
Before World War II, America never had the political will to allow low-income employed persons to live in public housing. Unfortunately, by immediately turfing newly employed wage-earners out, the federal government destroyed its planned long term-financing scheme for public housing, which relied on a stream of tenant income to sustain management and repair costs.
Post World War II, that became okay, because public housing reeked of socialism, which reeked of communism, which had no place in a capitalist democracy threatened by Cold War.
Still, somebody had to take the blame for the clearly visible deterioration of public housing. It could not be the fault of federal underfunding for management or repairs, for all the usual CYA1 reasons.
The solution? Blame the tenants: the unemployable old, infirm, or child-burdened. These were cast as people incapable of appreciating and caring for public housing and therefore morally unfit to occupy it. Let public housing decay, fall down. Good riddance to it and its undeserving tenants alike.
And yet, after decades of tenant-blaming and neglect that led to the bulldozing of public housing project after project, some of it still survives. Surprising perhaps.
But completely unsurprising is the surviving and multiplying unemployable old, infirm and child-burdened, together with a rapidly growing population of low-income employed who are being reduced to abject poverty by the unaffordability of present day housing.
And so, though the concept of public housing in America has been thoroughly trashed, there remains a population of low- and no- income citizens who need to be housed, with no market rate housing solution.
And needless to say, there is no venerable, reliable, respected public housing program to fall back upon, as there is in many European countries that have preserved public housing stock, along with the capacity to produce more, if and when that becomes necessary.
So what’s the American housing solution today? Why, build upon that leaning tower of small-government nonsense: “the private sector can do it better.”
Well, maybe they can. But will they? Not a chance.
Nonetheless, by roping the private sector into the muddle, the federal government can hand-wring and shed crocodile tears while pointing in three directions at once when confronted by affordable housing activists, or plain old tenants at their wits’ end.
“Oh, poor dear tenants. Of course you don’t deserve wall-to-wall cockroaches, but . . . ”
“Oh, poor, dear landlords. With our minuscule subsidies, of course you can barely make a profit, let alone fix up your stinking rental accommodation, but . . .”
“Oh, poor, dear us at HUD, of course we’d like to help every aging, infirm, child-burdened single parent, employed and holding down three jobs but unable to afford the rent. But we only have so many dollars to hand out, and it is well known that private enterprise does it better than we possibly can, so why are we even involved?”
For the present predictable consequences of a federal government department racing itself to well-deserved oblivion, read more in U.S.News:Inspections Show Deterioration of US-Funded Housing for Poor
. . . or a similar article with a bit more teeth in its headline at AP: Rats, Leaks, Urine: Life In New Orleans Low-Rent Housing