Why even discuss the flaws in public housing during a pandemic?
Simple. Black people are more vulnerable to this dread disease than whites for several reasons. They are poorer, and “wealthier is healthier.” African-Americans suffer to a greater extent from other medical maladies which weaken immune systems, such as diabetes, obesity, heart conditions, etc. Also, they tend to congregate to a greater extent in large cities, and population density is one of the dimensions implicated in Covid 19.
And, proportionately fewer whites are found in public housing than blacks, and this is likely true even in absolute numbers. Black lives matter. The sooner we eliminate this housing scourge, the more precious lives will be saved.
At the outset, public housing sounds like a good idea. After all, we have a homeless problem. Better these people have a roof over their heads than not, even if there are difficulties with this initiative. A society is properly judged in great part by how well it treats those at the bottom of the income distribution, and this type of residence presumably plays a role in their support.
But compared to what?
How were the poor housed before the advent of this institutional arrangement? Not too well. It was tenement housing. If you look at the two purely from the point of view of the physical plant, the projects have it all over the prior system. Public housing features high rises, with great views from the upper stories, hot and cold running water, private bathrooms, elevators, etc. The private variety could not boast of any of that. But this is an unfair comparison. Scads of taxpayer money went in to the one, not the other. No tenement ever had to be blown up by government authorities, but this was the fate of the Pruitt Iago projects in St. Louis. Nor were they the only rat-infested, feces-filled, crime ridden, hell-holes in this system. Pruitt Iago was only the tip of the ice-berg for this type of housing. As for running water, bathrooms, this describes tenements of a century ago, not at present.
Why the failure of public housing? In the view of Jane Jacobs, a leading critic of this program, it is due to safety; that is, the lack thereof. These residences are dangerous for two reasons.
First, the leaders of the community, around whom the populace ordinarily coalesces, are systematically weeded out. Initially, only those in dire poverty accepted, and such people are not likely to take on leadership roles. Later on, if a resident is awarded a promotion or a salary increase, an indication of increased guidance ability, they are summarily booted out of the projects as their income no longer qualifies them for retention. In other words, the cream is taken out of the milk at first, and, as it rises in the bottle, it is continually siphoned off.
Second, “eyes on the street.” The creators of public housing have an inveterate hate for commerce. Nary a store, restaurant, repair shop or pharmacy is to be seen anywhere on the premises. Most if not all private high rise edifices place such commercial enterprises on the ground floor. There is a continual movement in and out of these places of business, and some people hang out in front of them. This makes it interesting for people in the floors above to look down and keep their eyes on the street. Criminals are a shy lot. They do not relish being seen as they perform their dastardly deeds. If the tenants have little or no reason to look out onto the street as they did when there were tenements, criminality rises. In the no-businesses projects they have far less of an incentive to do so.
What, then, is the solution?
If we can abstract from the immorality of seizing money from some and giving it to others, then the funds placed in these buildings should be instead given to the recipients. This would allow them to enter into the private real estate market with an advantage they would not otherwise have. In other words, modern up to date tenements run by private enterprise would be preferable to the present system.
How can we relatively seamlessly make the necessary switch? Margaret Thatcher offered one proposal: give these apartments to their present owners, or charge them a nominal $10 fee for them. Then, allow the new owners to sell their residential units, or convert them into private condominium associations. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” will do all the rest. The quest for profits will turn these hell-holes into viable residences.
Walter E. Block is the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics at Loyola University New Orleans.
READER COMMENTS
SaveyourSelf
May 29 2020 at 11:32am
The Cure to Self-Defeating Policy Suggestions: Tough Love.
Sustainable management of resources is a skill set, and not an easy one. What’s more, the skills necessary to sustainably manage resources must be learned in a particular order. Skipping ahead does not work. If a poor person wins the lottery, for example, it is a safe bet that in a year they will be poor again, perhaps more so. This model of necessary learning seems to apply regardless of type of resource in question. I spoke with a man on the board of Habitat for Humanity in my area. He was depressed and said the charity was struggling. Apparently, ownership of a new house and sweat equity in a house are not adequate incentives for people to keep their houses livable. He told me that they have to evict about 50% of the new owners within one year. “You wouldn’t believe it if you saw it.” I was told. “The houses are brand new. And within months we have to condemn them. It’s amazing. You wouldn’t think it was possible to destroy anything so quickly.” The charity started instituting mandatory classes for new home owners on how to maintain property. The classes helped. A little.
I felt for the guy, and I felt for the poor people too.
So giving money to poor people is unlikely to help them. Their values are different than the people who gifted them the money. They may not spend the gifts in “responsible” ways. Odds are very good that a high percentage of the recipients will not use the welfare money given to them to rent apartments or even buy food. Drugs is a huge cause of sustained poverty and drug use is COMMON!
Which leaves altruists in a pickle. If you can’t give homeless people houses. If you can’t give hungry people food. If you can’t give poor people money. How are we supposed to help these people?
Having had children, I have come to the conclusion that the only reasonable answer is tough love.
Interactions in markets is where wealth is created. Interaction in markets over time is also moral. On-the-job training is where many people learn how to care for and keep up tools and their local environment and how to interact with others in a healthy way. If we really want to help poor people, we have to get them participating in markets. To do that we have to remove the obstacles that keep them out of markets (minimum wage laws, employee benefit laws) and remove the rewards that incentivize them to remain poor (welfare checks, free housing, free cell phones, free [fill in the blank], drugs). I’m not suggesting we force people to work. That would be immoral, but we should not reward them or even make them feel more comfortable if they choose not to work. Once they are working, the housing and the food and the clothing and the education will come naturally in time. Market participation is moral and effective. Keeping people out of markets is the opposite.
TMC
May 29 2020 at 2:53pm
Well said. It’s a tough go no matter how you go about it.
Walter: Sounds like you advocate Section 8. There seems to be no consensus as to whether it helps or just spreads the crime around. It may ruin more neighborhoods than it helps people.
SaveyourSelf
May 29 2020 at 3:54pm
There is an alternative model for addressing poverty worth mentioning wherein begging and giving to charity are taken as opposite ends of a legitimate market exchange. In such a model, poor people are already market participants who exchange pleas for help or declarations of poverty or gratitude and appreciation for money. The other side of the exchange is people giving money in exchange for feeling good about themselves or feeling like they are meeting the expectations of their religion or feeling like they are addressing the problem of poverty. The problem with this common approach to dealing with poverty is that it is economic and thus follows the laws of economics. One of those laws is that as price increases, supply increases. So the more people are willing to pay for declarations of poverty, the more poverty they can expect to see. This is a paradox because being poor is defined as a lack of resources. Thus giving people without resources treasure should abolish their poverty. But the laws of economics beg to differ. (One wry comment Milton and Rose Friedman made in their book Freedom to Choose was that if you add up all the money and resources given to the poor in the United States, then there is no poverty in the United States. But there is poverty in US. Lots of it!) And that is why tough love is the better answer.
Thomas Hutcheson
May 30 2020 at 2:28pm
If the Republican party were willing to raise taxes enough to give everyone in and eligible for but not in public housing money to rent or buy there own accommodations, I predict it could attract plenty of Democrats to the coalition. Perhaps as a condition for allowing the program to operate in a state, it would have to remove NIMBY-ish obstacles to commercial and residential development.
Idriss Z
May 30 2020 at 5:54pm
My apologies, I enjoy this blog and the resources it provides but “Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ will do all the rest” cannot possibly be a substitute for evidenced based empirical rationality. It’s the “prayer will save us” thinking of economic analyses which is misplaced in an issue that is far too important and complex for such simplifications Additionally, “the quest for profits” that “will turn these hell-holes into viable residences” have been well documented to create incredibly poor living conditions by slum lords-not an accidental term. Both points you make are valid but also they owe much to broader issues such as housing segregation, lack of available tenants for those poor because the lack of profits in housing them, the fact that landlords prefer stable income to higher rent (and in cash, which is why narcotics dealers are often favorite tenants of said landlords), lack of resources in the judicial system, and environmental discrimination where more pollution is left in these neighborhoods because there is less fear of legal/political retribution (again profit motives working in a different direction externally).
Lastly, remember this is not just a good/commodity we’re talking about, it is housing for those that have no other place to turn, it is a necessity for living. Adam Smith’s “Invisible hand” is much less apt at factoring in ‘desperation’ into prices nor does it contemplate the idea of standards of living. Matthew Desmond’s “Evicted” is a wonderful place to start to get acquainted with these issues. I have worked in this field and believe that it deserves much more (and better) attention than it has gotten and for that I thank you. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the issue deserves far better than “prices will do the rest,” historically and empirically they have not, we need deeper and better analysis on the subject.
Best,
Idriss
Matthias Görgens
May 30 2020 at 10:03pm
Public housing works a lot better in Singapore. But then everything works better in Singapore.
We do have plenty of shops on our ground floors here. (And actually more than the private high rises have. Unless those that are over malls.)
The public housing here also has ‘void decks’, space at the ground floor for social activities. Eg wedding or funerals or parties. When not currently in use, you can also just walk through the void decks, thus improving walkability of the area.
The individual apartments are also usually sold off to individual families. Only a few are rented out by the government.
Michael Pettengill
May 31 2020 at 2:30am
Public housing in the US was built for whites and excluded blacks and most brown people. Public housing was the best housing in cities for white working class people until courts and Congress changed the rule of laws denying non-white people equal right to housing available to white people.
When housing policy changed to giving white working class families single family homes, land and building deeds included covenants prohibiting sale to non-whites. For example, Detroit was developed by public policy to have white working class housing built with great public services, water and sewer, schools, public transit, but when the deed covenants were invalidated by courts, and non-whites began to buy and move in, often higher income non- whites, that housing instantly became undesirable housing with too much welfare for undeserving people, like schools for blacks that were built for whites.
It’s odd that housing built for whites becomes symbolic of bad public policy only after non-whites gain equal rights to live in the white only housing.
And arguing that Federal or Statewide tax funding of local services like roads, transportation, water and sewer, school building, etc is welfare targetting non-whites when the majority gaining benefit will be white, but unlike such tax funded development going to projects that exclude non-whites, whites benefit only if non-whites benefit.
The result is whites today have less opportunity than their white grandparents and great grandparents, all in the name of ending the bad policy of welfare for non-whites.
The policy principles forcing Detroit into bankruptcy because non-whites should not get welfare, eg good schools, also forces white only Iowa, Kansas, etc rural towns into bankruptcy. These policies lead to (white) population flight with good housing abandoned, and production abandoned for lack of services and workers. The rural Iowa town is different only in size from Detroit.
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