrivals...
...Families that received Section 8 vouchers distributed after the earthquake are entitled to up to $1,391 a month in rent subsidies for four-bedroom apartments...
...Cisneros admitted, "We do not want to give people a three-month free ride on the backs of property owners...
...By defining unfair housing as a lack of "income integration," Cisneros can now call almost every neighborhood in America an unfair housing market, liable to intervention from Washington...
...What is undermined is a defining aspect of middle-class life: accepting the discipline of work and family, as well as law and order, to attain, after a time, comfortable and secure surroundings...
...Public housing built in affluent or blue-collar neighborhoods allow families who have not followed the same route of upward mobility to share the reward...
...But, he said, he cannot think of any course of action short of a lawsuit—which he said he cannot afford...
...At Manhattan Plaza in New York City, Section 8 pays for apartments with parquet floors and onpremise swimming, racquet, and tennis facilities...
...C isneros is moving aggressively to relocate black welfare recipients to middle-class white areas in and around Omaha, Nebraska...
...Though many of the Section 8 recipients were blatantly ineligible for the benefits, the D.C...
...Strom ruled that the policy "wrongfully denied rights to the valuable benefits promised by such housing, including integrated neighborhoods, low crime and increased job opportunities...
...Strom ruled that the policy "wrongfully denied rights to the valuable benefits promised by such housing, including integrated neighborhoods, low crime and increased job opportunities...
...Section 8 doesn't provide that...
...The landlord had paid no attention...
...Cisneros has promised to deny HUD grants—such as Community Development Block Grants worth $3.4 billion a year—to communities that do not adopt aggressive fair housing codes...
...The contradiction between HUD's regulations and its rhetoric was made stark earlier this year in Los Angeles...
...Basically, it seeks to end the stigma of welfare by granting welfare recipients the lifestyle of self-reliant upper middle class...
...Security deposit required...
...Yet he failed to address the most serious source of fear among public housing residents: the absence of adequate police protections...
...Helen Macey, executive director of the Plano Housing Authority, defended the disparity in these terms: "Our residents will be given better choices of where they can live...
...Fair housing czar Achtenberg is intent on further constricting allowable language in housing advertisements...
...At the Morningside apartments in Chicago, subsidized residents enjoy a billiard room, library, and an arts and crafts room...
...In the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, the violent crime rate in1993 was thirteen times the national average...
...Investigators revealed in April that 390 of 400 Section 8 certificates distributed by the District of Columbia since 1990 were given to people who had paid bribes to housingofficials...
...housing department has made no effort to retrieve the certificates...
...HUD decreed that landlords can require only a $50 security deposit from Section 8 renters, instead of the usual full month's rent...
...Between 1970 and 1976, HUD took over 13 percent of the housing stock in Detroit-25,000 homes—after owners abandoned the houses or defaulted...
...By defining unfair housing as a lack of "income integration," Cisneros can now call almost every neighborhood in America an unfair housing market, liable to intervention from Washington...
...Louis Post Dispatch reported in March that crime had soared as a result of the subsidies, and "a growing number of homeowners say Section 8 is undermining their neighborhoods...
...Between 1970 and 1976, HUD took over 13 percent of the housing stock in Detroit-25,000 homes—after owners abandoned the houses or defaulted...
...At the same time that Achtenberg is demanding that Section 8 recipients be treated with respect and as equals, federal regulations encourage housing welfare recipients to become deadbeats and moochers...
...HUD is increasingly punishing companies that fail to impose racial quotas in their use of models in real estate ads...
...This assumes that public housing residents will be less likely to rob and steal if they are surrounded by more affluent neighbors...
...HUD has indicated that it hopes to greatly expand this program in the future...
...But HUD makes little or no effort to verify the income of Section 8 recipients or to insure that they actually pay their small share...
...CAM handled investments primarily for government, colleges, and labor unions—all of which often face explicit or implicit minority quotas...
...In January, fair housing czar Achtenberg told a convention of 1,100 advocates in Washington that the program, "through rent subsidies, enables minority public housing residents to move to conventional housing in low-minority communities...
...According to a January 7, 1993 letter from Cisneros's personal lawyer Raymond Ortman, Cisneros pledged to remove his name from his business, and make certain that it could not be used for promotion...
...Not only do Section 8 recipients reap a financial windfall, but HUD also forces landlords to treat Section 8 renters better than renters who pay their own bills...
...Fair Housing Council attorney Christopher Brancart observed, "We refused to settle this case because we felt the newspaper had an obligation to make things right in the community...
...The majority occupy homes owned by absentee landlords who are reluctant to evict tenants, even for the most egregious lease violations...
...assistance for mothers on welfare...
...Public housing residents had sued in 1990 to end the alleged segregation of poor blacks in public housing...
...HUD will provide $70 million for 1,300 rental vouchers to help people in pub26 The American Spectator September 1994 lic housing projects in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, and New York to move into surrounding middle-class and affluent suburbs...
...The Chicago Tribune in 1975 denounced the Section 235 program for causing "the decay of hundreds of good neighborhoods": No natural disaster on record has caused destruction on the scale of the government's housing programs...
...It is illegal to use "photographs, drawings, or other graphic techniques...
...Fair housing programs have moved far from their original goal of reconciling disparities between blacks and whites...
...For the Clinton administration, it is now considered "unfair housing" if poor people cannot live like rich people...
...In April 1993, the Globe noted the disruption caused by Section 8 renters living across the street from Mayor Raymond Flynn: The subsidized tenants living in the house across the street were nuisances, allegedly using drugs and making loud and threatening noises, but little could be done about it...
...Section 8 could be harming unsubsidized renters too, inflating rents for all Americans, according to a 1991 HUD report...
...June Ridgway of the Detroit Board of Assessors declared in 1976, "HUD has cost every citizen in Detroit 20 percent on his house...
...Federal Blockbusting Redux Cisneros is seeking $149 million for the so-called Moving to Independence program to relocate poor people away from "poverty communities" or "racially concentrated neighborhoods...
...This time, HUD is using the Section 8 program, passed by Congress in 1974, to provide direct rent subsidies to low-income families...
...Though many of the Section 8 recipients were blatantly ineligible for the benefits, the D.C...
...the local public housing authority reached an agreement with the plaintiffs to relocate some of the poor into Omaha's nicer suburbs...
...When I phoned CAM director Gilbert Garcia in March, he assured me that the company was planning to change the name of the fund...
...New public housing and the opposition it will appropriately inspire, is likely to stigmatize minority families generally—and make their gradual movement into the middle class more difficult...
...Officials in Pacesetter, Illinois, claim that "a sudden influx into the Section 8 vouchers entitle welfare families to live in apartments with rents as high as $1,657 for a fourbedroom apartment in some areas—a higher rent than the vast majority of American renters are now paying...
...Cisneros called economic integration an "over-arching objective," and, as the Washington Post noted, "ordered his agency to advance economic integration at every...
...But many private landlords balked at renting to Section 8 recipients...
...prove a bonanza for local landlords who will be able to receive higher rents from low-income subsidized renters than they would be able to get from moderate-income people...
...emergency victims have never before received such longterm subsidies...
...Frankly, I went the extra mile to sell, even though the official reading I got was that it was not necessary...
...The January earthquake left thousands homeless...
...In May, HUD raised Section 8 subsidy levels in Plano, Texas, to $750 for a two-bedroom and $900 for a three-bedroom apartment...
...According to the Clinton administration, America is suffering a great injustice because people who do not Springfield Housing Authority...
...The Office of Government Ethics/HUD Office of General Counsel ruled that Cisneros could continue his affiliation with CAM as long as his stock was placed in a voting trust...
...assistance for mothers on welfare...
...Tens of thousands of homes emptied and were left to rot in previously stable neighborhoods...
...Cisneros called economic integration an "over-arching objective," and, as the Washington Post noted, "ordered his agency to advance economic integration at every...
...No one would want to live next door to them...
...HUD noted that the robbery rate at one Baltimore project Was almost twenty times the national average...
...Not surprisingly, Section 8 recipients enjoy far more comfortable housing than many working Americans...
...That tends to lead one to believe that we should be on the lookout for additional acts of discrimination...
...To be eligible, recipients needed to have held a job for at least a year and to pay at least $221 a month in rent...
...In 1968, Congress passed the National Housing Act, which provided for federally insured mortgages to poor people in inner cities, among others...
...Last December, Cisneros got Ossie Langfelder, the mayor of Springfield, Illinois, to reverse his stand and endorse HUD's scattered-site housing program for the Springfield area...
...It would be difficult to concoct a better rule to maximize the irresponsibility of a privileged class of renters...
...At Manhattan Plaza in New York City, Section 8 pays for apartments with parquet floors and onpremise swimming, racquet, and tennis facilities...
...On his 1993 financial disclosure form, Cisneros stated that his shares in the company were worth between $500,000 and $1 million...
...housing department has made no effort to retrieve the certificates...
...HUD establishes the Section 8 subsidy level (so-called "fair market rents") by comparing rents in each geographical area...
...President Nixon, surveying the effect of Section 235, complained in 1973: "All across America, the federal government has become the biggest slumlord in history...
...Section 8's links to crime and declining property values have become political hot potatoes...
...Pamela Price told the Los Angeles Times in March that "this is like Christmas" after she used her new Section 8 certificate to move into a luxurious apartment complex with a heated swimming pool, four spas, six tennis courts, and two air-conditioned racquetball courts...
...According to the Clinton administration, America is suffering a great injustice because people who do not Springfield Housing Authority...
...I sold my shares in the company for $320,000 last June...
...Helen Macey, executive director of the Plano Housing Authority, defended the disparity in these terms: "Our residents will be given better choices of where they can live...
...The result of a weak market is the abandonment of buildings rather than lower rents...
...Section 8 is hailed by many liberals for giving lower-income people "freedom of choice" in housing, But in Chicago, where thousands of Section 8 certificates have been distributed, public housing residents have flooded a handful of communities on the city's southern edge, turning parts of some towns into a "Section 8 corridor...
...to indicate exclusiveness because of...
...Cisneros has promised to deny HUD grants—such as Community Development Block Grants worth $3.4 billion a year—to communities that do not adopt aggressive fair housing codes...
...Federal fair-housing efforts of the 1990s have degenerated into a multi-billion-dollar crusade to give preferential treatment to public housing clients...
...And Section 8 landlords can't be dropped from the program for picking tenants who misbehave...
...We view this primarily as an effort at income integration but it has a disproportionate impact on racial minorities...
...Nicholas Blase, mayor of Niles, said that imposing subsidized housing on a town "is not the American way...
...Yet, as this article goes to press in late July, the firm continues to brandish Cisneros's name...
...Appeals Judge Daniel Anderson observed: "Such trifling complaints may well reduce available rental housing by having a chilling effect on potential landlords who would rather hold property off the market than risk the expense of defending against a complaint over innocuous and inoffensive advertisement...
...The Hartford Courant noted in 1992 that the provision of Section 8 subsidies to Hartford residents, allowing them 30 The American Spectator September 1994 to leave the city, "has begun to cripple city landlords, who are watching their buildings empty out and who are having more and more trouble paying their taxes...
...Cisneros told this journalist that less than half of the money he managed "was given to CAM as a result of a minority search...
...The HUD-funded California Fair Housing Council sued the Southern California Community Newspapers chain because one of its papers printed an apartment rental classified ad that stated "adults preferred...
...Southern Chicago Commission Chairman Julian H. Levi called HUD "the greatest enemy of community stability The American Spectator September 1994 27 within the city of Chicago...
...Cisneros talks of the problems of public housing as if his proposal to disperse public housing residents will solve the crime problem...
...In 1968, Congress passed the National Housing Act, which provided for federally insured mortgages to poor people in inner cities, among others...
...Calumet City mayor Jerry Genova: "We need homeowners that are supporting the schools and the government...
...To be eligible, recipients needed to have held a job for at least a year and to pay at least $221 a month in rent...
...handicap," among other factors...
...A War on Advertising The federal government's unfair housing campaign is increasingly degenerating into a war on freedom of speech...
...In 1993, Section 8 certificates were used to entitle low-income/welfare families to move into an apartment complex in Silver Spring, Maryland, that includes a heated pool with water jets, microwave ovens, and "deluxe modern kitchens with convenient breakfast bars...
...HUD continues to devastate neighborhoods, due to the bankruptcy and deterioration of thousands of HUD-financed apartment buildings across the nation...
...After a $35 million plan for St...
...Both Cisneros and Achtenberg consider Chicago's program to be a model for the nation...
...Southern Chicago Commission Chairman Julian H. Levi called HUD "the greatest enemy of community stability The American Spectator September 1994 27 within the city of Chicago...
...Residents denounced their neighbors in federally-subsidized housing, accusing them of ruining property values and bringing a bad element to the borough...
...Cisneros told a congressional committee last year, "The most destructive of the behaviors that affects urban America is racism...
...James Bovard Suburban Guerrilla HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros thinks inner-city poverty and violence will disappear if transplanted to outlying areas via such seedy programs as Section 8. T he Department of Housing and Urban Development, the federal agency that spawned the most barbaric housing conditions in the nation, is now seeking vastly greater power over private housing...
...HUD decreed that landlords can require only a $50 security deposit from Section 8 renters, instead of the usual full month's rent...
...June Ridgway of the Detroit Board of Assessors declared in 1976, "HUD has cost every citizen in Detroit 20 percent on his house...
...This is the sector that is in deep trouble because of the inability of unsubsidized poor tenants to pay the rents...
...When 441 new Section 8 vouchers were proposed for St...
...Cisneros's financial disclosure form indicates that he earned over $470,000 in 1992...
...The Detroit News opined that the program was turning Detroit neighborhoods into "'ghost towns' where a handful of families exist amid vandalized and fire-gutted homes...
...Last December, Cisneros got Ossie Langfelder, the mayor of Springfield, Illinois, to reverse his stand and endorse HUD's scattered-site housing program for the Springfield area...
...At a time when more and more minority families are achieving middle-class housing standards on their own, the Clinton administration is trying to concoct a fair housing emergency based on a contrived epidemic of racial discrimination...
...It would be difficult to concoct a better rule to maximize the irresponsibility of a privileged class of renters...
...Area residents protested loudly, but, as the Post Dispatch noted: Both sides agree that the rules for the Section 8 subsidized housing program make it difficult to get rid of troublesome tenants...
...Few of the "working poor" that the Clinton administration is so exercised over will get to take part in this exodus, for only residents of public housing or other HUD handout recepients are eligible to move to "low poverty areas"—i.e., affluent areas...
...When the administration has faced up to the problem of crime in public housing, its solution has consisted largely of giving government officials unlimited power to violate the rights of private citizens...
...There is no controversy...
...At least one of CAM's contracts has been linked to a controversy: auditors revealed last December that Texas A&M University hired several money managers—including CAM—without competitive bidding and without a written contract...
...The Equal Rights Division found Jacobson guilty, but he appealed to the Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission, which acquitted him, ruling that "an ordinary reader would not have understood the advertisement to state or indicate discrimination...
...By defining unfair housing as a lack of "income integration," Cisneros can now call almost every neighborhood in America an unfair housing market, liable to intervention from Washington...
...Officials in Pacesetter, Illinois, claim that "a sudden influx into the Section 8 vouchers entitle welfare families to live in apartments with rents as high as $1,657 for a fourbedroom apartment in some areas—a higher rent than the vast majority of American renters are now paying...
...In January 1990, Richard Jacobson placed a tiny classified ad in an Oconomowoc, Wisconsin newspaper stating: Fully Winterized Cottage, 2 bedrooms, ideal for couple...
...HUD will also soon issue new regulations that could impose multi-million-dollar penalties on cities, counties, and states that do not aggressively enforce HUD's definitions of fair housing...
...Strom ruled that the policy "wrongfully denied rights to the valuable benefits promised by such housing, including integrated neighborhoods, low crime and increased job opportunities...
...He admitted to Congress in June 1993 that "HUD has in many cases exacerbated the declining quality of life in America...
...Government officials first allow crime at public housing projects to get out of control—and then denounce private citizens for their fear of it...
...in January, Rhode Island set aside 2 percent of its state and municipal workers' pension fund for minorities and women...
...Achtenberg declared last September: "Part of the problem has been HUD's lack of resolve to essentially use its money programs in a way to further fair housing goals...
...CI 32 The American Spectator September 1994...
...Spending on the program is scheduled to double to $14 billion a year by 1996, and Cisneros is planning to distribute an additional 100,000 Section 8 certificates in the coming years...
...Last September, Cisneros warned, "All of the money that we might put into public housing . . . will not be successful as long . . . as America is a society divided spatially...
...Cisneros and Achtenberg are already attempting to scapegoat suburban communities that resist incursions of public housing and Section 8 welfare recipients, and such criticism will likely greatly accelerate in the coming months...
...The Fair Housing Council, utilizing generous federal grants it receives to fuel its litigation, appealed the decision to Waukesha County Circuit Court, which also found Jacobson innocent...
...A Boston Globe editorial last year complained: CAM Scam Henry Cisneros, while declaiming against racial conflicts, has himself grown rich exploiting his minority status...
...In Haledon, New Jersey, last fall, a public hearing on Section 8 exploded into "meetings [that] were as rancorous as any ever held in the borough," the Bergen Record reported...
...The act created the Section 235 program to provide heavily subsidized loans for low-income families and individuals to allow them to buy homes, with special According to the Clinton administration, America is suffering a great injustice because people who do not work cannot afford middle-class housing...
...Southern Chicago Commission Chairman Julian H. Levi called HUD "the greatest enemy of community stability The American Spectator September 1994 27 within the city of Chicago...
...Cisneros is now trying to use Omaha to set a precedent for compulsory relocation programs across the nation...
...In the late 1960s, the phrase "No Jews allowed" in housing ads was considered illegal discrimination...
...Cisneros is now trying to use Omaha to set a precedent for compulsory relocation programs across the nation...
...HUD also devastated Chicago...
...GAO also observed that Section 8's goal of mixing the poor and the middle class is often not achieved because Section 8 housing "is often so costly that moderate and even middle-income unassisted households cannot afford to live in it...
...28 The American Spectator September 1994 lic housing projects in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, and New York to move into surrounding middle-class and affluent suburbs...
...GAO also observed that Section 8's goal of mixing the poor and the middle class is often not achieved because Section 8 housing "is often so costly that moderate and even middle-income unassisted households cannot afford to live in it...
...Louis Police Department declared of one batch of Section 8 renters: "There is evidence of drugs being sold there, and ample evidence of gang activity responsible for the drug activity...
...As the Washington Post said: "The increases in fair market rent levels could...
...Delores Irving of Chicago's Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities warned: "We are building ghettos in the suburbs...
...The 90-day eviction ban for Section 8 recipients epitomizes how federal welfare programs encourage the worst type of behavior in low-income citizens...
...It took only four years of the federally insured mortgage program to reduce a neat, middle-class neighborhood into a shattered, decaying slum...
...The Elm Street Plaza project in Chicago advertised that its Section 8 apartments included all the "luxury amenities" one would expect...
...Cisneros is now trying to use Omaha to set a precedent for compulsory relocation programs across the nation...
...People resent it when government tries to make somebody their economic equivalent by subsidizing them...
...She told the Los Angeles Times: "We will be a significant presence now and into the foreseeable future...
...The most serious problem with the program was housing abandonment—since most families had almost no equity in their homes, it was cheaper for them to abandon the work cannot afford middle-class housing...
...Cisneros declared that he hoped eventually to start a similar effort in every major city...
...The resulting scandals have been documented in dozens of General Accounting Office and HUD Inspector General reports since 1975...
...President Nixon, surveying the effect of Section 235, complained in 1973: "All across America, the federal government has become the biggest slumlord in history...
...But neither Cisneros nor Achtenberg shows any concern about the track record of their own programs...
...The high crime rate in public housing can decimate the value of nearby private housing...
...There has never been a shortage of racism among some whites across this country—and it reared its contemptible head in a public-housing controversy recently, when the Ku Klux Klan protested the relocation of blacks into a public housing project in Vidor, Texas...
...The Council then appealed to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, which also found Jacobson innocent...
...A suit stemming from a Fair Housing advertisement complaint destroyed twenty-two newspapers in California...
...In an August 1993 settlement, the New York Times announced that it would judge each real estate ad on a case-by-case basis, and that ads with a "substantial number" of people but fewer than 20 percent black people would be rejected...
...According to a HUD report, Crime in Public Housing, "crime rates in public housing complexes are in some cases . . . ten times higher than the national average...
...Particularly hard-hit was Detroit, where Mayor Roman Gribbs declared that a single abandoned house on a block "becomes a magnet for vandalism, crime, fire, blight, drug addiction, and other kinds of socially pathological forces...
...But the surest way to "economically isolate" people is to remove them from the workforce—and there's no better way to do that than to offer them an upper-middleclass lifestyle at bargain-basement prices...
...Detroit City Council President Carl Levin called it "Hurricane HUD...
...Martin's Press...
...At that time, the local public housing authority was already operating a program to move selected tenants out of the projects into thirty-eight single-family homes it had bought...
...In 1968, Congress passed the National Housing Act, which provided for federally insured mortgages to poor people in inner cities, among others...
...Cisneros apparently won Langfelder's support by threatening to withhold a $20-million HUD grant to the house than to sell it...
...HUD analyst Irving Welfeld notes that the [Section 8] voucher program hurts those that it does not help...
...Detroit City Council President Carl Levin called it "Hurricane HUD...
...He admitted to Congress in June 1993 that "HUD has in many cases exacerbated the declining quality of life in America...
...This phrase violated the 1988 Fair Housing Act Amendments, which prohibit "discrimination" against renters with children...
...The publisher, Ric Trent, offered the Fair Housing Council $50,000 in free advertisThe American Spectator September 1994 31 ing to promote the need for fair housing, but the council refused...
...Spending on the program is scheduled to double to $14 billion a year by 1996, and Cisneros is planning to distribute an additional 100,000 Section 8 certificates in the coming years...
...The most serious problem with the program was housing abandonment—since most families had almost no equity in their homes, it was cheaper for them to abandon the work cannot afford middle-class housing...
...It took only four years of the federally insured mortgage program to reduce a neat, middle-class neighborhood into a shattered, decaying slum...
...But in 1991, federal judge Lyle Strom ruled that such conditions violated the constitutional rights of welfare recipients by effectively excluding a "disproportionate number of otherwise eligible minority applicants" from the single family homes...
...Cisneros has promised to deny HUD grants—such as Community Development Block Grants worth $3.4 billion a year—to communities that do not adopt aggressive fair housing codes...
...But the fierce resistance in many locales to federally subsidized housing goes far beyond racism...
...Between 1990 and 1993, Hartford lost over 5 percent of its population—the sharpest population decline of any city in the nation...
...But in 1991, federal judge Lyle Strom ruled that such conditions violated the constitutional rights of welfare recipients by effectively excluding a "disproportionate number of otherwise eligible minority applicants" from the single family homes...
...Voting trust or no, at this writing Cisneros has become a leading Clinton administration spokesman for changing the laws that govern investment pension funds...
...HUD requires that "models should be clearly definable as reasonably representing majority and minority groups in the metropolitan area, both sexes, and when appropriate, families with children," and that models "should portray persons in an equal social setting...
...But HUD's methodology has an extreme upward bias, partly because many HUD administrators want to bankroll low-income families to live in upper-class neighborhoods...
...Michael Roache, executive director of the Fair Housing Coalition of the South Suburbs, observed: "The intent of the Section 8 program is not to create Section 8 neighborhoods, but that's exactly what's happening...
...It is no longer acceptable for the poorest of the poor to be concentrated in developments located in the most dangerous and decaying neighborhoods...
...President Nixon, surveying the effect of Section 235, complained in 1973: "All across America, the federal government has become the biggest slumlord in history...
...The resulting scandals have been documented in dozens of General Accounting Office and HUD Inspector General reports since 1975...
...Tens of thousands of homes emptied and were left to rot in previously stable neighborhoods...
...At Taino Towers in New York City, HUD paid for a gymnasium, greenhouse, and even an indoor swimming pool for the subsidized residents...
...California in 1989 required that 15 percent of its retirement-fund contracts be set aside for minorities...
...But in 1991, federal judge Lyle Strom ruled that such conditions violated the constitutional rights of welfare recipients by effectively excluding a "disproportionate number of otherwise eligible minority applicants" from the single family homes...
...Tens of thousands of homes emptied and were left to rot in previously stable neighborhoods...
...Section 8 currently gives $7 billion a year in rental subsidies to roughly 2 million families...
...The Chicago Tribune in 1975 denounced the Section 235 program for causing "the decay of hundreds of good neighborhoods": No natural disaster on record has caused destruction on the scale of the government's housing programs...
...C isneros is moving aggressively to relocate black welfare recipients to middle-class white areas in and around Omaha, Nebraska...
...Particularly hard-hit was Detroit, where Mayor Roman Gribbs declared that a single abandoned house on a block "becomes a magnet for vandalism, crime, fire, blight, drug addiction, and other kinds of socially pathological forces...
...The act created the Section 235 program to provide heavily subsidized loans for low-income families and individuals to allow them to buy homes, with special According to the Clinton administration, America is suffering a great injustice because people who do not work cannot afford middle-class housing...
...Available February 1 or 15...
...At that time, the local public housing authority was already operating a program to move selected tenants out of the projects into thirty-eight single-family homes it had bought...
Vol. 27 • September 1994 • No. 9
