[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 62 (Tuesday, May 7, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E725-E726]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    THE PUBLIC HOUSING THAT SUCCEEDS

                                 ______


                           HON. BARNEY FRANK

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                          Tuesday, May 7, 1996

  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, sometimes I read an article 
so relevant to our work, and so thoughtful and informative, that I 
write a short gloss highlighting its main points and have it printed 
here so our colleagues can benefit from it.
  Occasionally, I come across an article so insightful and compelling 
that it would be presumptuous to summarize or paraphrase it. Nicholas 
Lemann's brilliant rebuttal of Senator Dole's attack on Government 
funded housing is such a piece.
  I ask that it be printed here so that Members can read it before our 
debate and votes on the Housing bill tomorrow.
  [The article follows:]

                    The Public Housing That Succeeds

                          (By Nicholas Lemann)

       Pelham, NY.--One of the endearing things about Senator Bob 
     Dole is that he is so quintessentially the consensus-oriented 
     legislator that his forays into the realm of wedge issues 
     always have a tinny, false feeling, as if he isn't 
     emotionally connected to the words coming out of his own 
     mouth. His statement last week that American public housing 
     ``is one of the last bastions of socialism in the world'' is 
     a good example. It's hard to believe that Mr. Dole was 
     candidly revealing his most deeply held views.
       Still, the idea that public housing has failed and should 
     be abolished is something many Americans believe. High-rise 
     public housing projects such as the notoriously dangerous and 
     bleak Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago are the leading visual 
     symbol of the idea that liberal Government programs, 
     especially antipoverty programs, don't work and may actually 
     cause poverty to increase.
       If public housing were in fact a bankrupt and doomed idea, 
     it would be a very sad end to the oldest and most visible 
     strategy in the struggle against poverty. Jacob Riis' ``How 
     the Other Half Lives,'' published in 1890 and arguably the 
     first American book to propose a plan for improving 
     conditions in urban slums, ended with a call for the 
     construction of ``model tenements.'' If Mr. Dole is right, 
     the whole antipoverty cause would be powerfully undermined.
       The truth, however, is that housing for the poor stands out 
     among antipoverty strategies as the area where the most 
     progress has been made over the past generation and where 
     there is the most cause for optimism. Senator Dole's comments 
     were so completely wrong that they could help bring a halt to 
     genuine progress rather than pull the plug on something 
     unworkable.
       Before the World War II, public housing in America was 
     considered a great success. It ``worked'' in the sense of 
     being clean, safe and, for most residents, a huge improvement 
     over the slums where they had been living. There were long 
     waiting lists for apartments.
       One reason for the projects' good reputation was that their 
     constituency was not the very poor but people with jobs one 
     notch higher on the economic ladder. (Probably the most 
     famous product of the public housing of that era is Elvis 
     Presley.) Most projects wouldn't admit single parents, and 
     many wouldn't admit welfare recipients. Virtually all 
     maintained strict rules about keeping apartments and hallways 
     neat and about who was allowed to be where when. Those who 
     broke the rules or committed crimes were swiftly kicked out.
       Then in the late 1940's, the nation embarked on the course 
     that led to the perception that public housing doesn't work: 
     the construction of enormous high-rise projects. It wasn't 
     just the architecture, or the mere presence of Government 
     subsidies, that caused these places to go so horribly awry. 
     There was also a big change in the tenant population, from 
     carefully screened working people to the very poor. Because 
     of changes in Federal rules, people who got jobs actually had 
     to leave the building, and it became nearly impossible to 
     kick out tenants who were criminals.
       Even so, it's not all public housing that doesn't work. 
     It's just the large-scale, all-

[[Page E726]]

     poor, severely isolated projects that invariably fail. Just a 
     few blocks from the Robert Taylor Homes are pleasant high-
     rise projects for senior citizens.
       ``Imagine, the United States Government owns the housing 
     where an entire class of citizens permanently lives,'' Mr. 
     Dole said, as if this were fantastically improbable. Yet in 
     most industrial countries a much larger portion of the 
     population lives in Government housing. Three percent of 
     Americans live in public housing, as opposed to more than a 
     fifth of the population in Great Britain, Germany, France and 
     the Netherlands. What's unusual about American public housing 
     is that it serves primarily the very poor.
       It is paradoxical that Mr. Dole chose to stage his attack 
     on public housing at a realtors' convention, because the real 
     estate industry, by and large, supported the construction of 
     the worst projects. In the 1950's and 60's; African-American 
     migrants from the South were streaming into the big cities, 
     and part of reason for the building of the projects was to 
     contain them within the existing ghettos so as to avoid 
     residential integration.
       In any case, the mistake of the high-rise, all-poor 
     projects was fairly quickly realized; in 1968, Congress 
     banned the construction of any more them. These projects have 
     no defenders except for unaccountably loyal groups of 
     residents. To set high-rise projects up as being the fruits 
     of a real political position, as some critics of public 
     housing have, is to create a straw man.
       Under Secretary Henry Cisneros, the Department of Housing 
     and Urban Development has begun demolishing about 30,000 of 
     the worst high-rises. The agency is also trying to reinstate 
     policies of giving preferences to people with jobs and 
     swiftly kicking out criminals.
       In his speech to the realtors, Senator Dole called for 
     replacing public housing with a voucher system. But we 
     already have a voucher system, called Section 8, which is 
     perpetually underfinanced (partly because the real estate 
     industry is so effective in lobbying against its expansion) 
     and thus has very long waiting lists. Mr. Dole has repeatedly 
     voted against increasing financing for the program, and he 
     failed to support Mr. Cisneros's proposal last year for a 
     major new housing voucher program.
       There is an alternative to old-style public housing. In the 
     decades since we stopped building new projects, hundreds of 
     thousands of units for the poor have been created by local 
     community development corporations, private groups that have 
     sprung up around the country since the 70's. On the whole, 
     this is housing that works. Those who haven't visited the 
     South Bronx lately would be amazed to see how vastly areas 
     thought of as desolate have been improved by the new and 
     renovated housing that community groups have put up.
       These groups do exactly what Mr. Cisneros is trying to do 
     in public housing: Screen tenants, create a mix of working 
     and very poor people, oust criminals, maintain security 
     forces big enough for residents to feel safe and keep the 
     overall scale of developments manageably small. It's not an 
     exotic, recondite, high-risk formula.
       Often people point to the success of the community 
     development corporations as proving that the private sector 
     can succeed where the Government has failed. The implication 
     is that any involvement by the Government is fatally 
     corrupting. But the community groups are heavily financed by 
     the Government. More than three-quarters receive Federal 
     dollars (Washington gives them more than $300 million each 
     year) and more than half receive state money. The experiments 
     in tenant management pushed strongly by Jack Kemp, Secretary 
     of Housing and Urban Development under President George Bush, 
     were also federally financed.
       It should be kept in mind, too, that the disastrous large-
     scale urban public housing projects were constructed and 
     operated not by Washington but by local housing authorities. 
     In recent years, HUD has begun taking over the management of 
     projects from the most incompetent of the local authorities.
       The view that Federal is always bad and state and local are 
     always good just doesn't apply in public housing. The Federal 
     Government pays for virtually all public housing and 
     contracts with local organizations to run it. The key 
     variables are whether the project's rules are sound and 
     whether the local group in charge is competent.
       The conditions in the worst public housing projects are 
     horrifyingly bad and constitute a real moral crisis. It is 
     outrageous that week after week children continue to lose 
     their lives to the violence of the projects and we don't do 
     anything about it. It doesn't do public housing residents who 
     live in fear and misery any good to be told that what they're 
     going through is attributable to ``socialism'' and therefore 
     can't be helped.

                          ____________________