
How do you rationalize a responsible management position that impacts human lives and health when, thanks to an inadequate budget, you can’t do your job either effectively or humanely?
If, like much of the rest of the world, you need the work to support your family, you may be forced to approach a job in a way you can live with yourself. Even when that job appears to others to be creating or supporting human misery.
Is this how America arrived at its both racist and classist belief that low/no income public housing residents were/are moral degenerates with some kind of inherited depravity gene? The other option for public housing managers would be to point the finger at bosses who, for one reason or another, would or could not provide adequate management funding. Probably a career-limiting move!
Leave aside the possibility that public housing in America actually failed for reasons with little or no link to the innate quality of its tenants,1 are low income tenants genetically unable to help themselves from wrecking public housing?
Well, it is possible to actually test out the convenient ‘blame the tenants’ theory in private market housing.
How? In the era of housing vouchers, those same tenants receive income supplements to be able to afford otherwise unaffordable housing. Needless to say the value of the vouchers is suitably underwhelming, so low/no income voucher holders (such as unpensioned seniors who have lost a gene or two in a fit of forgetfulness) tend to gravitate to the least expensive housing.
So what future for a manager looking at the lower-rent private market as a place to ply the ancient trade of landlording? Will tenant depravity make the job both an emotional and economic disaster?
In Halifax Nova Scotia, one manager was prepared to consider the possibility that the management practices might be the culprit for poor tenant behaviour, rather than the other way around. Being his own boss, he was not afraid to point the finger at himself.
The results so far? Read more at Global News: Halifax Property Company Trying To Rethink Affordable Housing
Footnotes
- see in the National Review: An Improvement To Ben Carson’s Public-Housing Proposal