{"id":16594,"date":"2025-03-03T02:34:32","date_gmt":"2025-03-03T02:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=16594"},"modified":"2025-03-03T02:34:33","modified_gmt":"2025-03-03T02:34:33","slug":"public-housing-didnt-fail-in-the-us-but-it-was-sabotaged","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=16594","title":{"rendered":"Public housing didn\u2019t fail in the US. But it was sabotaged."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“the demise of public housing was not an inevitable outcome. As my colleague Rachel Cohen has pointed out<\/a>, other countries have successfully pulled it off. Governments around the world have shown that they can operate mixed-income housing developments<\/a> that have reliable maintenance and upkeep and that public housing doesn\u2019t have to segregate poor people away from the middle class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So why did public housing in the United States age so poorly?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“efforts to undermine public housing are about as old as the efforts to build it. From the outset, opposition was fierce. Many Americans didn\u2019t like the idea of the government using their tax dollars to subsidize poor people\u2019s housing, and real estate developers were concerned about having to compete<\/a> with the government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Housing Act of 1949, which had a goal of providing \u201ca decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family,\u201d bolstered America\u2019s public housing plans by heavily investing in the construction of new housing units. But by then, the federal government had already undermined its own stated plans<\/a> by capping construction costs (which encouraged using cheap materials and discouraged modern appliances) and allowing racial segregation. Congress had also doomed public housing authorities\u2019 ability to raise revenue through rents in 1936 when it passed the George-Healey Act, which established income limits<\/a> for who can qualify for public housing \u2014 making mixed-income public housing models impossible for federally funded projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As housing projects started to draw more Black residents, white people who lived in public housing started leaving, especially after the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s banned racial discrimination in housing<\/a>. This was partly because the Federal Housing Authority pushed for more people to own homes<\/a> and expanded its loans mostly to white people, helping white families move out of the projects. Black families didn\u2019t receive the same opportunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou saw a change in the racial composition, which simply added to the stigma and the pattern of administrative neglect that characterized many housing authorities,\u201d the historian Ed Goetz told The Atlantic<\/a> in 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Starting with President Richard Nixon \u2014 who declared that the US government<\/a> had turned into \u201cthe biggest slumlord in history\u201d and suspended federal spending<\/a> on subsidized housing \u2014 public housing started facing serious austerity measures and never recovered. Federal investments shifted away from building new public housing units and toward housing vouchers and public-private partnerships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the decades that followed, public housing started declining in quality, and Congress funded a program to demolish<\/a> dilapidated public housing units and replace them with newly constructed or renovated mixed-income developments. But according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition<\/a>, those demolitions were an \u201covercorrection\u201d; public housing simply needed more funding and better management.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.vox.com\/policy\/390082\/public-housing-america-policy-failure-poverty<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“the demise of public housing was not an inevitable outcome. As my colleague Rachel Cohen has pointed out, other countries have successfully pulled it off. Governments around the world have shown that they can operate mixed-income housing developments that have reliable maintenance and upkeep and that public housing doesn\u2019t have to segregate poor people away from the middle class.
\nSo why did public housing in the United States age so poorly?”<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

“efforts to undermine public housing are about as old as the efforts to build it. From the outset, opposition was fierce. Many Americans didn\u2019t like the idea of the government using their tax dollars to subsidize poor people\u2019s housing, and real estate developers were concerned about having to compete with the government.<\/p>\n

The Housing Act of 1949, which had a goal of providing \u201ca decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family,\u201d bolstered America\u2019s public housing plans by heavily investing in the construction of new housing units. But by then, the federal government had already undermined its own stated plans by capping construction costs (which encouraged using cheap materials and discouraged modern appliances) and allowing racial segregation. Congress had also doomed public housing authorities\u2019 ability to raise revenue through rents in 1936 when it passed the George-Healey Act, which established income limits for who can qualify for public housing \u2014 making mixed-income public housing models impossible for federally funded projects.<\/p>\n

As housing projects started to draw more Black residents, white people who lived in public housing started leaving, especially after the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s banned racial discrimination in housing. This was partly because the Federal Housing Authority pushed for more people to own homes and expanded its loans mostly to white people, helping white families move out of the projects. Black families didn\u2019t receive the same opportunity.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou saw a change in the racial composition, which simply added to the stigma and the pattern of administrative neglect that characterized many housing authorities,\u201d the historian Ed Goetz told The Atlantic in 2015.<\/p>\n

Starting with President Richard Nixon \u2014 who declared that the US government had turned into \u201cthe biggest slumlord in history\u201d and suspended federal spending on subsidized housing \u2014 public housing started facing serious austerity measures and never recovered. Federal investments shifted away from building new public housing units and toward housing vouchers and public-private partnerships.<\/p>\n

In the decades that followed, public housing started declining in quality, and Congress funded a program to demolish dilapidated public housing units and replace them with newly constructed or renovated mixed-income developments. But according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, those demolitions were an \u201covercorrection\u201d; public housing simply needed more funding and better management.”<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.vox.com\/policy\/390082\/public-housing-america-policy-failure-poverty<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[770,270,411,2175,619,150],"class_list":["post-16594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-history","tag-housing","tag-policy","tag-public-housing","tag-united-states","tag-welfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16594"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16595,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16594\/revisions\/16595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}