galveston vows to continue failed policy

8/14/2019 Galveston Vows to Continue Failed Policy

1/12

Galveston Vows to ContinueFailed Policy; Lack of Success

no Reason to Change!by David Stanowski30 March 2009

The Galveston Housing Authority was formed on 08 April 1940,in the heady days of the New Deal. The idea was simple; it wasbetter for low-income people to live in properties owned,controlled, and subsidized by the government than to live in

privately owned properties that they paid for themselves. Thisnew formula would give them a hand up and out of poverty.

In this conceptionarticulated by Catherine Bauer in herinfluential 1936 "Modern Housing"and embraced by PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt in the National Housing Act of 1937public housing authorities were to run apartment buildings aspermanent public utilities, with publicly financedconstruction keeping rents low.

It's hard to exaggerate how mistaken this idea was, evenwhen Bauer and other advocates first formulated it. From theend of the Civil War up until 1937, private builders haderected a dizzying variety of housing for the striving poor asthey improved their condition over time.How Charlotte is Revolutionizing Public Housing

This philosophy was reinvigorated and reinforced by the Great

Society in 1964.Next week will be the 69th anniversary of the GHA, so it maybe time to actually ask the question; how well has it worked?Have many of the previous residents of GHA housing projectsused their stay there as a stepping stone to successfullybecome self-sufficient in the private sector, or have many

1
http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_2_how_charlotte.htmlhttp://www.city-journal.org/html/10_2_how_charlotte.html


2/12

families remained in the projects for generation aftergeneration?

Heres what Star Parker has to say about public housing:

"A benevolent Uncle Sam welcomed mostly poor blackAmericans onto the government plantation. Those whoaccepted the invitation switched mindsets from "How do Itake care of myself?" to "What do I have to do to stay on theplantation?"Instead of solving economic problems, government welfaresocialism created monstrous moral and spiritual problems --

the kind of problems that are inevitable when individualsturn responsibility for their lives over to others.The legacy of American socialism is our blighted inner cities,dysfunctional inner city schools, and broken black families.I thought we were on the road to moving socialism out of ourpoor black communities and replacing it with wealth-producing American capitalism. But, incredibly, we are going

in the opposite direction.

Trillions of dollars later, black poverty is the same. But blackfamilies are not, with triple the incidence of single-parenthomes and out-of-wedlock births."Back on Uncle Sam's Plantation

2
http://www.urbancure.org/http://www.onenewsnow.com/Perspectives/Default.aspx?id=414214http://www.urbancure.org/http://www.onenewsnow.com/Perspectives/Default.aspx?id=414214


3/12

One of my "mentors", Dr. Thomas Sowell, has done some of thebest work on the legacy of public housing projects:

"Once, after giving a talk, I was confronted by a lady in theaudience who asked what some people regard as the ultimatequestion:

"What is YOUR solution?"

"There are no solutions," I said. "There are only trade-offs."

"The people DEMAND solutions!" she shot back angrily.

The people can demand square circles if they want. But thatdoesn't mean that they will get them. What they are morelikely to get is the illusion of a solution by someone seekingtheir vote.

Nowhere have illusions been more abundant than indiscussions of housing -- especially that ever-elusive"affordable housing" that so many people wring their handsover -- often while passing laws that make it virtuallyimpossible to achieve.

It has become axiomatic in some quarters that only thegovernment can provide affordable housing to low-incomepeople. Often the people who talk this way do not leteconomics cramp their style or history distract theirattention.

Within living memory, there was a time when there were no

3
http://www.tsowell.com/http://www.tsowell.com/


4/12

government housing programs. The federal government firstgot into providing public housing with the National HousingAct of 1937. (It is amazing how many bad ideas began ineither the 1930s or the 1960s.)

Today, we have gotten used to the idea that the governmentwill take care of the poor by putting them in housingprojects. We have also gotten used to seeing videotape ofpublic housing projects being demolished. What has not beendemolished, however, are the unsubstantiated assumptionsbehind these disastrous social experiments."Housing Hurdles: the Solution?

"Among the most unconscionable attempts to unsort peoplewho have sorted themselves out by behavior are governmentprograms to relocate people into neighborhoods where theycould not afford to live without subsidies. Often the people inthose neighborhoods have sacrificed for years in order to beable to live where they could raise their children in decentsurroundings and not have to live in fear of hoodlums -- onlyto have the government import the bad neighbors and

hoodlums they have tried so hard to escape.

Both kinds of people may be of the same race but that doesnot make the consequences any less painful or theresentments any less bitter. Blacks as well as whites haveobjected to having problem people thrust into their midstthrough housing subsidies or government housing projectsbeing built in their neighborhoods.

Almost never do the social experimenters relocatedysfunctional and dangerous people into their own eliteneighborhoods. They unsort other people's neighborhoods andembitter other people's lives."The New White Flight

4
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3504http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4483http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3504http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4483


5/12

Howard Husock is the Vice President, Policy Research and theDirector of the Manhattan Institutes' Social EntrepreneurshipInitiative. He was formerly the director of case studies inpublic policy and management at Harvard University's Kennedy

School of Government. Husock is a prolific writer on housingand urban policy issues.

Most policy experts agree these days that big public housingprojects are noxious environments for their tenants. Whatsless well understood is how noxious such projects are for thecities that surround them. Housing projects radiatedysfunction and social problems outward, damaging localbusinesses and neighborhood property values.

Public housing spawns neighborhood social problems becauseit concentrates together welfare-dependent, single-parent

families, whose fatherless children disproportionately turnout to be school dropouts, drug users, non-workers, andcriminals.

Some might dismiss Petrones grumbling as the intolerance ofa white ethnic for minority newcomers in his onceoverwhelmingly Italian-American neighborhood. Theyd bedead wrong. Youll hear exactly the same complaints fromhardworking minority residents of project-dominated

neighborhoods, too.

Working with the Chicago Housing Authority, he proceeded tomix new, owner-occupied homes with buildings featuring newpublic housing units.

5


6/12

Gatess gambit kept out interloping whites, all right; but italso enraged law-abiding minority homeowners, who didntmuch care for their new publicly housed neighbors, some ofwhom had turned their subsidized residences into crack dens.

Lambert, a Democrat, argued that Watuppa Heights was amagnet, drawing households with social problems to his cityfrom Boston and other cities with large numbers of residentseligible for subsidized housing. His office discovered that, outof 1,700 households waiting to receive public housingplacement in Fall River, only 200 actually lived in the city(and most of those had passed up available units in WatuppaHeights while waiting for apartments in newer, more

desirable public housing). A Boston Globe article, reportingthat Boston social workers were encouraging low-incomehouseholds to move to the old mill town, where there wasgreater vacancy in the public housing system, providedfurther evidence that Watuppa was filling up with out-of-towners.

Perhaps surprisingly in a state where affordable housing isa mantra, the Massachusetts State Legislature recently gave

Lambert the green light to demolish the project. The voterepresented a big win for the mayor and for Fall Rivers statelegislatorsanda major turning point for a city fighting hardto improve its schools and its economy.

The belief that public housing ye shall always have withyou is sacrosanct among housing advocates and officials.Like public housings originators more than a half-centuryago, they are convinced that the private housing market willalways exclude the poor, making public housing permanentlyessential.

It is this assumption that drives the Department of Housingand Urban Developments ongoing multi-billion-dollar Hope VIreform initiativethe latest in an endless series of HUDefforts to remedy the endless failures of its earlier housing

6


7/12

programs. Hope VI has demolished 70,000 aging publichousing units nationwide (including Chicagos notoriousRobert Taylor Homes), only to replace many of them withnew units of a different design, in the belief that this time

HUD will get the formula right.

Real-estate official Joe Petrone, part of a citizens groupseeking to block construction of the new units, says, We livein fear right now of them duplicating what we had for 40years. Theyre just putting a tuxedo on a pig. Its still a pig.

But by mandating that 79 of North Town Villages 261apartments rent to Housing Authority tenants, and that

another 39 rent for below-market rates, the city has greatlydiminished the prices of other units in the buildings and theproperty tax that the buildings generate. We could beselling condos here for $800,000; instead were selling themfor $425,000.

In Fall River, for example, a legal services advocacy group,the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, has pledged that itwill try to block the demolition of Watuppa Heights every

step of the way, as the Boston Globe puts it. In Chicago, thelocal housing authority faces constant pressure from tenantorganizers such as the Community Renewal Society, a socialjustice organization that has pushed for one-to-onereplacement of any public housing unit that the city happensto tear down and a lifetime right of return for any tenantdisplaced by project demolitions.

Housing officials and angry activists notwithstanding,however, the truth is that any two-income working family canafford private housing in the U.S. For example, the averagerent for an apartment in New York City, excluding priceyManhattan, is just $604.

It would be a boon to cities if they could get rid of suchmisbegotten places. By incubating social pathology, and by

7


8/12

keeping so much property permanently off the property-taxrolls, public housing has sapped urban vitality. Thoughaffordable housing activists deny it with their last breath,the gentrification that public housing inhibits is a good thing

for cities, the urban poor included. It provides the housingthat growing, high-paying businesses need if they are toattract the highly skilled workers who are their lifebloodand whose high wages provide economic opportunity for somany other workers at all income levels. It is this economicdynamism that creates the opportunity city, in which there isa job for everyone, and no one has to depend on governmentfor his income or his housing.How Public Housing Harms Cities

How public housing is bankrupting America -- while harmingthe people it was designed to help:

"For more than six decades, the United States has built publichousing projects and otherwise subsidized housing for thepoor. Everyone knows how quickly these housing projects,particularly in big cities, turn into dangerous, demoralizedslums. But the problems with our low-income housing policygo much deeper than the unwholesome living conditions theyprovide.

In America's Trillion Dollar Housing Mistake: The Failure ofAmerican Housing Policy, Howard Husock argues that our low-income housing policy -- like so many other misguided anti-poverty programs -- has harmed those it set out to help and

8
http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_1_how_public_housing.htmlhttp://www.conservativebookclub.com/products/bookpage.asp?prod_cd=c6403http://www.conservativebookclub.com/products/bookpage.asp?prod_cd=c6403http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_1_how_public_housing.htmlhttp://www.conservativebookclub.com/products/bookpage.asp?prod_cd=c6403http://www.conservativebookclub.com/products/bookpage.asp?prod_cd=c6403


9/12

has caused serious, and continuing, collateral damage in ourcities.

Butpublic housing projects, Mr. Husock explains, are only the

best-known housing policy mistakes. He reveals how a longlist of lesser-known efforts -- including housing vouchers,community development corporations, the low-incomehousing tax credit, and the Community Reinvestment Act --are just as pernicious, working in concert to undermine soundneighborhoods and perpetuate a dependent underclass.

He exposes the false premises underlying publicly subsidizedhousing, above all the belief that the private housing market

inevitably fails the poor. Exploring the link between privatehousing markets and individual self-improvement, he alsoshows hownew and expensive public efforts are merely oldwine in new bottles. Instead he argues for the deep butunappreciated importance to America society of economicallydiverse urban neighborhoods -- and he demonstrates thehistoric andcontinuing importance of privately built"affordable" housing, from the brownstones of Brooklyn tothe bungalows of Oakland."

Before Hurricane Ike, the Galveston Housing Authority ownedand managed 958 public housing units:

Gulf Breeze: 199 elderly unitsHolland House: 157 elderly unitsThe Oaks: 20 elderly units

Total: 376 elderly units

Cedar Terrace: 139 standard unitsMagnolia Homes: 133 standard unitsOleander Homes: 206 standard unitsPalm Terrace: 104 standard units

9


10/12

Total: 582 standard units

Cities all around the country are desperate for the opportunityto demolish their housing projects, and end the blight of publichousing for the reasons outlined above. Here in Galveston, theGHA is being forced to demolish their four standard housingprojects due to the damage from Hurricane Ike, but ratherthan use this as an opportunity to do away with these failedexperiments in social engineering, they are pushing ahead toreplace the 582 lost units, AND add another 1,500 units afterthat!

With all of the evidence that public housing projects do notmake a positive impact on their residents, or theneighborhoods adjoining them, the GHA is seeking to nearlyquadruple the number of standard public housing units in thiscity!! Advocates of rebuilding, and further expansion, arguethat they hope to build back the population of the City byadding to the number of people dependent on public housing!If they get their way, this will have a disastrous effect on ourrecovery effort!

It is difficult to tell who is in favor of replacing these units, andadding still more, outside of the GHA, and Councilman TarrisWoods. Certainly these people think that they are doing theLords work, but they are simply ignoring the negative impactof public housing on the people who live there and the City asa whole.

Can this be stopped?The Galveston City Council can certainly vote not to allocatethe funds to rebuild any public housing units, if at least fourMembers have the courage to do so, but should we expectthem to take all the heat from the people, and organizationsthat will seek to demonize them, if they do? Wouldnt it be

10


11/12

preferable for Council to put the matter to a public vote? Sincethe residents of this city insisted that they must be allowed tobe the ones to determine the fate of paid parking on theSeawall; why shouldnt they be the ones to vote on something

this crucial to the City's future?

Unfortunately, a negative vote by Council, or by the City atlarge, will probably be met by a lawsuit by some group likeLone Star Legal Aid that could easily overturn the will of thepeople.

The better strategy might be to begin by using the same legalsystem that is so often used by the advocates of New Deal

solutions to every problem. The City could bring a lawsuitagainst the GHA challenging the whole premise of the publichousing model using the vast amount of evidence to prove it isa failed experiment.

However, since the City is unlikely to take the lead on this, acitizens group could fund such a lawsuit, in a last ditch effortto save their city. It is also possible that a conservative orlibertarian legal foundation would be willing to take the case,

without charge, in order to try to set a precedent againstpublic housing.

The upside of using a lawsuit is that even if the citizens ofGalveston did not prevail; if it delayed matters long enough,that might be sufficient to stop new construction from takingplace. The CDBG funds currently in play must be spent withintwo years or they will be lost. Not a long time in the world ofcivil litigation.

The GHA may argue that new units will make all the differencein the world, and past results will not be repeated. That hasbeen the song and dance about public housing all around thecountry for many years. It wasnt the buildings that caused theexperiment to fail, it was the belief that the government couldtake over the responsibility for peoples lives, and then expect

11


12/12

galveston vows to continue failed policy

Documents