Today over 2 million Americans are living in public housing.
That’s a sizable number (though it makes up a relatively small percentage of the population
and it’s low compared to other nations that offer similar housing initiatives like say
the UK).
In spite of that, we largely only hear news stories about public housing in the US when
there’s a moment of crisis or when decisions about state and federal budgets are being
handed down.
Take for example Chicago’s Cabrini-Green homes which were built beginning in 1942 and
demolished by 2011 due to highly publicized issues with violence and disrepair.
The discourse on public housing structures is generally that they are riddled with maintenance
issues, crime and unsightly exteriors, or are the victims of budgetary constraints.
And yet, many if not most of these developments nationwide are either at close to full occupancy
or have very long waiting lists.
And residents of public housing are fighting, not only for improvements to their homes but
also for the right to remain there.
That’s despite a shift from thinking of public housing as a long term resource to
treating it as a stopgap on residents’ trajectories of success that they should look to move out
of eventually.
So today I wanted to go into the history of how we ended up with approximately 3,400 public
housing authorities nationwide and why this state funded resource is still in such high
demand.
The Great Depression marks the beginning of the US federal government’s direct funding
of public housing.
But Professor Lawrence Vale notes in his book on the history of public housing that this
is actually part of a larger story about changing attitudes around what constitutes societal
responsibility.
Namely: when should society assist people in need of housing and what form should that
assistance take?
According to Vale’s research, providing housing for people with either financial constraints
or who are unable to care for themselves independently has taken a variety of shapes throughout US
history.
He writes:
Before there were public housing projects, there were model tenements, zoning laws, and
philanthropic developers; there were settlement houses, working-class suburbs, and private
charities; there were tax advantages for homeowners, land bounties for worthy veterans, and Homestead
Act opportunities for thrifty pioneers; there were “Overseers of the Poor,” pauper auctions,
and laws of settlement; and there were almshouses, “bridewells,” and “houses of industry.”
All of these helped to codify the relationships among land tenure, house form, and labor,
and all were attempts at “improving poor people.”
So public housing was developed in the 20th century as part of FDR’s New Deal and in
the midst of the Great Depression.
But it was just the latest event in a longer history between government oversight and coded,
paternalistic language about “improving” the poor through housing.
That mission, although somewhat consistent, didn’t always take exactly the same form.
In some of the cases listed earlier, the housing assistance came in the form of private charitable
donations that built shared homes for poor families (like almshouses).
In others it came in exchange for forced labor (like the case of “houses of industry”).
And in others still it came in the form of government initiatives and tax breaks for
people who were willing to work to expand the continental US’ reach at crucial moments
(like the case of the Homestead Act of 1862).
But as Vale notes, we often don’t include these other forms of housing under the umbrella
of public housing or public assistance because the because we think of them as different
from their predecessors.
Before there was discussion of building public housing through the government, housing reform
and regulation was the more common conversation.
And this largely came through innovations in the field of photojournalism, rather than
new discoveries in city planning or architecture.
In 1890 Danish immigrant Jacob Riis used a new fangled thing called flash photography
to document the tenements and lodging houses of New York City’s most notorious slums.
He published these images of impoverished communities in his book How the Other Half
Lives, which looked to sensationalize and expose the dangerous and deplorable living
conditions of the city’s poor residents.
The book was wildly successful, not only for its harrowing images, but also for stark language
about the trials faced by vulnerable populations.
As a result, New York City’s police commissioner (and future president) Theodore Roosevelt
closed a number of notorious lodging houses.
And city officials began to more strictly enforce and expand upon existing housing codes.
Roosevelt even said of Riis:
“The countless evils which lurk in the dark corners of our civic institutions, which stalk
abroad in the slums, and have their permanent abode in the crowded tenement houses, have
met in Mr. Riis the most formidable opponent ever encountered by them in New York City.”
So at this point, photojournalistic efforts had shone a light on the deplorable conditions
of slums and privately run charitable homes were already an established precedent.
That’s when the government decided to move beyond just regulating housing to actively
providing dwellings for residents.
The Federal Housing Administration was created by an Act of Congress in 1934.
But the relationship between the government and providing safe, cheap housing was already
established.
This included everything from the forceful frontierism of the Homestead Act, to Teddy
Roosevelt’s regulation of New York lodging houses.
This new entity also made it easier for white US citizens to get loans, while “redlining”
communities of color and black communities, which strongly enforced segregation.
But this latest iteration of government assisted housing focused on subsidizing home ownership
for a relatively small percentage of the population through mortgage insurance programs.
Through these programs people were allowed to pay an upfront, relatively low down payment,
and then to cover the rest of the cost through monthly mortgage payments.
(This system is commonplace today, but was a relatively new practice at the time).
But the government’s role in subsidizing housing soon evolved beyond mortgage insurance.
When the Housing Act of 1937 was passed, the law looked to create and build subsidized
housing particularly geared towards people that met certain income requirements.
This was a radical shift in the scope and mission of the federal government’s role
in public housing.
For the first time they were getting into the business of building, renting and maintaining
structures specifically designed for this purpose.
Although Mayor Daniel Hoan of Milwaukee, Wisconsin built the nation’s first public housing
project in 1923, the project ended just a few years later under the weight of mounting
administrative issues.
The idea of building structures and essentially becoming governmental landlords was untested
on a national scale.
But perhaps the biggest difference in nationwide public housing from its earliest inceptions
in the 1930s to today is the way it was talked about and represented to the actual public.
In an interview for City Lab, journalist Ben Austen notes that when they were first built,
places like Chicago’s Cabrini-Green were seen as sites of hope and promise.
He says:
That was one of the great ironies of public housing when it was being demolished.
The arguments for replacing it were that we were saving the people living there from death.
[Those were] the exact same arguments that were used to justify building public housing
in the first place.
So when public housing emerged on the scene as a nationwide initiative it was accompanied
by promises that it would be safe, affordable, government controlled and regulated.
But when did this narrative of hope and potential change?
Although there are other crucial plot points between 1937 and the mid 20th century in the
larger narrative of public housing and housing development, perhaps the most critical change
came in 1965 with the establishment of HUD or the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
HUD marked a huge shift in not only the visibility of public housing officials, but also elevated
the platform of public housing.
It went from being a more locally operated affair to becoming a cabinet level program.
And by the mid 90s public housing had exploded from a small agency granting mortgage insurance
to a massive program with 1.3 million individual housing units managed by approximately 3,400
housing authorities and a sizable budget.
But with growth comes growing pains.
The initial narrative of public housing was outrage over the deplorable conditions of
privately owned slums that led to the creation of promising new developments.
And the conversation of public housing’s metaphorical back nine was that public facilities
were sites of disrepair and neglect.
This was reflected not only in the national discourse, but also in the policies of elected
officials in the 1980s and 1990s.
Public housing had ballooned in a relatively short amount of time and with limited budgets.
And suddenly, it became a political lightning rod, with many politicians looking to either
defund it and tear the buildings down all together, or at least to limit the number
of buildings and the scope of HUD.
Early housing programs from the Great Depression were restrictive, highly regulated, enforced
racial segregation and prohibited single parents.
And by the 1980s and 1990s discussions about housing projects began to use language about
race and crime as coded signs that the projects themselves were failures.
But a 1995 HUD report found that public housing buildings were no more racially segregated
than their surrounding neighborhoods.
And most often the racial makeup of an individual building reflected the demographic breakdown
of the neighborhood where it was located.
And in the midst of the Civil Rights Era of the 20th century, residents began to make
demands for improvements to the living conditions inside of the structures.
But that also meant that some of the public perception of these facilities was that they
were only intended for black and brown residents, and that they should be defunded, torn down,
and the residents should be rehomed to “save them” from these housing projects.
But in the crosshairs of political strife, many people didn’t stop to take stock of
the reactions and concerns of residents.
Now grassroots organizing and reports take into account the stories and perspectives
of actual residents of public housing, rather than those of the general public and elected
officials.
Community driven research from 2010 found a stark difference between the perspectives
of residents and the perspectives of the general public gleaned through the media.
For example a review of 400 newspaper articles in the study found that, “Guns and poverty
are the two most prevalent words found in the articles about public housing."
And yet residents consistently felt that housing projects are actually good places to live,
that provide affordable rent, despite their own concerns and their need to have more input
in the oversight of the buildings.
They also assert that considering the issues of homelessness nationwide more units need
to be built.
And many residents have at least one member of the household who is elderly, disabled,
or in need of care.
So public housing could serve as an alternative way to bridge some crucial gaps in housing
possibilities for people with limited or fixed incomes.
So the conversation around public housing since its inception has been split.
Because the same arguments that were levied against privately owned slums in order to
support the creation of public housing are now being used in the tail end of the 20th
century and early 21st as justification for tearing public housing down.
But if we look at it through this longer historical lens, it seems like the conditions people
are critical of in public housing aren’t inherent to buildings and systems themselves.
They’re problems that can and do emerge whenever housing is underfunded, not well
regulated, and not well maintained regardless of if the units themselves are publicly or
privately owned.