
While public (a.k.a social) housing has been extremely successful in some European nations, it survives and prospers against a small ‘c’ conservative attitude that financially poor tenants are both philosophically and intentionally to blame when public housing is seen to deteriorate.
Philosophically, pubic housing tenants apparently demonstrate by their poverty that they are naturally inferior humans. The intentional damage comes because because the genetic makeup of poor tenants apparently predisposes them to violence towards, and neglect of, their surroundings. This attitude has taken particular hold in the United States.
Consider the plight of impoverished tenants individually, however, and a whole new pattern of behaviour emerges. Is it the behaviour of the tenants or of the managers and politicians who raise issues of human inferiority.? Capable and responsible for helping those in need, political/managerial city denizens seem to dodge and hide in a thicket of funding ‘problems’ and regulatory ‘issues’ that do enormously more damage to the buildings and the tenants than the occasional boot through drywall. Really, just who are the real human ‘degenerates’ here?
Is this an unforgivably over-the-top analysis? You decide.
For the personal trials of a public housing tenant that well illustrate this issue, read in Crosscut: Affordable housing, but at what cost?