In the category of good intentions gone awry, it is hard to beat the Americanpublic housing program.
Public housing was born in the 1930s when liberal pressure groups helped starta quintessential New Deal program that was intended not just to help the poor butto put the construction industry back to work. After a couple of decades offairly smooth sailing, however, delinquency and social problems began to appearamong residents in the housing projects. By the 1980s, conditions had gone frombad to worse, and public housing had become synonymous with the socialpathologies of the underclass.
Today public housing faces an uncertain future, and it behooves us to try tounderstand what went wrong. Two recent books from Harvard University Press arevital to the task. American Project by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh is a history of Chicago's notorious Robert Taylor Homes; From the Puritans to theProjects by Lawrence J. Vale is the saga of public housing in the city of Boston. These works describe how this once promising program fell so low and offer cautionary lessons for progressives who want to devise successful social policies.
When it opened in November 1962, Robert Taylor Homes was the world's largestpublic housing project. The complex extended more than two miles along StateStreet on Chicago's South Side and comprised 28 buildings, 16 stories each,containing almost 4,300 apartments in all. By 1965 it was home to 27,000 souls,20,000 of them children and young people, and it already had gained a localreputation as a dangerous and forbidding place. Twenty years later, Robert TaylorHomes, along with another Chicago high-rise project, Cabrini-Green, had become anational symbol of urban squalor.
In American Project, Venkatesh probes beyond the headlines about Robert Taylor Homes--the shootings, murders, accidental deaths, and police sweeps--and shows us how its residents used whatever resources were at hand to adjust to adverse circumstances. The brilliance of the author's approach is that he listens sympathetically to the people who lived and worked in this massive public housing development, yet he remains scrupulously objective.
In the beginning, officials in the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), as well asthe tenants, had high hopes that Robert Taylor Homes would succeed. Soon,however, the CHA staff was overwhelmed by the challenge of maintaining anenormous but poorly planned physical plant. The elevators, for example, brokedown constantly. When the elevators stopped between floors, passengers wereforced to climb out, and once a child fell down the elevator shaft. In anotherincident, three children died when a broken elevator prevented firemen fromreaching the 14th floor in time.
Changes in the tenant population, Venkatesh shows, contributed to thedeterioration of life at the project. Early on, about half the householdsreceived some form of assistance; but two-thirds of the households weretwo-parent families, and CHA staff and tenants worked together to screenprospective tenants. By 1970 the admission committees no longer met, and the CHAwas accepting more of the unemployed and more female-headed families. Up to 70percent of the tenants were on welfare, and half of the school-age youth haddropped out. Men lived at Robert Taylor Homes, but usually surreptitiously toavoid welfare and CHA officials.
Even though they were poor, tenants showed an entrepreneurial spirit. Some ransmall businesses such as food preparation, car repairs, and hair dressing. Otherssold drugs or operated an apartment bordello. Almost all transactions wereillicit, run under-the-counter to avoid the income penalties imposed by thehousing authority and the welfare office.
In the face of an uncooperative police force and a generally indifferent CHAbureaucracy, Robert Taylor residents developed a system based on payoffs toorganize life in the projects. In each of the buildings, tenant leaders wereelected or appointed. Acting like old-time political bosses, the leaders usedpersonal contacts to provide services to tenants. They might be called on to getthe CHA to fix broken plumbing, to bring in the police to investigate aburglary, or, more often, to send men to administer justice to wrongdoers such aswife beaters. Using their standing with the CHA as a threat, the tenant leadersregulated the business enterprises, including restricting drug dealing andprostitution to particular times and places. To compensate for their services,the tenant leaders took payments--in kind, when cash was in short supply--fromthe project's entrepreneurs and even CHA managers. The system was not, bymiddle-class standards, pretty. But in a fashion, it worked.
Things fell apart, however, when elder gang leaders decided to turn the youthgangs--which previously had mainly attacked one another--into drug-dealingoperations. The gangs commandeered lobbies, stairwells, and apartments,intimidating all whom they encountered. Rival gangs clashed over market shares,and shoot-outs and casualties became common. Noncombatant residents were afraidto leave their apartments. Not content to deal drugs, gang members took over thetenant leaders' payoff system, beating up entrepreneurs who did not cough upextra "taxes."
The city police and housing authority made matters worse by refusing to enterRobert Taylor Homes except to conduct massive raids of buildings and grounds. Thesweeps were largely ineffectual, since the gangs, which maintained constantsurveillance, were tipped off beforehand. Tenants grew angry that theirapartments were searched and innocent bystanders arrested but no one would makeneeded repairs to the homes.
Robert Taylor Homes careened toward destruction. Isolated by the authoritiesand powerless to fight the gangs, the tenant leaders could only watch withdisgust and frustration. Residents deserted the premises, and the CHA movedsluggishly to fill vacancies. Only the most desperate--young, destitute singlemothers--took apartments. By 1992 only 12,300 people lived in Robert Taylor Homeslegally, and of these an incredible 95 percent were unemployed and dependent onwelfare. The city authorities gave up. When Congress appropriated billions fordemolition of public housing, Chicago signed up to raze Robert Taylor Homes andits other high-rise housing projects.
Lawrence Vale's study From the Puritans to the Projects reveals that the decline of public housing was well under way by the time housing projects like Robert Taylor Homes were built. In his history of housing and poverty in Boston, Vale shows that the public housing program was intended to be something quite different from what it became.
Most important, public housing originally was not meant for the very poor. TheBoston Housing Authority (BHA) set stringent standards for admission to Boston'sfirst public housing project, Old Harbor Village, a handsome apartment and rowhouse complex that the federal government built under an experimental program in1938. Tenants were to have permanent employment. Not even those holding jobs withthe Works Progress Administration were allowed to live in the housing project,and welfare recipients were discouraged from applying. As a result, the residentsof Old Harbor Village were on average better educated, more frequently employed,and able to pay higher rents than their neighbors in predominantly Irish,working-class South Boston. The BHA built its own housing projects in the late1930s and early 1940s and again chose tenants from the high end of the low-incomecategory. The residents of Boston's early public housing were, in Vale's words,"barely poor."
There were reasons for public housing authorities to be selective. As theprogram was constituted, the federal government helped pay to acquire land andbuild the projects, but rents were supposed to defray the costs of maintainingand managing the properties. Housing agencies therefore needed solvent tenants.Furthermore, the founders of the public housing movement, such as Edith ElmerWood and Catherine Bauer, wanted to exclude "problem families"--alcoholics, drugaddicts, criminals, the hopelessly indigent--until the program was solidlyestablished. They knew that such families were unstable and difficult to help,and that their presence would stigmatize public housing. Early public housingagencies in Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere prohibited the entry of all but a fewproblem families.
Economic conditions, Vale points out, enabled public housing officials to cullthe most stable and best-paid low-income tenants. During the Depression,middle-class workers were submerged in the low-income category. (This wasespecially true of African Americans.) In addition, inexpensive housing was inshort supply and great demand. With more than 10,000 applicants for Old HarborVillage's 1,016 dwellings, the Boston Housing Authority's acceptance rate waslower than that of Harvard College. Public housing officials in Boston and otherAmerican cities were able to admit skilled and clerical workers and even a fewprofessionals.
Not surprisingly, tenants in these years were model citizens who organizedthemselves into a wide array of volunteer organizations and took pride inmaintaining clean and attractive buildings and grounds in the projects. The chiefproblem was that aspiring tenants tended to prosper, earning more than the rulesallowed and forcing reluctant officials to evict them.
The numbers of such tenants increased during and immediately after World WarII, when the government required housing authorities to accommodate defenseworkers and veterans. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, tight housing markets,created by the return of the GIs, made public housing a bargain and preserved theability of housing authorities to be selective in their admissions. As a result,Vale observes, tenants in these years were typically two-parent, one-earnerfamilies. In these conditions, public housing worked.
Then came the long decline. Vale charts the descent in Boston. In 1955 aseries of articles in the Christian Science Monitor announced that Boston's public housing was recently afflicted with vandalism, delinquency, murder, and assaults on children. The projects were home to a "new kind of tenant," the reporters explained: Welfare families made up an average of 13 percent of public housing households, and the proportion of broken families in some projects was as high as 30 percent.
Five years later, a settlement house report regretted the loss of upwardlymobile families and "residents who have assumed leadership responsibilities." By1960, well before the large expansion of welfare payments, almost half of thehouseholds in Boston's public housing projects received income from programs suchas the Aid to Families with Dependent Children and Old Age Assistance. ElizabethWood, the nationally known former director of the Chicago Housing Authority,criticized Boston's public housing officials for not doing enough to combat theimpression of public housing as an institution for people "who can't take care ofthemselves."
Across the nation, liberals grew disillusioned. In her 1957 article "TheDreary Deadlock of Public Housing," Catherine Bauer criticized the program shehad helped create. "Once upon a time," another supporter of public housing wasquoted as saying, "we thought that if we could only get our problem families outof those dreadful slums, then papa would stop taking dope, mama would stopchasing around, and Junior would stop carrying a knife. Well, we've got them in anice new apartment and modern kitchens and a recreation center. And they're thesame bunch of bastards they always were." Beating a fast retreat, Washingtonpolicy makers began to emphasize public housing for the elderly.
Over the next 40 years, it only got worse. As liberals in Congress and federalofficials attempted to assist the poor, their efforts undermined the housingsystem further. They loosened restrictions for admission to public housing. In1968 Congress passed an amendment, named after Senator Edward Brooke ofMassachusetts, that required housing authorities to charge no more than 25 (laterraised to 30) percent of a household's income. This protected the very-low-incomepeople from being replaced but at the same time further lowered the rentalrevenues. As housing authorities teetered on the brink of insolvency, Congresswas forced to provide operating subsidies. The indifference and incompetence ofthe ossifying local and federal housing bureaucracies only accelerated thedownward spiral.
By the 1970s, public housing was recognized as a disaster. The high-riseprojects were the most notorious (although they were not the only public housingdevelopments to be plagued by crime, vandalism, and deterioration). ThePruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis was the first to gain national notoriety,especially after government officials, with much fanfare, blew it up.
Documenting the ways family public housing hasn't worked is easier thanunderstanding the cause of its many afflictions. Some writers--notably OscarNewman, in his 1972 book Defensible Space--blame the design of the buildings for the demise of public housing. True, some projects were poorly designed for family living and security. The site of Robert Taylor Homes, near railroad tracks and expressways, was a terrible place to put children. Yet, as Venkatesh makes clear, Robert Taylor in its early years functioned pretty much as it was intended. And housing professionals have long noted that in New York City, where demand for apartments is high, the public housing authority has been able to keep employed tenants and maintain the public housing stock.
Critics often blame racism for public housing's troubles. Vale, for example,shows that African Americans suffered discrimination and unfair treatment inBoston's public housing, and others have demonstrated similar injustices in othercities. After examining the CHA's records, however, Venkatesh concluded thatChicago's legendary racial problems did not bring about the downfall of RobertTaylor Homes. Even in Boston, Vale's evidence reveals, the number of welfarefamilies in public housing first rose during the 1950s when the overwhelmingproportion of the households was white. Twenty years later, some of the housingprojects in black neighborhoods were perhaps more dangerous and miserable thanthose in white neighborhoods, but not by much. Whites still occupied SouthBoston's Old Colony development during the 1970s and 1980s, but the project'salcoholism, drugs, murderous gangsters, and female-headed households--vividlydepicted in Michael Patrick MacDonald's memoir All Souls--put it on a par with the worst black-occupied public housing.
The works under review here make clear that public housing declined primarilybecause authorities lowered their standards for admission to the projects. Theofficials did so not because they wanted to, but because they no longer had theluxury of picking and choosing among low-income families. As housing authoritieswere forced to rent to people who considered public housing a last resort,functioning apartment complexes were transformed into slums with which cityagencies were unprepared and unwilling to cope.
The underlying reason that public housing lost its original clientele--whichneither of these two books explores--was the geographic and social mobility ofthe urban working and middle classes. Beginning in the 1950s, a boom in suburbanliving drew working and middle-class whites out of the old neighborhoods and gavethe growing number of African Americans a much wider choice of places to live. Bythe 1970s, upwardly mobile middle- and working-class blacks also abandoned theinner city in droves, leaving behind those whom William Julius Wilson calls "thetruly disadvantaged." Public housing became the domain of those who, for onereason or another, were unable to escape.
What lessons can we draw?
The federal government has for most of the last decade been carrying out a$3-billion program (Hope VI) for demolishing the most troubled public housingprojects and reconstructing them as mixed-income developments. New laws haveraised the income limits for tenants in public housing projects and have allowedhousing authorities to bar drug users, alcoholics, and criminals. Lawrence Valebelieves that the rebuilding program will not be enough and that rental voucherseventually will replace public housing as the chief low-income housing program.
Most observers have finally recognized that low-income housing developmentsmust, like any community, contain working people to remain stable. This is oneof the chief lessons Venkatesh derives from the story of Robert Taylor Homes.Without working people, public housing projects become either vast human-serviceinstitutions (such as homes for unwed mothers) or, as in the case of RobertTaylor Homes, high-rise hellholes where only the strong and the lucky survive.Politically, the former is too expensive, and the latter is unacceptable.
Which brings us back to what the founders of the public housing programunderstood. Whether in public housing, welfare reform, or education, the hardcases in the business of social uplift require funds, commitment, and a realisticassessment of the difficulties they entail. It is a truth too often overlooked.
