Howard Husock joins Stephen Eide to discuss his new book, The Projects: A New History of Public Housing.
Audio Transcript
Stephen Eide: Hello and welcome to 10 Blocks. My name is Stephen Eide. I’m a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor to City Journal and I’ll be hosting today’s episode. My guest is Howard Husock, a senior fellow in domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a long-term contributor to City Journal and the author of two of my personal favorite City Journal articles of all time, “How the Agency Saved My Father,” from the Spring 1999 Issue and “Dreams of My Uncle,” from the Spring 2017 issue. Today, though we are not going to be talking about those articles, but something else Howard wrote, his new book, The Projects: A New History of Public Housing published by NYU Press. Howard, congratulations on your new book and thanks for joining 10 Blocks.
Howard Husock: Thank you so much, Stephen. It’s so good to be with you and thanks for having me.
Stephen Eide: Let’s start with the title. To many Americans, when they hear the term, “the projects,” they may think, well, isn’t that an old debate? It’s a topic we used to spend a lot of time going back and forth, maybe back in the 1980s. We have different concerns now. What is your argument that this theme of public housing still has a major claim on our attention?
Howard Husock: Well, first of all, Stephen, there are still 876,000 public housing units in this country and another 2.7 housing voucher units, and that’s a program that is really a spinoff from public housing, and so the legacy of public housing, simply as a housing policy per se, remains very much with us, but more broadly how public housing happened. As I try to show in the book, a small elite in New York led to the changes, physical changes and policy changes, across the country affecting millions of people. How that happened, that process is very much worth understanding and visiting in detail lest we make similar mistakes.
Stephen Eide: Yes, you spend a lot of time on what you call the intellectual origins of public housing, and when I was reading this section of the book, when you were going through these essayists, journalists, planners laying out their initial vision, I was so struck by just the grandiosity of it, the ambition that is this was not just about how to help poor people with the rent. This was about creating, I think at one point one of them called it a “City of Tomorrow.” Why don’t you walk us through that?
Howard Husock: Yeah, so there was a group of modernists, and so what happened with public housing that reshaped the face of New York among other places, but there are 3,000 public housing authorities across the country. Even small cities in the south were deeply affected by this change. There was a collision, an overlap between a desire to jumpstart the economy and the depression and modernism, a group of intellectuals very much affected by Europeans, especially Le Corbusier, the French architect, French-Swiss architect who wrote a book called The Radiant City. This was the inspiration not just for how to build new housing, but how to remake cities. Le Corbusier envisioned a city without streets that were going to separate industry from commerce, build new projects on campuses. They thought they were going to remake the cities and to some extent they did, and now people live with that legacy in quite isolated communities with no stores, no churches, no mutual aid societies. So grandiose it was indeed
Stephen Eide: So why didn’t it work?
Howard Husock: Why didn’t, it did work for a little while. I’m not making a kind of an entirely polemic. This is a history, not a polemic. At a time, right after World War II when there were very few housing options, production had been stalled, suddenly the government threw up these gleaming new apartment buildings where you could live here, low rent. Those were actual posters that the government published, and when they were gleaming and new, there was a vetting of families in New York City. You had to be a married couple that was working to get in for maybe 10, 15 years. They worked pretty well, but it turned out the idea that housing per se would be a kind of a public utility, non-capitalist. Louis Mumford, the social critic, argued that housing would never work as long as there was capitalism. Literally, he said that. They ignored the fact that Americans really didn’t want that kind of apartment living. They wanted to have small homes in the suburbs, and as soon as those were put on offer in places like Levittown on Long Island, 17,000 tiny 750-square-foot homes, people flocked to that alternative, and public housing over time became a hollowed out shelter for the very poor. That was not the original vision. People think that. It was not true. The advocates, the visionaries believed that public housing would serve the working class broadly, and at first it did until it didn’t.
Stephen Eide: It seems to me that your book is partly a book about capital-P Progressivism. What is a progressive vision for government, and I wonder if you could connect what you’re saying about these visionaries with a current debate we have about just ineffective governance in America. I know a lot of people who have a kind of admiration for the kind of mid-century American ability to get things done, economy, medical progress, certainly infrastructure. One of these housers that you touch on is Robert Moses, who is somebody who had a bad reputation for a long time after the publication of The Power Broker, but in recent years has seen a kind of revival of his reputation as people thinking that, well, gosh, we have so much trouble getting anything done. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get some of that back in the 21st century? And I just wonder if you have any thoughts about how could we get back some of that just capacity, that ability of American governance that we once had while also avoiding some of the more hubristic elements, the social engineering elements that you spend so much time analyzing in your book?
Howard Husock: Yeah, that’s a deep question, and just to preface my answer, Robert Moses was very much involved in the public housing movement and it was a progressive vision. It was palaces for the people. Moses at his height as the slum clearance commissioner of New York was on par, on pace to demolish 60 buildings a month, so that was doing a lot fast, there’s no doubt about it. And it was hubristic because they didn’t really ask what people wanted. Nobody went to the so-called slums. My book is, if anything, a defense of slums in their complexity. Nobody said, would you like to move to the outskirts of town and live in the high-rise where there are no stores? Nobody asked that. And so that we then swung totally in the other direction where we asked everybody about everything with environmental impact and community involvement to the point that we’ve become paralyzed. And so there’s got to be a middle ground on that. We certainly haven’t found it. It may be however that it’s hubristic to think that certain systems must be run by government. Healthcare, should it be a government directed entity? Well, if you believe housing should be a government utility, then maybe you do believe that healthcare can be effectively run as a government utility, but maybe that’s an overreach, and so it may be that we’re having trouble getting things done because we’re overreaching and not relying on what can be better be done by the private sector.
Stephen Eide: I want to ask you about Chicago. I think that Chicago’s public housing projects had unique notoriety. Cabrini-Green was at one time just a nationally known byword for social dysfunction, somewhat like the South Bronx once was. The story I once heard about how public housing in Chicago got to be what it became was you had a large population of great migrators coming up from the south. I think it was something like 10 to 12,000 coming up from Mississippi, Arkansas per month, a huge population. Mayor Daley said, okay, welcome to Chicago. We have always been a city of ethnic neighborhoods. The polls live over here, the Irish live over here. You guys are welcome to be here, but you have to be in your own neighborhood. And public housing was kind of slotted into that vision, and that’s how things got going initially. Is that wrong? Is that simplistic? What’s your account of how things in Chicago just got so bad?
Howard Husock: The ethnic neighborhoods of Chicago included black neighborhoods prior to public housing. Bronzeville is a famous black neighborhood. Many of these black neighborhoods were demolished for public housing. They were regarded, I think by progressives as irredeemably physically bad, but they had a lot going for them too. Social institutions, not just churches, but churches, mutual aid societies. The Urban League was founded in order to help those southern migrants you talked about adjust to city life. Black people were fending for themselves in good ways, and it was the progressives who decided that their neighborhoods needed to go. They needed to demolished. There was even pushback in Chicago from black leaders saying, wait a minute, why are our neighborhoods being demolished? But once the decision was made to go for public housing, big projects were named for black people as if they were always going to be black per segregation. Ida B. Wells a main famous housing project. She was a famous black journalist, anti-lynching crusader, Robert Taylor, the Robert Taylor homes, iconic, dysfunctional, high rise on the lake. He was the head of the NAACP in Chicago.
Visionaries, if you want to call them that, of the Chicago Housing Authority. They didn’t want to have racially segregated neighborhoods Contra Daily. They wanted scattered-site public housing, and they created a firestorm. So they did two things. One, they demolished black neighborhoods in which there were not just jazz clubs and mutual aid societies. There was a relatively high degree of owner-occupancy and what I call owner presence, owners owning two-flats, which are very ubiquitous in Chicago. And so there was a functioning private sector in housing the reformers said had to go, had to be demolished, and then they bought into the modernist vision. So you had this, your question about how did Chicago get so notorious? Segregation happened because Daley didn’t want scattered-site housing. He wanted to keep blacks on the South Side, and then it got married to the modernist vision of high rises on the lake, and this was a highly deleterious combination.
Stephen Eide: Your book goes into the shift from the high rise style to different types of subsidized housing, especially vouchers. My feeling, and your book also talks a lot about I guess what we would call the pathologies of government housing programs, the social problems that develop. That’s often when American government gets into subsidized housing. My feeling is that there is broader public understanding of the pathologies of subsidized housing back when the debate was focused on the high rises. I think that there’s just less of a sense of what the social downsides of vouchers may be. So in a sense, do you think that in some ways this was like a public relations triumph, the move away from the high-rise projects to other forms of subsidized housing?
Howard Husock: Yes, I agree with that. By the way, it was Richard Nixon coming up on the anniversary of September 19th of Richard Nixon’s moratorium on new public housing construction, and it was Nixon who started the housing voucher program very much now embraced by left liberal Democrats kind of taken for granted by Republicans. Barbara Mikulski was a progressive Democrat from Baltimore, but she saw the dangers of housing vouchers. She called them horizontal ghettos, not vertical ghettos, and they have caused a concentration of poverty in places where the voucher is valuable enough to rent in the private market. That’s how vouchers work. You rent a private apartment and the government pays 70 percent of the rent. And we see on the south suburbs of Chicago, there’s been a migration, an exodus from what used to be the projects into lower middle neighborhoods, many of them African-American where there’s tension between the voucher holders and the lower-middle-class homeowners.
But yes, it’s kind of gone under the radar now that vouchers create concentrations of poverty. They bring with them social problems on their own, but they’re not as visible. They also don’t serve that many people. You’re talking about 2.7 million households. It’s important to note, and I note this in the book, and I note this in new research that I’m doing, that this is a new form of dependency. First of all, almost 50 percent of voucher holders are African-American way disproportionate, and the typical voucher holder stays, 89 percent stay for at least five years, 65 percent for at least 10 years. So we’ve created a deleterious form of dependency where you don’t have an incentive to move up and out. The more money you earn, the more you pay in rent. So we’ve created a new system of dependency, but you’re right, it’s not really on the radar.
Stephen Eide: Now let’s get into a couple of the alternatives to public housing that you like. I want to talk about landlording. It used to be the case that being a landlord was part of the natural process of upward mobility in America, that the earlier arrivals provided housing to the later arrivals, and this was seen as a natural and good process. How did we get away from that? How did we lose that? We now have a very large population of migrants, many of whom are trying to move up the ladder, and yet landlording seems to be increasingly stigmatized. Every new law seems to stigmatize landlording more. I guess the idea is that no, those new arrivals somehow need to find them, whether they’re low-income, working class, they need to find some way into a subsidized housing program, not be receiving their housing from some sort of landlord. What happens to upward mobility in the 21st century? What happens to wealth creation if landlords continue to have such a bad reputation?
Howard Husock: It’s a big problem. I think it’s especially pronounced in New York City. Landlord-tenant laws swing wildly against landlords, very hard to evict somebody for nonpayment. Rents levels are price controlled, so New York is an extreme example of anti-landlord bias, but we stopped building and public housing and something to do with this. We stopped building the naturally occurring affordable housing. That’s a phrase I like to use. Naturally occurring affordable housing, which were row houses, two-flats in Chicago, three family homes in New England. Those were crowded out by public housing. It’s not just that public housing was creating a mecca for dysfunction on its own. It was competing with private housing. It was offering a story that landlords were going to be exploitative. Public housing projects were literally offering new apartments at cheap rent. Subsidized housing does the same thing today. It competes with private landlords. Failing to understand not is small building ownership a form of wealth creation, and by the way, all the black owner-occupants whose neighborhoods were torn down and were steered into public housing, the only owner in public housing is the government. Nobody creates wealth that way. Not only that, but it’s a failure to understand there’s social capital involved in small landlording. The landlord lives on one floor, the tenants live on another floor. Well, the landlord has a powerful incentive to maintain the premises lest that tenant vote with his feet and leave, and the tenants have a very strong incentive to be on good behavior lest they be evicted. The anti-landlord bias, the idea that landlords are per se exploitative robs us of that social cohesion. And so it’s a problem and we really need to change our psychology on that.
Stephen Eide: And I also want to ask about lodgers, the old lodger economy or as you might sharing housing, what would it mean to bring back something of the lodger economy? Is this a question of policy or is it a question of culture? I mean, a couple thoughts I had, and I just want to hear your reaction to them is first of all, we’re very, very diverse and probably it’s easier I would assume to do lodging on an in-group basis versus dealing with different groups. We’re, I would say, much more protective of children now than a century ago. On the other hand, we have a declining population and we have or will have soon lots more over housed people than we had three, four decades ago. So how could we use some sort of lodging economy revival to deal with what people refer to as the affordability crisis?
Howard Husock: The progressives, including those who were part of the public housing movement, talked about this as the “lodger evil,” and they were very much focused on the moral question of having unrelated men living in tenements and sharing bathrooms and that kind of thing. But people were able to afford their premises by taking in lodgers. My father grew up in a row house in Philadelphia, and he talked about Martin, the local ward heeler who would be there at the dinner table, and he got exposed to politics that way. So there’s an upside to this. I’m kind of tolerant of Airbnb as a recreation of lodgerdom, and there’s been a pushback against that as well. Now, if people are making loud noise at a party, and that’s a nuisance, but taking in Airbnb short-term tenants is a way that people can afford housing and make the most of their empty bedrooms. Thirty percent of the residents in the vast 177,000 New York City public housing system are over housed. Many of them are elderly women whose children have moved up and out and have empty bedrooms and they’re knocking around in one bedroom of three. They might need help carrying the groceries. Of course, lodgerdom is banned in public housing. Unrelated persons laws also, in terms of your question about do laws need to change, yes, many communities have laws against unrelated persons, people, not by blood and consanguinity as I think are some of the terms of art, and so some of those laws would have to be changed to bring back lodgerdom. Lodging was a big form of income, certainly in the depression and could be again.
Stephen Eide: We are almost at time, but I want to conclude with one last question, which is what do you do with a problem like NYCHA?
Howard Husock: NYCHA of course, is the New York City Housing Authority. It’s a large percentage of all the public housing units in the country, 177,000 of 876,000 total. I’m pretty sure those are the numbers. So you’re talking 20 percent of all the public housing in the country off the top of the head math. I think we have to have a very creative approach, much more creative. The approach NYCHA is taking is bringing in private money to manage and rehabilitate and manage through what’s they call the Permanent Affordability Commitment Together program. It’s a version of the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program, which is a federal program where property managers, developers borrow against voucher housing. It’s wonky and complex. Suffice to say, you bring in private money to fix it up and then manage it. I think that’s likely to create a situation where you cut the ribbon and it looks good when you cut the ribbon, but it may not be well maintained over time because you still have very poor people whose rents don’t cover the expenses. That became the fundamental problem of public housing. As the population changed, the rents didn’t cover the expenses and everything went downhill.
I think when you’ve got 30 percent over-housing, you ought to break those apartments up into smaller units. You can create large amounts of new units simply by subdividing. I’d like to see whole floors converted into kind of quasi-dormitories, single room occupancies where kitchens and baths were shared by people who are now street homeless. I don’t know if that’s the perfect idea, but I want a lot of out-of-the-box thinking. I think it may be possible to offer people who have been long-term residents, we’ll give you $10,000 for every year you’ve lived in NYCHA, and you could move out and we’ll rent your apartment to somebody else to deal with the over-housing problem. Maybe some buildings are so valuable and they are on the Brooklyn Waterfront, on the Manhattan Waterfront that we should try to relocate tenants, sell those buildings for really large, for billions and use the proceeds to fix up the rest. And so what do you do for NYCHA? You’ve got to think much, much more creatively about how to approach it. Over time I think the city should aspire to get out of the housing business, but that really makes me a housing heretic. I realize that.
Stephen Eide: Okay, so the book again is The Projects: A New History of Public Housing. It’s out already, right?
Howard Husock: It is. September 9th.
Stephen Eide: Okay. Howard Husock, thanks again for joining 10 Blocks. I’m Stephen Eide.
Howard Husock: Thank you so much.
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