Is Public Housing Another Covert Tool of Oppression in America?

In his essay, “Moving out of Public Housing” Howard Husock presented an effective argument supporting government owned housing presented in the 1930s by Catherine Bauer, a social reformer. Bauer explained that it was “Only governments [that] can set up the new method of house production . . . to replace the wasteful and obsolete chaos still prevailing” (Husock, 89).

According to Husock, Bauer’s 1935 theory, that America’s privatized housing market had dominated the era allowing “small builders . . . front-foot lots and,” what she called, “the miserable straggling suburbs” to reign over other options. “The ideology of individual home ownership must go” she exclaimed. The idea of constructing city housing projects across the nation signified change and hope theories such Bauer’s brought about two significant events: the 1937 congressional debate during which Senator Robert Wagner argued allowing the construction of public housing would help Americans, “who live in unsafe and unhealthy conditions . . . detrimental to morals, to health and safety” (Husock, 100) and Franklin Roosevelt signed legislation producing the affordable housing projects of today.

Husock argued that those who advocated so strongly for the construction of Public housing never imagined, “the realities . . . as they exist today” (91) after all, the original intention for public housing was to provide affordable housing for working class people (91). Husock noted also that the former mission to provide housing for low-income, working-class families was altered by a host of social variables that I concur with to some degree. Multiple causations contributed to the decline of the projects. 1. During the Second World War, millions of private homes and apartments were produced by American construction companies. 2. The beauty and affordability of these structures combined with assistance from organizations such as the National Association of Realtors who devised the Housing Affordability Index that compared housing prices and mortgage rates to a family’s income, sparked an exodus within pubic housing. 3. “Working families quickly abandoned public housing” (Husock 91).

Subtracting an important variable such as the working class transmogrified the entire social plan into something else. The very social group the projects were meant to assist, no longer required aide. 4. As the working class families dissipated single-family households headed by women began to dominate public housing. “Department of Housing and Urban Development data indicated that of the 1.06 million households . . . in 2001, only 6 percent were married families with children . . . HUD estimates that 88 percent of all families in public housing are single-parent households” (Husock, 92). 5. Local Housing authorities did not/do not delegate funds wisely. 6. Buildings deteriorated and became dilapidated from mismanagement.

Social change is evident and due to factors both explored and ignored within “Moving out of Public Housing” the need for public housing changed when the social dynamics of its’ original target group was altered. Currently, public housing has adopted a renewed purpose for another social group as its’ mission: “The implicit reason for public housing today is to meet the demand in housing for low-income, single parent households” (Husock 92). He argued, (without my support on this particular point), that the presence of such opportunity encourages single-parent households further complicating an already astronomical socioeconomic problem. Husock said that, “Anything that abets the formation of single-parent families is destructive . . . moreover, it has become apparent that concentrating these families in a single location far exacerbates their problems, contributing not only to the formation of more single-parent families but also to deprivation and dependency”(92). Husock concludes that public housing need not be reformed but discontinued because, even after many expensive attempts to reform, restructure and ameliorate the projects, it remains painfully clear: (A) the schematic objective for which public housing was meant failed miserably and (B) it is not proving helpful to the lower classes it now serves.

While I agree that encouraging single-family households increases the poor’s problems I must raise additional issues not discussed by Husock on this matter. Nevertheless, According to Husock, public housing is currently made even more attractive to the poor, “In contrast to cash public assistance, which has [now] been limited to five years subsidized housing comes with no time limits. . . . The average length of stay in New York public housing is 17.7 years” (92). It cannot be denied with sincerity that Husock’s premise that “Public housing does not alleviate short-term hardship but traps the poor in a life of poverty and perpetual dependence” (Husock 92-93) is not valid.

However, Husock pointed out that increasingly, communities are beginning to realize the financial and social strain that the projects present, “Encouraging a plethora of social ills”. The dilapidation . . . is closely related to the system’s demographics” (Husock, 93) and order to improve on the maintenance of some of these structures along with alleviating some of the major social ills would call for an estimated $29 billion dollars (93). Consequently, Husock has branded public housing a “failed social experiment” that should be eliminated (100) and while I agree that eliminating some public housing structures may not be a bad idea, I would be remiss to advocate for such an action without a concrete plan for those who would be removed from those structures as a result.

In “The Downtown Back-Alleys” Jacob Riis explored a tenement structure that as the Urban Renewal Projects examined by Husock were, the tenement’s original purpose was to serve as a pioneer New York City tenement built by a Quaker in 1851 intended to improve the conditions of the poor. However, poor structuring and design, neglect and community abuse and a selfishly-place highway corroded the property quickly. The tenements “Were a bad-after-thought of a heedless day. The years have brought to the old houses unhonored age” Riis lamented. He said that, “Dirt and desolation reign . . . danger lurks on the stairs” just as the projects harbor stairwells filled with peril today (295). Riis describes similar circumstances to those Husock discussed. Parallel to the twentieth and twenty-first century projects described within Husock’s work, the original intent for the structure quickly metamorphosed into something far more grotesque than the situation officials originally sought to improve: not long after the tenement was erected did disaster strike. In 1862, “A sanitary official counted 146 cases of sickness in the court . . . . A board of health inspector later reported that nearly ten per cent of the population is sent to the public hospitals each year,” further exacerbating the public budget and solving nothing for the poor who were obviously afflicted by diseases born of filthy conditions worsened by ignorance (Riis, 299). Just as the advocates who pushed for urban development via the public housing currently dominating the nation’s cities could never have imagined that American construction companies would build millions of private homes and apartments geared toward the working class the projects had been built to accommodate, “The builder of the old gateway had no thought of its ever becoming a thoroughfare” (296).

Similar to Husock’s look at public housing are the opportunistic infections of ghetto life described by both he and Riis. “The Rock of Ages” drinking saloon located within the New York slum Riis outlined can be compared to drug and alcohol abuse Husock describes. Inebriation reportedly contributes to crime: “Secured convictions of theft, robbery, and murder” and the tenement buildings have, over the last twenty years produced more convicted criminals than the entire city alone (Riis, 301). This evidences that the poor are historically plagued with ignorance due to lack of education, sicknesses, lack of basic life-skills, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness and crime. Even today, “The philosophy of the slums,” remains intact, if not enhanced by years of tradition among the poor and destitute, “recognizes the saloon, always handy, as the refuge from every trouble and shapes its practice according to discovery” (Riis, 307).

While there are many valid facts and observations inherent in “Moving out of the Projects,” the author is extremely remiss in that, he neglects to mention important factors which lead to a broader and thus, in-depth examination of the Urban Renewal Project that birthed the current public housing paradoxes. One of the most important factors obscured whether purposefully or neglectfully is racism. It is of little circumstance whether the author overlooked these variables or chose to ignore them for convenience, comfort, fear, ignorance or even in an effort to misinform readers because, whatever the reason for their exclusion by leaving them out writer has rendered his research incomplete. American history is replete with information documenting slavery and racism for centuries. Four hundred years of bondage followed by centuries of oppression still evident today have been examined argued, fought and studied. To ignore the involvement of racism while elucidating a history of housing in this nation during eras of tremendous discrimination which birthed tumultuous civil unrest and protests is incomprehensible. Nevertheless, those points numbered above are issues I found valid within Husock’s study.

Many studies of the Urban Renewal Project, The National Association of Realtors and the policies allowing institutional racism in the form of deliberate segregation and systematic “set[s] of interlocking and individual actions protected by government policies that, according to

The black ghetto was created by the cultural American power structure in the beginning of the twentieth century. Legislation such as the Fair Housing Act of 1968 were used and or ignored to perpetuate black segregation as a way to control the burgeoning black urban populations which resulted from the mass exoduses of the 1930s and the 1950s. Douglass and Massey reveal that:

Under conditions of extreme segregation, any increase in the overall rate of black poverty yields a marked increase in the geographic concentration of indigence and the deterioration of social and economic conditions in black communities. As ghetto residents adapt to this increasingly harsh environment under a climate of racial isolation, they evolve attitudes, behaviors, and practices that further marginalize their neighborhoods and undermine their chances of success in mainstream American society (Preface, II).

In Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Gail Radford asks, “Why has American public housing failed to keep its promise? Historians have generated several answers . . . conservative opposition, poor design, insufficient funding, and racism” (25). Although blacks and whites associated in relative harmony during the 1920s and 1930s, competition for work, the continuous immigration of poor blacks and the degradation of neighborhoods populated with blacks renewed racial tensions. However, what is even more interesting here is that the “post –World War construction boom” discussed by Husock in “Moving out of the Projects” was not the unintentional act Husock presented it to be. No black families were offered federal initiatives to partake in the opportunities of Levittown shooting up across the country. Instead, white homeowners were allowed to buy or build sparking what has been called “White Flight” from inner cities. Husock would have readers to believe that white, working class just happened to leave in droves during the remarkable construction of millions of private homes and apartments (Husock 91). With the capital leaving for what came to be known as the suburbs, businesses and corporations followed reducing greatly the available job opportunities for blacks which compounded poverty, increased crime.

Another thing that Husock’s work does not offer is compassion, empathy or altruism unlike Margaret Fuller in her article, “Our City Charities” where she expressed tremendous hope for the downtrodden, the mentally ill, the incarcerated, the poor and the youth of New York where she visited Bellevue Alms House, the farm school, the mental asylum and the penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island. Within her accounts of New York’s indigent can be offered direct, honest and simple advice in truly assisting those in need of aide and reside in “the establishments . . . [that] admonish us of stern realities” and should not be ignored into obscurity the ways in which many of us attempt to deal with the disadvantaged (Fuller, 111). Instead, Fuller promotes that the forthcoming of kindness, respect and humanity as opposed to pity, disdain and degradation be employed at every opportunity because, “Men treated with respect are reminded of self-respect, and if there is a sound spot left in the character, the healthy influence spreads”(113). Nothing would be better than “A good sanitary system, which promotes self-respect, and through health and purity of body, the same in mind” she asserts (117). But most importantly, Fuller provokes thought regarding “the causes which make the acceptance of public charity so much more injurious to the receiver than that of private are obvious” so much so that it is not difficult for us to understand this and thus, “A deeper religion at the heart of Society would devise such a means” for it is highly relevant that the poor retain natural pride and self-respect (113) and, moreover education and the obtaining of life skills along with learning trades. These efforts are a beginning to true reform. In contrast to Riis and Husock, Fuller encouraged respect and admonished that the poor be treated equally while Riis was far more compassionate and realistic in his description of the tenement’s poor than Husock who obviously obscured certain truths and realities in an effort to sway readers toward his point of view.





Works Cited

Denton, Nancy A. and Douglass S. Massey. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Fuller, Margaret. "Our City Charities." Phillip, Lopate. Writing New York: A Literary Anthology. Ed. Lopate Phillip. 10, annotated. New York: The Library of America, 2008. 1049.

Howard, Husock. "Moving out of the Projects." Phillip, Lopate. Writing New York: A Literray Anthology. Ed. Lopate Phillip. 10,annotated. New York: The Library of America, 2008. 1046.

Jacob, Riis. "The Down Town Back Alleys." Phillip, Lopate. Writing New York: A Literary Anthology. Ed. Lopate Phillip. 10,annotated. New York: The Library of America, 2008. 1049.

Radford, Gail. Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal. Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Gail Radford, n.d.

William, Greider. Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country. n.d.