Howard Husock
Subject: The Government Housing Failure
Bio: Senior Fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The Projects: A New History of Public Housing
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and journalism. Today’s topic is The Government Housing Failure.
Our speaker is Howard Husock who is a Senior Fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a new book entitled The Projects: A New History of Public Housing.
Howard can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Howard Husock:
The Museum of Modern Art in 1934 sponsored the Housing Exhibition. It was a utopian collection of exhibits and an accompanying book that put forward this idea that the government should build housing because the private market was going to fail. Who were these people who believed this and ended up being extremely influential?
Catherine Bauer wrote a book called Modern Housing. Edith Elmer Wood was a Columbia professor. Philip Johnson, the modern architect. And Lewis Mumford, the social critic who wrote in this accompanying book for the exhibit, capitalism is going to fail all those who need housing.
They were entranced by the work of Le Corbusier and his book, The Radiant City. The Swiss-French architect believed in cities without streets where you would put aside the hustle and bustle and crowdedness of neighborhoods and build high rises, set in green campuses with no businesses and no industry.
These were Bohemian intellectuals who conceived under the influence of Europeans that we are going to build government owned housing to transform our cities. Three years after the Housing Exhibition in New York, the 1937 Housing Act sponsored by Senator Wagner, using much of the language written by the people in the Museum of Modern Art Exhibit. They transformed the nation’s cities: Chicago, St. Louis, also small towns around the South because Southerners seized on it to have government enforced segregation. We’ll build projects for the whites and projects for the blacks. We’ll tear down all the mixed race neighborhoods. They did that.
That was their other big project: slum demolition. I am an unabashed defender of slums. They were wrong to tear down the slums. They projected what I call the reformers’ gaze when they look at a place and say, “this is messy, dirty and crowded. I’d never want to live that way. Therefore, let’s tear it down.”
The head of the slum clearance committee in New York City, Robert Moses, was tearing down 60 buildings a month, ultimately displacing 200,000 people. Southwest Washington DC, a historic African American neighborhood tore down a neighborhood with a thousand black owned businesses.
There was a high degree of owner occupancy and what I call owner presence. Small landlords owning small buildings, renting out the second and third floors, building wealth. Once those neighborhoods got destroyed, all the potential future wealth appreciation of that land, some of it very well centrally located, gone. Instead, you are steered into a project where you can own nothing. This was an extremely deleterious program invented by Bohemian intellectuals and we still live with its legacy today.
Larry Bernstein:
My favorite movie growing up was It’s a Wonderful Life. Frank Capra’s utopia was single family home owned by working class people like the cop and the taxi driver. And the utopia of the MoMA exhibit of 1934 was government owned projects.
Howard Husock:
Well, it played out that way under Truman, who authorized slum clearance on a massive scale called urban renewal and 800,000 units of public housing. But at the same time, the federal government was conflicted because the Federal Housing Administration was subsidizing suburbanization. And if you want to talk about trying to transplant this European idea to the United States, there was organ rejection. What is American is small homes on small lots and little square yards where people could plant their own gardens. That’s the American ideal.
Prior to the depression, you had gradations of housing types. You had row houses in Philadelphia, almost 300,000 of them. Three family homes in New England, 15,000 in Boston alone. But what the reformers in the Museum of Modern Art Exhibit fundamentally got wrong was that the private market would inevitably fail. People liked public housing at first because new houses, refrigerators, gas stoves.. But over time, those with an option to get out because they made enough money, what did they want to do? Move to Levittown, move to the smallest single-family home. And so that has been the magnetic pull in American life.
Larry Bernstein:
There is a Columbia University sociologist from the 1960s and 1970s by the name of Herbert Gans, and he wrote a book about some slum clearance in Boston, and there was a sense among the reformers that nothing could be better than the removal of its slums. They knocked it down. They cleared it out.
What Gans said that the reformers did not appreciate was that this was a living ecosystem. An endogenously created working and living community that had been together for generations and that if you drop a bomb on it, you kill it. All the institutions, the churches, the community groups are instantly destroyed and spread out and the cohesive units were broken. Those institutions did not survive the clearing of that slum.
He said it was a great loss. Slum clearance was so destructive undermining the very values that they would wish they had created in public housing.
Howard Husock:
I’m an acolyte of Herbert Gans. I lived in Boston for a long time and people who had lived in the West End have reunions all the time. They still yearn for it. It’s what Robert Putnam calls social capital. That’s what was lost.
43% of the slum cleared neighborhoods were African American. The Hill neighborhood in Pittsburgh where August Wilson grew up, the famous playwright, the neighborhood’s gone. There was a columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier, the Black newspaper in Pittsburgh, Paul Jones.
Even in the moment when public housing was being planned, he protested. He says, yes, there are some places here in the Hill that have outdoor latrines, but there are a lot of nice, owned houses, and what’s going to happen to all the churches, nightclubs, social clubs, and charitable organizations? The city was bereft of that social capital afterwards. And people still yearn for it.
Larry Bernstein:
Couple of points from Jane Jacobs’s book. The first is the desire to get rid of the street in public housing. What Jane Jacobs mentions that her utopian environment is Greenwich Village with small streets crisscrossing. You have the neighbors looking out their windows at the street to make sure that there’s nothing going wrong there.
When you walk from A to B and it’s six blocks, there’s many different ways to do the walk, opening up a chance for small businesses at the retail first floor level to create something beautiful. The dispersion of retail and residential in the same place. Tell me about the beauty of small streets as compared to the public housing environment where they removed the streets.
Howard Husock:
Le Corbusier, the godfather of public housing, believed in cities without streets. They built them all over New York. Public housing that still stands is removed from city life by these campuses with no cross streets. What’s lost? In Brooklyn, there were 129,000 buildings built between 1880 and 1930 with ground floor retail and second and third floor residential. What did that mean? People lived above the stores. They could finance their buildings through the income from the stores. It creates a whole complex of human activity that is all constructive, ownership serving the public, all those intangibles that are wiped out by this antiseptic city without streets. The new businesses that will come in when old businesses go out of style, the new uses for old buildings.
One of the problems of public housing is that it’s always has to be public housing. Let’s say the city changes and great example is the Ingersoll Houses on the waterfront in Brooklyn. It was built for the workers at the Brooklyn Navy yard. Guess what? There is no Brooklyn Navy yard anymore, but there is still the Ingersoll Houses on property that is probably worth a billion dollars in the open market today if it was to be developed.
Lots of public housing sits on valuable property, but it’s frozen. It always has to say the same that is antithetical to the dynamism of healthy cities. That’s the essence of Jane Jacob’s books. Subsidized housing freezes things in place to the detriment of growth.
Larry Bernstein:
My recollection from Jane Jacobs on this dynamism is that something starts as “A” class office and then the bloom is off the rose and its B-class office and the top hedge funds move out and in come the lawyers, and then it ages out from the B lawyers into the C accountants and little businesses you’ve never heard of. Then after it becomes C class office, there’s a thought process of whether that should become residential property at the end or knock it down and make something new. Great cities go through these cycles of A, B, C and refresh or new use, and the federal government is incapable of doing that.
Public housing, they don’t maintain it and then they knock it down. Tell us about the dynamism as well as what we’re going to do with public housing when it’s deteriorated.
Howard Husock:
The theory of public housing at the beginning was the government would subsidize the construction through bonds, but the rents of working people would pay for the maintenance. But then working people said, “we’re out of here.” And poor people who moved in didn’t want to pay the rent. The prime example was the St. Louis Housing Authority and the Pruitt Igoe Housing Project, 33 11-story buildings in 1969. The housing authority said, we have to raise the rent, we got to fix this place up. It’s falling down. And the tenant said, we’re going on a rent strike.
Federal government said, yeah, they’re paying too much. We’re going to limit their rent to 25% of their income. That was a tourniquet on revenue for housing authorities across the country. And the cycle of deterioration that culminated, as you point out, with demolition of what the federal government called severely distressed public housing.
That area is still vacant in St. Louis and the federal government followed up with new utopian schemes. There must be some formula that we can tweak for this public housing ideal that’ll get it right. More subsidized housing, we will have mixed income housing. That’ll be the Alchemist stone, right?
Public projects are not how cities work. Reformers may want to push back against this, but neighborhoods self-segregated on the basis of social class. That is the reality of every neighborhood; socioeconomic status determines it. When the federal government tries to shoehorn people together or when government tries to tell suburban communities, you need to have low income housing because you need to do your fair share. A firestorm develops, and that is one of the legacies of public housing. Any new housing that even smacks of serving lower income groups arouses fear and loathing.
And that’s too bad because suburban neighborhoods need smaller houses and smaller lots. They need places for their workforce to live. This divergence between high rise subsidy and large lot zoning is a problem for the United States.
Larry Bernstein:
I read this book called White Flight Black Flight. You have a white urban community and African Americans start to move in, and whites start to exit quickly. And then as prices start to come down, poor blacks move in and then the middle class blacks run away as well. It turns into a class flight, though it did start with a racial flight.
Howard Husock:
A successor program to public housing, housing vouchers. Richard Nixon in 1973 in a speech to the nation, that is how big a deal this was, imposed a moratorium on new public housing. And he spoke in poignant terms about it, about the social isolation of those in public housing. He invented a successor program, we’ll give you a voucher like food stamps. You can take this housing stamp and rent in the private market with it. So, we will not have government managed and owned housing, we will have housing choice vouchers, and vouchers are more than twice as big in residential numbers today than public housing. They make up the majority of the budget of the Housing and Urban Development Department.
The problem with that is exactly the black flight/white flight problem that you discussed. As minorities move into higher income neighborhoods, there’s a bar they have to pass. If there’s divergence, then you have tension. So we’re doing minorities no favor by saying you get to move to this upper class neighborhood.
First, it’s impractical to move people on mass. How many people can you ever do that for? Second there is an inherent tension in which you feel different. Everybody else is wealthy here. The research about moving to opportunity which was studied by a famous economist at Harvard named Raj Chetty. He found that black male teenagers did not do well after they were relocated with housing vouchers. Are they profiled by the police? Who knows? But it is social engineering. What we need to do is to build naturally occurring affordable housing, small houses on small lots. That’s the magic formula for affordable housing. And then to commit to the idea that poor neighborhoods can be good neighborhoods.
The Lower East Side of New York produced six Nobel Prize winners. Poor neighborhoods can be good neighborhoods if government does its job, not building or managing housing, but good schools, clean, safe streets, good recreation facilities.
We still have not learned the lesson of the failure of the reformers’ gaze that poor neighborhoods need certain amenities, but we must accept that they can be healthy launching pads for upward mobility and do what it takes to make them that.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to expand on the ideas of Raj Chetty. He spoke at one of my events at Harvard years ago and he said that if we move a poor child to a wealthy neighborhood, then that child has a much greater probability of success. This isn’t a random occurrence, that’s one of the complaints about the study. How do you think about the interaction of rising up?
One of the assumptions is that when you mix two types of people, simplify it, one good, one bad. And if you say, what I’m going to add a bad kid to a good community that good kids will turn the bad kid to a good kid, but the bad kid won’t turn the good kid to a bad kid. How do we think about the interaction endogeneity associated with mixing?
Howard Husock:
These ideas that we should move people to opportunity and mess around with who lives where via government intervention is a legacy of public housing. One of the ideas of public housing is environmental determinism. Raj Chetty is a brilliant empiricist. I am not, but I think he misses some big social dynamics with upward mobility. Moving to a better off neighborhood requires habits, decisions, life choices that allow you to move there.
Larry Bernstein:
I had Matthew Desmond on the podcast a couple years ago and he wants to greatly expand the housing voucher program.
Howard Husock:
He runs the Eviction lab at Princeton.
Larry Bernstein:
Desmond wrote a book called Evicted about poor people living in Milwaukee and the troubles that they faced paying the rent. He makes two assumptions that landlords in Milwaukee are making too much, and as a result, causing evictions for their tenants. He wants to give substantial vouchers where you would lose 30% of your voucher for every dollar of income you have. So, putting them in a relatively high marginal tax rate associated with it. What do you think of his work and vouchers to change housing dynamics?
Howard Husock:
I reviewed Evicted for City Journal Magazine. It’s a brilliant participant sociological piece. He followed households very closely over a period of years and wrote very poignantly about how they lived. I think he drew the wrong conclusions from his own studies. As I recall, one family that was losing its home, one of the members had been a crack cocaine addict who set the building on fire, another living in a trailer park and losing his residence was a male nurse who had stolen drugs and become a drug addict. I think that his work demonstrated that poor life choices were as much a predictor of getting evicted or losing housing as high prices.
Now as far as landlords making too much money, Zohran Mamdani wants to freeze the rents because of this parasitic landlord class. It is Maoism revisited.
One of the heroes of Desmond’s Evicted book are a black couple who own a number of buildings and have to go out to collect the rent to balance their own books. The idea that landlords, this goes back to the slumlord myth, are parasitically draining the wealth from poor people. No, they are helping to hold the neighborhood together because the tenants who pay their rent are the bedrock of those communities and it’s appropriate to have the threat of eviction as a social sanction.
Larry Bernstein:
Going back to your introductory remarks about the goals and objectives of public housing was to provide housing for lower working-class people. And what public housing has turned into is for poor people only, you mentioned that only 3% of public housing apartments are leased by two parent households and that it is not temporary. Most residents are there for 10 years or more, and a substantial minority are there for 40 years or more.
Howard Husock:
Public housing became a poor house. The old poor houses were often last residences for the elderly poor. In New York City, which has the largest public housing system in the country, 45% of tenants today are 65 years or older. They are elderly women living alone in their later years. How did it become a poor house? Two reasons. Those with the means to leave did because the buildings were not well-maintained. Two, as you mentioned, the benevolent policy of limiting rent to 30% of income turns out to be a honey trap. The more you earn, the more you pay in rent. What do you do? You don’t earn more or you do it off the books. Doesn’t help your credit score. It’s a honey trap.
A lot of Americans believe wrongly that it was always supposed to be transitional housing. No, it was supposed to be permanent working class housing. The Trump administration proposed limiting tenancy in public and subsidized housing to two years. Congress is going to consider that possibility that would overnight change the culture from harbor to launching pad.
Larry Bernstein:
Of the first housing reformers, I think of Jacob Riis who undermined the tenement houses in the Lower East Side. I took my kids when they were young to the Tenement Museum, and they were commenting on how many people were living in such a small area. As I was going through the museum, I looked across the street and I noticed that the neighbors’ buildings were under construction and that these very same apartments were going to be the hottest places to live. When my kids got older, they would give their left arm to live in these Lower East Side tenements. How do you think of Jacob Riis as the instigator for public housing?
Howard Husock:
Jacob Riis was a brilliant photographer. That’s what made the book How the Other Half Lives. He used photography to shock. Before he had been a muckraker, he had been a police reporter. He was a sensationalist. Jacob Riis invented the reformers’ gaze. He set off the stampede to public housing. Yes. Were they crowded? People took in lodgers to pay the rent. They had to keep things clean for the lodgers. They had to be on their best behavior. All of that created social capital. Riis did not see any of it. He just got the picture to put on the front page of the newspaper and make his reputation.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each podcast with a note of optimism.
Howard Husock:
I’ll start with the projects themselves, which is a small part of all the urban housing, but I would cut streets through them. Reconnect them to the city. And on those side streets have small houses on small lots that can be owned by owner occupants. Ideally two and three family houses where people can pay their mortgages with the rent from their tenants, stores on the ground floors, reintroduce the city to the projects.
Across the country, I am cheered by the “yes in my backyard” movement. Sometimes people go too far. Minneapolis has abolished single family zoning. That’s draconian, but there is a movement that is beginning to recognize that our zoning, especially in the inner ring suburbs, is so restrictive that we cannot build that naturally occurring affordable housing that I spoke of before.
There’s recalibration going on and sometimes good ideas spread. What I’m hoping is that it is a green shoot right now and it’s not government housing.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Howard for joining us.
If you missed the last podcast, the topic was The Rise of Conservative Media. Our speaker was Joel Pollak who is the Senior Editor at Large for the website Breitbart. Joel discussed the future of conservative media.
I would now like to make a plug for next week’s podcast on Convicting Ex-Nazis: the 80th anniversary of Nuremberg. We will have three speakers including two law professors, Jonathan Bush at Columbia, and Eugene Kontorovich from George Mason. They will be joined by the What Happens Next Culture Critic Darren Schwartz who will chat about the new movie Nuremberg that is now in the theaters.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, The Future of Conservative Media, here.
