The Rural Housing Famine
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union THE RURAL HOUSING FAMINE BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS A housing famine is raging through rural America, and no one is lifting a finger. More than two-thirds of the nation's bad...
...everyone shared one outdoor toilet...
...More exchanges followed...
...At another Colorado migrant camp a rat was seen swimming in the water supply...
...Farmers Home manages to ignore its mandate--that is, aiding the poor--through a combination of red tape and callousness...
...Most of these towns are small enough to fall within Farmers Home's jurisdiction (towns of 5,500 or less...
...The next step was to obtain a long-term, low-interest mortgage from the Farmers Home Administration...
...In 1964 the bia and the Public Housing Administration together launched a Mutual Help Housing program for Indians...
...In 1964, the maternal death rate in rural areas was 41 per 100,000, compared to 25 per 100,000 in America's suburbs...
...But Federal demonstration projects are usually one-shot affairs, especially the successful ones...
...Today the Farmers Home operates some 20 different programs related to housing and community facilities...
...Sylvester, 36 years old, supports a household of seven children (including two of her grandchildren) by picking oranges and cucumbers for growers in the area...
...In Hawthorne, Florida, just east of Gainesville, lives Nancy Sylvester, a black seasonal farmworker...
...Sylvester's grandchild, noted again that "the income of this family is most difficult to establish," and refused to reconsider her application...
...Their labor, or "sweat equity," would reduce the cash price of the house...
...Last January the Sylvesters moved into a new house built by vista workers in cooperation with the Rural Housing Alliance, a private, nonprofit organization based in Washington...
...Sylvester has been meeting her payments on time, and she and her family have escaped the housing famine...
...Fortunately for the Sylvesters, the Rural Housing Alliance was able to pick up the mortgage (of about $4,600...
...Its illustrious forebears include the Resettlement Administration, a radical creation of the New Deal that made loans to cooperatives, sponsored rural health programs, and even officiated over a modest land-redistribution program to assist black sharecroppers...
...Each morning at 5 a.m...
...The ditch usually runs near the pump, the sole source of drinking water...
...State Welfare gives her another $1,082...
...There is, in fact, no adequate Federal mechanism for construction of new housing in rural America...
...Since 1960 the size of its loan and grant programs has increased 624 per cent, a promising statistic until one considers that the agency's staff has grown only 77 per cent during the same period...
...The migrants, the sharecroppers and the seasonal workers supply muscle and sweat for the nation's thriving $125 billion food industry...
...About three-quarters of the population was rehoused, almost overnight...
...A two-weeks' supply of stove-wood costs $10...
...The old agency with its old dreams was wiped out, to be replaced by the Farmers Home Administration, an agency bereft of both dreams and funds...
...One case history will suffice...
...When the company doesn't need her, the bus doesn't come...
...The ceiling was approximately six feet high...
...There are sharecroppers in the Deep South who cannot afford an outhouse...
...Like all famines, the rural housing famine is an agent of death...
...At its present rate of construction, the bia will require 281 more years to get the Indian population into decent houses (assuming, of course, that the Indian population does not continue to double itself every 20 years...
...Department of Agriculture...
...For example, 34,000 communities in the United States lack decent water facilities and 44,000 lack decent sanitation facilities...
...Resettlement was succeeded by the Farm Security Administration (headed at first by FDR brain-truster Rexford G. Tugwell), which operated a similar program from 1937-46...
...Flies and black widow spiders were in abundance...
...But what about the other 13 million...
...45 per cent went to families with incomes of $3,500-$10,000...
...The failures are sometimes repeated by officials anxious to correct, or conceal, their mistakes...
...The Bureau of Indian Affairs (bia) is, among other things, supposed to be in the business of providing decent housing and sanitation facilities for reservation-based Indians...
...Sylvester could not afford the monthly $20 mortgage payments, with or without welfare...
...In the reactionary postwar atmosphere, Congress decided that cooperatives and land redistribution were un-American...
...The shack was heated by a wood-burning stove, but often there was no wood to burn...
...The Rosebud housing effort was a "demonstration project," and what it demonstrated was that people who live in warm houses and drink clean water have a better chance of staying healthy...
...The idea was that under bia supervision the Indians would get together in small groups and build houses for each other...
...At the Rosebud Sioux Indian reservation in South Dakota a few years ago, several Federal agencies pooled their funds and built almost 800 new houses...
...Six years later, however, seven out of every 10 Indian families remain in hovels without heat or indoor plumbing...
...Congress expects each Farmers Home employe to work nine times harder in 1970 than he did in 1960...
...They live in company trailer camps, where rent is $150 a month...
...By and large, these are precisely the counties where one finds the most shacks...
...Officials predicted the Mutual Help program would rehouse three-quarters of the Indian population in five years...
...Italics mine...
...The company's seasonal farmworkers in California earn $4-8 per day (except during the height of the season, lasting a month-and-a-half, when they can earn up to $16 per day...
...More than two-thirds of the nation's bad housing is located in rural areas and small towns, yet about 90 per cent of all Federal housing funds goes to the cities...
...Case closed...
...Tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases occur in rural areas at rates disproportionately high...
...Mrs...
...Farmers Home's reply hinted that the youngest child was not Mrs...
...The result of this congressional penny-wisdom has been a monstrous administrative logjam...
...In sum, the rent S. S. Pierce charges is approximately equal to the wages it pays...
...Sylvester handed in a routine loan application, and it was routinely refused...
...News like that can take the joy out of eating...
...After all, the Rosebud houses cost only $6,000 each--considerably cheaper than the cost of supporting a Public Health Service doctor...
...Until recently the Sylvester family lived in a tiny one-room shack with a privy in the back...
...In theory, public housing is available to rural families just as it is to urban families, but in practice it has been a big disappointment...
...Although the program has been law for more than three decades, 38 per cent of the nation's counties have never bothered to create local public housing authorities...
...In response, Mrs...
...Finally, when it became clear to Farmers Home officials that the welfare gambit was not convincing, they took the position that Mrs...
...There are Indians living on the northern plains who sleep in rusted-out car bodies, in the dead of winter...
...In other words...
...In Burlington, Colorado, investigators hired by the state university found three migrant farmworker families, totaling 33 persons, living in "a converted chicken coop, divided into three rooms...
...It is impossible to determine how much income a family would receive from welfare 20 to 30 years in the future...
...Next time you open a daintily wrapped container of S. S. Pierce plum pudding, think about S. S. Pierce as a slumlord...
...Unfortunately, only 5 per cent of that money went to families earning $3,500 or less...
...The upshot is a continuing mass migration from shacks to tenements--out of the rural frying pan into the urban fire...
...What they ignored was that Mrs...
...Sylvester's friends got the Florida welfare department to write a letter to Farmers Home declaring she would be eligible for welfare "as long as she has at least one dependent" (the youngest grandchild is two years old), and offering, in view of the mortgage, to increase her monthly payments...
...they use a slop bucket or the ditch...
...It was a low-cost, experimental house--three bedrooms and a bath--and the Sylvesters were chosen to live in it by persons associated with the local community action program...
...Community workers representing Mrs...
...We eat the products of their misery...
...The only other Federal agency possessing authority to do something about rural housing is the Farmers Home Administration, a part of the U.S...
...Sylvester would have to pay much more than $20 a month to any shack landlord--it would cost her more money for less housing...
...but at the agency's current rate of subsidy it will take more than a century before the present need is met...
...During fiscal 1970, the agency made housing loans and grants totaling nearly $800 million...
...In other words, the only Federal program specifically aimed at helping shack-dwellers has become a middle-class boondoggle...
...Ditto for infant mortality and for maternal deaths associated with childbirth...
...Sylvester, "Go live in a lice-ridden shack for $40 a month, because you can't afford to pay us $20...
...Still, Farmers Home is the only bureau in Washington with the legal authority to make direct home-construction loans to the poor, and if it took the job more seriously it could be helpful...
...Sylvester earns $560 a year from her field labors...
...One might think that once Federal officials made this remarkable discovery they rushed to use it...
...we cannot make a loan to an applicant whose only income is from welfare," explained the state Farmers Home director...
...R.J.M...
...The agency entered fiscal 1971 this past June with a backlog of more than 70,000 applications--or as many as it managed to process in fiscal 1970...
...Even if the Farmers Home Administration were able to break up the logjam (an incredible assumption), its program would be miserably inadequate...
...As a result, hospital admissions on the reservation dropped 30 per cent...
...Meanwhile, about 13 million Americans remain in their shacks, their tarpaper huts, their mud hogans, their tents...
...she walks to the road and waits for the company bus to pick her up and take her to the fields...
...and half the money went to families with incomes over $10,000...
...In effect, Farmers Home was saying to Mrs...
...Some loan applicants have had to wait more than two years merely to get their applications processed...
...if the family is too large to be stuffed into a single trailer, a second one is made available for $80 a month...
...Why not gather ye Rosebuds while ye may and build houses for all 13 million rural poor, or at least for the half-million Indians who live on reservations (where 80 per cent of the housing is substandard...
Vol. 53 • November 1970 • No. 21
