And it always will be
The 2011 demolition of Chicago's disastrous Cabrini–Green public housing project. Image by Joe M500 from WEST LOOP CHICAGO, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Public housing has been an expensive, inhumane failure. Yet, the bitter clingers of the local left seem intent on trying backdoor means to bring it back. City Journal takes a long, historical perspective on the terrible price many cities have paid for implementing a bad idea.
Most policy experts agree these days that big public housing projects are noxious environments for their tenants. What’s less well understood is how noxious such projects are for the cities that surround them. Housing projects radiate dysfunction and social problems outward, damaging local businesses and neighborhood property values. They hurt cities by inhibiting or even preventing these rundown areas from coming back to life by attracting higher-income homesteaders and new business investment. Making matters worse, for decades cities have zoned whole areas to be public housing forever, shutting out in perpetuity the constant recycling of property that helps dynamic cities generate new wealth and opportunity for rich and poor alike.
Public housing spawns neighborhood social problems because it concentrates together welfare-dependent, single-parent families, whose fatherless children disproportionately turn out to be school dropouts, drug users, non-workers, and criminals. These are not, of course, the families public housing originally aimed to serve. But as the U.S. economy boomed after World War II, the lower-middle-class working families for whom the projects had been built discovered that they could afford privately built homes in America’s burgeoning suburbs, and by the 1960s, they had completely abandoned public housing. Left behind were the poorest, most disorganized, non-working families, almost all of them headed by single women. Public housing then became a key component of the vast welfare-support network that gave young women their own income and apartment if they gave birth to illegitimate kids. As the fatherless children of these women grew up and went astray, many projects became lawless places, with gunfire a nightly occurrence and murder commonplace.
The crime and disorder didn’t stay within the confines of the blighted projects, as residents in neighborhoods dominated by public housing know only too well. Joe Petrone, a longtime resident of Philadelphia’s East Falls neighborhood, where his family owns a real-estate business, has watched the whole life cycle of America’s experiment in subsidized housing play out on his doorstep. The now demolished East Falls housing project opened some 40 years ago as housing for working families. “We’d celebrate people ‘graduating’ from the projects,” Petrone recalls of neighbors in those days. “We viewed it as an up and out situation.” But as non-working residents replaced the working ones, explains Petrone, a director of real estate for the city of Philadelphia, kids from the project began menacing the long blocks of privately owned row houses on adjoining Calumet Street and the neighborhood shopping area along Ridge Avenue. “You’d have bricks coming through windows on Calumet Street, thrown from high-rises,” he says. “Ninety percent of the robberies involved a perp who would disappear into the project.”
The disorder exacted a huge toll on the neighborhood’s economic vitality, Petrone says. “It got to the point where you wouldn’t sell a three-story house in the area for more than $600”—a house that had once taken a whole working-class lifetime to own free of debt and that represented a family’s life savings.
Some might dismiss Petrone’s grumbling as the intolerance of a white ethnic for minority newcomers in his once overwhelmingly Italian-American neighborhood. They’d be dead wrong. You’ll hear exactly the same complaints from hardworking minority residents of project-dominated neighborhoods, too. “When you have single parents, you have lots of unsupervised teenagers and lots of drugs and gangs,” observes Laurena Torres, an Italian-Hispanic East Harlem real-estate agent and property owner, whose rental brownstones look out on the Robert Wagner Homes, a spine of projects looming over First Avenue. “It affects your everyday life—you have to avoid the projects just to get to the cleaners, the laundry, or the grocery,” she says. “None of us goes into them, or crosses through them—even at 1 in the afternoon—as a short cut.”
Fear of those who live in housing projects can drive neighbors who can afford it to move—another drain on urban vitality, since these are often the striving, upwardly mobile people who make neighborhoods flourish. Torres remembers a day three years ago when the valued tenants living in one of her apartments—“a professional couple,” she says—moved out, after finding blood splattered on their stoop from a drug dispute that had (quite literally) spilled over from the projects. “They got up that morning,” recalls Torres, “and said, ‘This is enough.’ ” It’s her upwardly mobile minority tenants, says Torres, who complain most about the “undesirable element from the projects.”
Earnest Gates, founder of Chicago’s Near West Side Community Development Corporation, once would have pooh-poohed the worries of Torres’s ambitious minority tenants. During the late 1980s, he tried to transform the Near West Side, a respectable lower-middle-class neighborhood with a substantial number of black homeowners, into an all-black community where all social classes would live side by side. Gates’s experiment in racial social engineering required keeping white gentrifiers out, and he decided to use what he calls “the stigma of public housing” to do it. In exchange for dropping his organization’s opposition to the construction of a new basketball stadium in his neighborhood, Gates won from the city the right to develop some 75 vacant, city-owned lots in the area. Working with the Chicago Housing Authority, he proceeded to mix new, owner-occupied homes with buildings featuring new public housing units.
Gates’s gambit kept out interloping whites, all right; but it also enraged law-abiding minority homeowners, who didn’t much care for their new publicly housed neighbors, some of whom had turned their subsidized residences into crack dens. Gates had hoped that the hardworking poor would move into his subsidized units. Instead, he says ruefully, “We got the bad players.” Today, the middle-aged Gates, whose demeanor remains that of a stern, subtly confrontational sixties black militant, admits that he made a serious mistake. “I have regrets,” he says, “and a lot of the homeowners here are pissed off at me.”
To understand more fully how much damage public housing can inflict on neighborhoods like the Near West Side, consider what can happen when it disappears from a troubled area of a city. After northern Philadelphia’s bleak Richard Allen Homes met with the wrecking ball two years ago, developer Lawrence Rust pounced, putting together a detailed development plan for the derelict area near the demolished project. Soon he was gutting and renovating previously vacant buildings, and selling to yuppie gentrifiers. “I took 15 dumpsters filled with trash out of here,” Rust tells some prospective buyers of a three-story loft he is renovating—a 20-something graphic designer and a singer, both from New York. He’s selling the row house he restored next door for $225,000, on a block where a few years ago houses went for $1,500, and property taxes were negligible.
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