[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 86 (Thursday, June 19, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1269-E1270]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




    ``WORKING CLASS ETHIC MADE PUBLIC HOUSING PROUD; IT COULD AGAIN

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. RICK LAZIO

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, June 19, 1997

  Mr. LAZIO of New York. Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to read the 
attached op-ed from the June 18, 1997, edition of the USA

[[Page E1270]]

Today. The article asserts that the public housing bill recently passed 
by the House would return a sense of stability and work ethic to 
American communities. In fact, the author argues that to leave the 
current system of public housing intact is ``only to punish the poor in 
the name of protecting them.''
  In anticipation of House consideration of the conference report on 
the House and Senate public housing bills later this year, I commend 
the attached article to Member's attention.

                       [USA Today, June 18, 1997]

     Working-Class Ethic Made Public Housing Proud; It Could Again

                         By Samuel G. Freedman

       On a frigid morning in January 1949, about 500 people lined 
     up, shivering but stoic, to apply for apartments in the first 
     low-income-housing project to be built in New Rochelle, N.Y. 
     War veterans still bunking with relatives, Italian laborers 
     barely recovered from the Depression, blacks working as maids 
     or drivers for the affluent--all had been waiting years for 
     this chance.
       None of them saw residence in the Robert Hartley Houses as 
     anything but a privilege, and a privilege that connoted 
     responsibilities. They had to produce wedding licenses and 
     military-discharge papers; they had to submit to a virtual 
     whiteglove evaluation of their housekeeping skills.
       And for 240 families who passed muster, there was the rule 
     book. The rule book specified the week each tenant was 
     required to sweep the stairwell and the type of pushpin 
     acceptable for hanging pictures. It dictated the fines for a 
     child who walked across the grass. Where the rule book left 
     off, the building superintendents picked up, enforcing an 
     unofficial curfew for teen-agers with 11 p.m. knocks on 
     the door.
       The social compact established in the Hartley Houses and 
     scores of similar developments made public housing one of New 
     Deal liberalism's greatest successes for a time. Hartley was 
     integrated by race and religion and animated by the ethics of 
     hard work and upward mobility. As late as 1964, a single 
     mugging in the complex of five buildings was rare enough to 
     make news.
       Just about that time, however, two devastating changes were 
     taking place. The first generation of Hartley residents, 
     having climbed into the working class, moved out, partly 
     because their incomes exceeded the project's upward limits 
     for tenants. Simultaneously, the wave of litigation that came 
     to be known as the ``rights revolution'' began destroying the 
     honorable bargain between the taxpayers who funded the 
     welfare state and the tenants who enjoyed its benefits.
       Individually, the court cases that undermined public 
     housing seemed reasonable enough. They won the rights of 
     various types of people, from political radicals to single 
     parents to welfare clients, to be permitted into public 
     housing and to stave off eviction from it.
       Collectively, however, these cases taught the managers of 
     public-housing projects--whether run by the federal 
     government or, like the Hartley Houses, by state and local 
     agencies--that screening current or prospective tenants 
     invited costly litigation. The doors of public housing swung 
     open as long as one was poor enough to qualify.
       By the early 1980s, then, the Hartley Houses had gone from 
     a stepladder for the working poor to a sinkhole of the 
     welfare poor, with 85% of the households headed by a 
     single parent and relying on public aid. The local housing 
     authority defaulted on loan payments to the state. An $11 
     million program of repairs had to be halted due to rampant 
     vandalism. Drug use and violent crime grew so brazen that 
     in 1990 the tenants themselves asked the city to declare a 
     state of emergency in the project.
       Sadly, there is nothing new in the saga of the Hartley 
     Houses. It is the story of the Robert Taylor Homes in 
     Chicago, a vast project known locally as ``the world's 
     biggest mistake,'' and of the Flag Houses in Baltimore, which 
     will be razed in 2000. One of its predecessors in demolition, 
     the Columbus Houses in Newark, N.J., had been pronounced by a 
     federal inspector unfit even for animals. And who has lost, 
     after all, in the failure of public housing? In a political 
     sense, liberals have. But day by day, the poor have. They are 
     the ones isolated and beleaguered; they are the ones left to 
     beg for martial law.
       So liberals and Democrats, including President Clinton, 
     should not be so quick to dismiss the public-housing bill 
     recently passed by the House of Representatives and headed 
     for the Senate simply because it is the handiwork of the same 
     conservative Republicans who designed the punitive welfare-
     reform law. The lesson of that law, in fact, is that when 
     liberals refuse to reform failed social programs, they leave 
     correction, by default, to the right.
       The housing bill has its flaws, particularly in its 
     intention to alter the Section 8 program that already 
     succeeds in using market incentives with private landlords to 
     distribute poor tenants throughout metropolitan areas rather 
     than concentrating them in bleak, highrise projects. But in 
     direct ways, the measure would restore public housing to its 
     original ideal of placing the fabric of community above the 
     rights of the individual. Among its provisions, the bill 
     would streamline the eviction of dangerous tenants, refuse 
     housing to those with proven histories of sexual violence or 
     substance abuse, and give housing officials unprecedented 
     access to national criminal records in screening applicants.
       Most importantly of all, moderate-income tenants would be 
     permitted to rent apartments at market rates alongside the 
     poor. In the heyday of public housing, it was working-class 
     families that established the value system of places like the 
     Hartley Houses. Their return can again provide a critical 
     mass of stability and work ethic.
       There is a reason many middle-aged blacks speak almost 
     witfully about the segregated neighborhoods of their 
     childhood. Those neighborhoods, walled in by white racism, 
     contained all the social classes, from the hod carrier to the 
     teacher to the dentist. With fairhousing laws came black 
     flight, transforming ghetto into slum.
       If some of the workers still in the central cities can be 
     enticed by decent rents to live in public housing, then no 
     one will benefit from their presence more than their 
     impoverished neighbors. It is not sufficient to say, as 
     opponents of the housing bill have, that the needlest people 
     stand to lose. There already are huge waiting lists for 
     public housing, and the federal government has gotten out of 
     the business of building low-income projects. To leave the 
     current system intact is only to punish the poor in the name 
     of protecting them.

     

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