Subsidizing the Slums
FRIED, JOHN J.
NATIONAL REPORTS Subsidizing the Slums By John J. Fried New York Not too long ago, after a good deal of searching, a young Negro mother of three found an apartment she thought would be an ideal...
...The welfare client, who gets only enough money to pay his current rent and buy food, and who must also seek approval for a move, is in no position to make the necessary quick decision involving a deposit and first month's rental payments...
...The worker will tell a client: 'All right, go out and find another apartment, use your current allowance for food and rent to get it and come and tell me what you've done.' Then the worker will go back to the Department and fight to get more food and rent money for the client...
...When one bill did pass both houses of the Legislature five years ago, Governor Rockefeller vetoed it...
...According to a recent survey, only 3.19 per cent of all apartments in New York are available and habitable...
...Under the Capital Grant Assistance Program, announced in March 1965, a $6 million dollar appropriation was set aside to help low-income families move into middle-income housing...
...The New York Housing Authority has translated this set of mind into 21 "conditions indicative of potential problems," which are used to judge families seeking entry to a public housing project...
...The law, which would have been enforced by the State Commission for Human Rights, was to have been effective immediately...
...This is a market, however, where Saturday and Sunday dawn with apartment seekers, checkbooks in hand, already on the streets, squinting anxiously for addresses they find in the want-ad sections...
...It is not the individual, as they see it, but the government that is moving into the apartment...
...And it effectively aids in barring welfare recipients from competition for the decent housing that does occasionally find its way into the open market...
...It amounts to nothing more, says Lyford, than subsidizing slums at public expense...
...Landlords," points out Judith Mage, a veteran social worker, "are just not interested in dealing with the governmental institutions that control the checks...
...It is a little known fact that in New York, where variations of the theme ending "on grounds of race, color and creed" abound for almost every situation, a landlord can still base his discriminations on economic status...
...If the state can take this position," asks one embittered social worker, "how can you go out and beat the private sector over the head for refusing to take welfare people...
...The landlord was agreeable in showing her through, and it wasn't until she told him she was a welfare client that he turned her down flat...
...Welfare clients," says Joseph P. Lyford, an urban crisis expert, "are supposed, rightly, to have more problems than other folks...
...The Welfare Department and civil rights groups have sought, with little success, legislation which would make discrimination against welfare clients illegal...
...Getting money for a security deposit and the first month's rent can be and has been done in one day...
...But it depends on a bold client working with a case worker who knows her way around...
...But the Governor felt this would not give the Commission sufficient time to establish procedure or guidelines and so would have "serious administrative, and legal implications...
...Not because she was Negro, he said, but, well, people on relief just wouldn't work out in his place...
...The record is not much better in the case of middle-income housing...
...Welfare officials, of course, take a dim view of being presented with a fait accompli...
...There are many who argue that until New York's housing supply is drastically increased, the question of discrimination against the welfare recipient remains moot...
...A law might even give public housing officials food for thought...
...It could very well be that the Welfare Department's administrative procedures play their own role in hindering the client's search for better living quarters...
...Roughly, this means that of the 2.1 million rental units, some 68,400 are on the market...
...They are not interested because if the rent is too high, the government, not the client, will press to have it lowered...
...The program is designed for the upward mobile family and therefore, by definition excludes families currently receiving public assistance...
...I know one house on 104th St...
...The latest attempt saw the necessary bill die in the Senate Finance Committee...
...And thus, I would suggest, there is a set of mind which automatically tends to rule these people out of public housing...
...NATIONAL REPORTS Subsidizing the Slums By John J. Fried New York Not too long ago, after a good deal of searching, a young Negro mother of three found an apartment she thought would be an ideal escape from Harlem...
...They have large families, are old or sick or helpless or uneducated or unemployable or noisy or transient, or they are several of these things put together and multiplied for good measure...
...She says to me: 'Who else would put up with these bums?' And I haven't found the answer yet...
...He simply could not take in people who didn't know where their next meal was coming from...
...Welfare officials deny that procedure stands in the client's way...
...The assumption [is] all too widely held that anyone who is on public welfare is automatically a problem family," City Welfare Commissioner Mitchell I. Ginsberg told a state legislative committee...
...Critics of the system, though, maintain this is true only where a client finds an apartment in his own borough...
...But as James Dumpson, former Welfare Commissioner and now Dean of Fordham's School of Social Service, has observed: "Until such a law is passed, we will not have made full use of whatever housing is available...
...Often, they contend, the client merely manages to get into a more difficult situation...
...Indeed, the only people in the private sector willing to take welfare recipients are the slumlords...
...Other factors notwithstanding, this void in civil rights law provides a legal escape for those who are loath to honor anti-discrimination law...
...There are ways of getting around the system," Mrs...
...and sometimes, because he is so anxious to get out of his tenement, the new building is only slightly better than the one he sought to escape...
...It can also be argued that the landlord's reluctance to cater to the welfare recipient—Negro or Caucasian?has a discernible basis in the way the rest of society, the various levels of government and the Welfare Department itself view and handle those on dole...
...he says, "that is filled with blind people, alcoholics, people dying of cancer and malnutrition...
...We'll do all sorts of things for them," one said...
...Mage said...
...This view of the welfare client as a puppet beholden to a bureaucracy is not entirely unjustified...
...In addition to their poverty, they have all the other disabilities that society finds repellent to some degree...
...Subterfuge would be discernible, he said, if it could be shown that the same landlord had rented to white welfare clients in the past, or if he had them in his building at the time he refused to rent to a Negro or Puerto Rican welfare client...
...Many experts feel such a law would only serve to cloud the real issue—discrimination against Negroes and Puerto Ricans who happen to be on welfare rolls...
...Landlords also tend to be wary of the welfare client because they view him not as an individual, but as part of a vast bureaucracy that would only meddle with their business affairs...
...John J. Fried, a previous contributor, is on the staff of Life...
...According to Commissioner Ginsberg's testimony before the state legislative committee, not one of the few families who have moved into what is known as the Mitchell-Lama Program is a public assistance family...
...It is one thing to ask a middle-class Negro to go through this enervating process, the thinking goes, but quite another to require it of a welfare mother with seven kids hanging on to her skirt...
...Although there are signs of a possible relaxation of these standards, to date only 11 per cent of 143,000 families in public housing are welfare clients...
...A more enthusiastic enforcement of existing laws against discrimination based on race, color or creed, it is believed, would achieve the same ends...
...If the client wants to move from Manhattan to Brooklyn, for example, and into a slightly more expensive apartment, the red tape begins to snarl...
...Putting everything together, however, produces stereotypes—stereotypes public officials apparently are no less willing to ignore than the man in the street...
...They are not interested because they think governmental agencies will keep too sharp a lookout for building violations...
...Under our present powers," a spokesman for the Commission said, "we make sure that a complainant's welfare status is not a subterfuge for national origins discrimination...
...Consequently, if a family has, among other things: a highly irregular work history, a husband or wife under 18 years of age, children with relatives or agencies, or a bad housekeeping potential (including a lack of furniture), it is likely to be barred from the project...
...The city pays the rents and the landlady with dyed red hair tells me she is doing society a good turn...
...Nor, because of the administrative regulations," he said, "will any welfare family ever be accepted...
...While the Commission itself does not use testers, it would accept affidavits from civil rights groups who do send testers to apply for housing which is denied to minority group applicants...
...If the landlord's prejudices are rooted in the way the welfare client is treated by the rest of society and his supposed benefactors, perhaps an overt effort to give the client standing in law would help destroy the stigma that comes as a stub to the welfare check...
...There is even a school of thought that questions the efficacy of such a law because of the hardships testing and prosecuting alleged cases of discrimination work on those who press them...
Vol. 50 • June 1967 • No. 13
