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Editor’s Note: The following essay is adapted from a speech given by the author at the Center for Urban Renewal and Education’s annual conference in Washington, DC on October 4.
It goes by many names: affordable housing, public housing, housing choice vouchers, Section 8, low-income housing tax credit developments, or simply “the projects.”
But I’m here today to tell you that all of these housing policies, dating from the 1930s to the present day, have been and continue to be harmful, in fact especially harmful to the interests of African Americans. They have lured black households into long-term dependency and poverty, rewarded single parenthood, and led to a widening gap in home ownership and wealth between black and white households.
FILE – The Farragut Houses public housing project is seen in Brooklyn on March 16, 2017 in New York City.
Our housing policies have had all of these deleterious effects in a number of ways: by destroying Black neighborhoods filled with Black-owned businesses and homeowners but labeled as slums; replacing them with public housing projects where ownership was not possible and blacks were and are overrepresented; establishing housing regulations that punish both income growth and marriage; and by defining affordable housing as subsidized rentals rather than small, privately owned homes whose ownership creates wealth.
RENT STABILIZATION AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING MEASURES PASSED IN SEVERAL US CITIES.
I’m going to take this series of errors one at a time.
Let’s start by going back to the Franklin Roosevelt administration and the National Housing Act of 1937. New Deal progressives were convinced that the private housing market was doomed to fail the majority of the population, and that the government should step in to build and manage replacement housing called subsidized housing.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt especially pushed for housing projects for African-Americans, convinced that the segregated black neighborhoods of that era needed to be replaced. She even came to Detroit to cut the ribbon on the first public housing project, named after Frederick Douglas.
Former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1945.
(Photo by Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images)
But housing progressives completely misjudged what they were replacing.
Although we are often told that black neighborhoods were slums owned by white slum owners, census records tell a different story.
In Detroit, Douglas Houses, and later its companion Brewster Houses, replaced a neighborhood known as “Black Bottom” (because of its soil, not its race) that was home to no fewer than 300 black-owned businesses, a significant percentage of one, black-owned of two- and three-family homes, a thriving branch of the Urban League and other self-help groups, and, of course, many churches, including Bethel AME, led by the Rev. CL Franklin.
I don’t have to tell this group who he or his daughter is. [Aretha Franklin] was, or to remind him of the power of his sermon, “The Eagle Shakes Its Nest” and his message of the way that strength and grace can defeat oppression.
When the time comes, the eagle carries its young out of the nest on its back and then plunges sharply, leaving them learning to fly, only to swoop down to protect them if necessary.
We have followed a path of housing policy that has led us to a dead end of impoverishment, especially for African Americans.
“God makes us like that sometimes” when we are in “a nest of too comfortable circumstances” and “we don’t bother to fight, we feel comfortable right where we are.”
Even the history of slavery could be surpassed, Reverend Franklin preached. Four hundred years was just a little time with God, he preached.
The great migration from the South to the North, he preached in his church, which would be demolished by the government, was God stirring up the nest.
Let me add this morning of the day that Yom Kippur begins that I am proud, as a Jew, that Reverend Franklin found inspiration in the story of the Hebrews from the Book of Deuteronomy.
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The entire effort that Black Bottom built was aimed toward that goal of striving for self-improvement and, by 1950, it was left as nothing more than vacant lots, a highway, and skyscrapers that fell into disrepair so quickly they would have to be demolished themselves.
The Stapleton housing project on Staten Island in New York City.
(Google Maps)
The same story of community destruction and high-rise hells would play out in African-American neighborhoods across the country: East Harlem, Central Avenue in Cleveland, Desoto-Carr in St. Louis, Bronzeville in Chicago. In St. Louis, the skyscrapers of the Pruitt-Igoe projects won an architecture award when they opened in 1956 and literally imploded in 1971.
What should Mrs. Roosevelt have done in her place? Improvements to homes that lacked amenities, instead of tearing them down. A Fair Housing Act that would have allowed black homeowners to move out, to be followed by a new generation of homeowners creating wealth.
None of that happened until the Fair Housing Act of 1968, by which time blacks would have already been herded into the supposed rewards of the projects.
Today, although African Americans make up 13 percent of the US population, they account for 48 percent of public and subsidized housing.
But isn’t that a benefit? A way to reduce poverty? No, quite the opposite. Consider the rules governing public housing and its close cousin, Section 8 voucher housing, in which the government pays most of the rent for a private apartment.
First, there is the question of how to qualify.
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The poorest households get priority, and that means single-parent households, almost always single mothers, go to the head of the line. Today in public housing, only 4 percent of households are made up of children with two parents.
We all know that the life outlook for low-income single parents is not positive. But even those who seek to improve themselves are instead punished. By rule, subsidized tenants pay 30 percent of their income for rent.
That may sound like a good deal until you look closely: It means that if your income goes up, so does your rent. Who would sign such a lease on the private market? It is not a ticket out of poverty, but a shackle that keeps one in it.
Today in public housing, only 4 percent of households are made up of children with two parents.
All this affordable housing, this government benefit, is still a temptation that lures one into dependency. The promise of physical comfort diverts attention from the struggle that gradually leads to fulfillment and achievement.
The fact that some projects are new and are yet to deteriorate should not distract us from their fundamental invitation to dependency. Here’s a number for you: The median time residents have spent in New York City public housing is 23 years. There are some residents who have lived their entire lives in the projects.
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They are denied the growth that comes with going to Home Depot for supplies to do their own home repairs; they are taught to be supplicants asking for basic services.
Where does that leave us today? On the one hand, we need to tell public officials that they need to stop doing someone the false favor of trapping them in the gilded cage of social housing. But what can be done to rebuild and restore neighborhoods, those marked by vacant lots and food deserts? History, the history of Black Bottom, must be our guide.
Instead of building high-rise apartments on those vacant lots, we need to make sure that our local laws allow for the construction of houses that local residents can naturally afford, because they are modest houses on small lots, starter houses, maybe for two or three families. , perhaps paying the mortgage taking in guests.
Some of those houses should have storefronts on the ground floors, where grocery stores and small businesses, such as hairdressers, can set up shop.
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I’m trying to paint a picture here of a real neighborhood, one where there are people on the streets and children walking safely to school. Where wealth is not created through government checks but through ownership and appreciation.
I am arguing that we have followed a housing policy path that has led us down a dead end of impoverishment, especially for African Americans. We need to rethink and redo. To go back, so to speak, to the ways of old, that worked.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM HOWARD HUSOCK
