1

THE QUIET SUCCESSES AND LOUD FAILURES OF PUBLIC HOUSING

Even as the image of public housing steadily deteriorates and its few remaining supporters speak in softer tones, tenants keep clamoring to get in…. We have, in short, a paradox: Nobody likes public housing except the people who live there and those who want to get in.

—Alvin Rabushka and William Weissert, Caseworkers or Police? How Tenants See Public Housing

The story of American public housing is one of quiet successes drowned out by loud failures. Fundamentally shaped by two bruising legislative battles, the program that emerged was importantly compromised in ways that significantly constrained its implementation. The program was limited to serving very low income households, channeled into the nation’s most difficult urban neighborhoods, and forced to conform to rigid cost and financial controls. In some places the program was plagued by mismanagement and neglect. Despite these conditions, public housing has, for the most part and in most places, provided and continues to provide functional, decent, and affordable housing for very low income households. Waiting lists for public housing are long wherever it exists, filled with families who are ill-served by the private market. Studies find that the residents of public housing value it highly, and that they have built communities of mutual support that are important in helping them meet daily needs. Even in projects wracked by crime and overwhelmed by deteriorating physical conditions, residents have built communities and relationships that they value. Where public housing has not worked, the failures often have been spectacular and have generated horrific stories of substandard conditions and community dysfunction. Since the 1970s, reports of unlivable conditions in the worst projects have become the most common type of news report about public housing; during the 1990s such reports helped generate visions of a more generalized urban dystopia.1

Origins

Public housing in the United States has its origins in two separate reform movements active in the early decades of the twentieth century. The Progressive movement’s concerns with urban slum eradication identified publicly owned and operated housing as a means of improving living conditions for poor families. The focus of this movement was the debilitating and dangerous conditions in America’s most disadvantaged slums. The environment there was seen as detrimental to the poor and especially to children forced to grow up amid the squalor and disease of the slum, but also to adults whose morals, health, and initiative were all thought to be in peril due to the poor living conditions they were forced to suffer. In particular, slum reformers pointed to heavy overcrowding, the lack of proper sanitation, poor ventilation, and the lack of natural light, as elements of the foul environment forced upon low-income families.2

As a result, the efforts of slum clearance advocates focused on upgrading the physical environment of ghetto neighborhoods. This approach reflected a strong sense of environmental determinism—that the physical conditions within which people live have great influence over their behavior and life chances. The nation’s first housing codes, established in large cities in the first decade of the twentieth century, were the earliest attempts to regulate the private housing market to improve conditions in the urban slums. Support within the slum clearance movement for government-run housing that reflected more enlightened urban design was a logical extension of these efforts. These reformers felt that direct government intervention in the form of publicly funded and operated housing was the only viable long-term strategy for dealing with the failures of the private market in slum neighborhoods. Public housing for those in the Progressive movement was therefore meant to both eliminate the adverse conditions of the slum and to provide much-needed affordable and decent housing for the neediest.

Operating at the same time was a group of housing reformers advocating for government-operated housing from a different perspective. As embodied in the work and words of Catherine Bauer, this vision of public housing, which came to be known as the Modern Housing movement, followed a European idea that supported a nonmarket sector of housing to provide decent and stable accommodations for the working class. There were important differences between this model and the one espoused by the Progressives. The modern housing movement saw housing more as a public utility than as a social service initiative. The housing reformers wished to target the needs of the working class and build a European-style system of government housing for workers that involved a range of union-based organizations, cooperatives, and nonprofit housing associations as well as local governmental agencies. Affordable housing would be established and run as a type of public utility permanently outside of the profit framework of the private market.3 The vision of the housing reformers was therefore broader than that of the Progressives: it was not tied to slum clearance, nor was it to be targeted to the neediest.

At the federal level, public housing began during World War I as an emergency response to wartime needs. The construction of these units, however, was not a blanket commitment to a public housing program as Congress ordered that the units be sold after the war ended.4 Nevertheless, the precedent of federal government involvement in housing production had been established. A tax incentive for developers to build low-cost housing was attempted during the 1920s, but very little activity was generated because investors had more lucrative options.5 The work of the reformers, however, began to show up in small-scale experimental efforts in the 1930s. Shortly after FDR’s election, the Emergency Relief and Reconstruction Act of 1932 authorized the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to make loans to limited-dividend partnerships for the construction of housing for low-income families. One year later the program was shifted to the Public Works Administration (PWA) in the Interior Department. Because of the lack of private sector interest, the program changed in 1934 to one in which the federal government itself built the housing.

The projects created in this early phase of public housing stand apart from most of the housing developed in later years.6 Early projects were much more likely to be solidly built and well designed. Indeed, as the years wore on, the projects built in the first ten years of the public housing program tended to stand out among the stock of public housing in the cities where such projects existed. In New Orleans, for example, the Iberville and Lafitte projects consisted of three-story red-brick blocks with “detailed brickwork, tile roofs and wrought-iron balustrades representing a level of craft more likely found on an Ivy League campus” than in a government-sponsored public works development.7 In Atlanta’s Techwood Homes, the very first public housing project completed in the country, each doorway had a canopy, and the buildings were solid and trimmed in stone. The campus design of early projects was intentionally open, providing common spaces, landscaping, and play areas for children, and replacing dark, crowded slums with open and airy conditions, the light symbolizing the moral uplift provided by the place.8 Outhwaite Homes in Cleveland, built in 1935, was similarly built of solid material and in an art deco architectural style.9

At its inception, local officials hailed public housing as the answer to the problems of urban slums and the residents themselves called it “paradise.”10 Public housing was modern housing in place of dilapidated slum dwellings, modern brick-built apartment buildings to replace ramshackle wooden shacks that dotted American slums at the time. To city officials, the opening of a new public housing project was an opportunity to speak of “ ‘an expensive and beautiful village’ that would ‘take boys and girls off the streets into playgrounds.’ ”11

The PWA program generated fifty-eight developments nationwide, producing about twenty-five thousand units of housing. This effort was squelched by the U.S. District Court decision in United States v. Certain Lands in the City of Louisville in 1935, which held that the federal government could not use the power of eminent domain for slum clearance.12 Rather than appeal the decision, the PWA and the Roosevelt administration encouraged state governments to enact enabling legislation so that the states could engage in slum clearance and public housing construction. Advocates pressed on in the effort to establish a large-scale federal program that would operate through state-chartered agencies.

Legislative Battles

Initial legislative efforts in 1935 and 1936 failed. The Progressive reformers and the modern housing advocates backed competing bills, both the Interior Department and the Commerce Department opposed the efforts, and FDR himself was insufficiently interested in passing housing legislation. But the press of economic conditions and the enormous potential for creating employment in the building trades through a program of public housing changed the political prospects of public housing. Roosevelt’s New Deal was largely predicated on the idea that public works could be used as a means of generating jobs and reviving industrial output, and with his other New Deal initiatives struggling in an increasingly hostile Congress, Roosevelt put his full support behind public housing legislation in 1937. Senator Robert F. Wagner (D-NY), the program’s legislative sponsor that year, sold it as the “next step in the country’s economic recovery,” another New Deal public works program whose primary benefit would be the employment that it generated.13

Congressional supporters were able to attract more votes for a public housing initiative that was simultaneously a program of slum clearance. Congressional defenders made frequent mention of the program’s importance in correcting the unsafe and unsanitary living conditions in the nation’s poorest urban neighborhoods. 14 The housing itself was seen as an antidote to the crime, disease, and unwholesome living of America’s urban slums. This orientation, however, meant that most public housing would be constructed in the declining parts of American cities.

In addition to the slum-clearance orientation, the 1937 legislation incorporated additional features that were important in shaping the ultimate course of the program. Limits were placed on construction costs and on the incomes of tenants, and PHAs were required to enter into a cooperation agreement with local governments before building and operating any housing.15 Congress also incorporated an “equivalent elimination” clause into the 1937 legislation that mandated that one unit of substandard housing be taken down for every unit of public housing built. Equivalent elimination ensured that the bulk of public housing projects would be located in previous slum areas and be part of clearance efforts. It also was meant to ensure that public housing would not become a competitor to private market provision of housing, but would rather be only a supplement in locations where the market would not function. The noncompete aspect of the program was critically important to the backers of the bill.16 According to Senator Wagner, “the most important consideration is, that public housing projects should not be brought into competition with private industry…. To reach those who are really entitled to public assistance, and to get into the field where private enterprise cannot operate, is the objective of this bill.”17

The reauthorization of the program in 1949 proved more difficult politically than the initial passage of the program twelve years earlier. By 1949 even the elements of the program that were aimed at ameliorating opposition, the noncompete orientation and the cost and income limits, were insufficient to avoid a full-on assault by the real estate industry. Virtually every private construction and real estate trade association voiced strong opposition to public housing during the legislative battles of the ’40s. The National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), the U.S. Savings and Loan League, the National Apartment Owners Association, and numerous real estate groups, builders, suppliers, and property owners associations throughout the country vehemently fought the program. Though their opposition was not new (they had unsuccessfully fought the 1937 legislation), their heated rhetoric and use of cold war images was. Opposition to communism, which in postwar America had much greater purchase than it had had during the Depression, was enlisted as a strategy to fight public housing. The government production and ownership of housing embedded in the public housing model was, according to critics, the first step toward a socialist economy. Representative George A. Dondero of Michigan called it “the first fatal step toward national socialism…and the first real imitation of the Russian ideology of government [to] have gained a foothold on the shores of freedom.”18 The charge of socialism was to stick with the program for many years. Senator Harry Byrd (D-VA) “complained of the ‘stench of gross inefficiency and Russian communism’ which hovered over the projects.”19 In 1952 Congress even required public housing tenants to take an oath of loyalty before taking up residence, fearing that the socialist nature of public housing would make it a natural place for the emergence of Communist Party cells.

The real estate lobby went beyond ideological strategies to invoke the specter of high taxes and racial integration. It paid for advertisements and billboards that read: “Can you afford to pay somebody else’s rent?”20 In the South the lobby appealed to fears that public housing might end residential segregation. “Public housing means the end of racial segregation in Savannah!” screamed the headline of one billboard.21 The extreme tactics of the opponents set the tone for congressional debate. The floor fight over public housing in the House of Representatives was long and bitter, and even punctuated by a fistfight.22 About the opposition to public housing that was mounted during the legislative fights of the later 1940s, President Harry S. Truman remarked, “I do not recall ever having witnessed a more deliberate campaign of misrepresentation and distortion.”23

Though opponents were strong and active, anticommunist hysteria had not yet peaked in the United States in the mid to late 1940s. With Truman’s upset victory in 1948 and a huge ninety-two-seat majority for Democrats in the House and a twelve-seat majority in the Senate, proponents were able to get the program through Congress in 1949, but only after it had been made part of a larger program of urban renewal. Though slum clearance always had been an important part of public housing, the 1949 Housing Act reversed the formula and made public housing one element of a much larger and comprehensive strategy of urban clearance and renewal. Housing advocates accepted this arrangement, feeling that tying the program to the urban renewal program would gain greater acceptance for their program.24 Congressional votes on the bill in 1949 show that support for public housing alone was quite slim. A final motion in the House of Representatives to delete public housing from the urban renewal legislation was defeated by a mere five votes.25

Operating within Constraints

The public housing program that emerged from these legislative battles thus took on a particular look, one calculated to appease critics as much as accomplish the goals of its supporters.26 The charge of public housing—to provide decent, safe, and affordable housing to very low income families in the context of urban decline—is under any circumstances a difficult one. The specific features forced upon it by its opponents have had the effect of making the job even more difficult.

Decentralized Authority and Implementation

Although the funding for the program came from the federal government, it placed authority for program implementation squarely at the local level. Localities were to create public housing authorities (PHAs) for the purpose of receiving federal subsidies to construct and operate public housing. The choice of whether to participate in the program was a local one, as was the decision about where to locate public housing once a PHA was up and running. This feature of the program created one of the ironies of public housing—that it was more effectively fought by its opponents after its passage than before. In addition to pressuring Congress to limit construction authorizations, the real estate lobby relied on its strong network of local chapters to take up the fight against public housing. In 1950, shortly after the 1949 reauthorization of public housing, Calvin Snyder of NAREB said that “the fight has just begun. The authorization of the gigantic multibillion dollar program has been issued by Congress. The completion of the program is another thing.”27 In order for the public housing program to be implemented state laws had to be amended to allow for such activity and local governments had to make formal requests to establish PHAs. In addition, cooperation agreements were required between the PHAs and local governments.

In California, Texas, and elsewhere, opponents passed laws at the state level requiring public referenda before local governments could participate in public housing. Even where referenda were not required, opponents were able to raise the issue in such a way as to force public decisions on whether or not a city would participate in the program. In many cities, political careers were created or came to an end over the issue of public housing. Local real estate interests in Los Angeles, led by the Los Angeles Times, responded to the prospect of public housing in that city with a strong campaign against the local PHA, including accusations of communism aimed at the staff. With a Times reporter in the city council chambers giving thumbs-up or thumbs-down signals to council members regarding the way they should vote, the council reversed its initial support of public housing. The Times ran an opposition candidate for mayor in 1953 who defeated the incumbent and succeeded in reducing the public housing commitment by half.28 More than forty municipalities nationwide voted against the program by 1952, while twenty others endorsed the program. Most of the defeats came in smaller cities.29

Few suburban communities were interested in public housing at all. PHAs were typically chartered at the municipal scale and thus had authorization to build only in the central city. Other PHAs that were incorporated at the county level nevertheless focused their work in (and sometimes limited it to) the inner city. As a result, public housing has been concentrated in central cities, with few suburban areas building significant amounts. When policies to encourage elderly residents emerged during the 1950s and 1960s, the spatial concentration of public housing in inner cities was reduced. Suburban and nonmetropolitan jurisdictions proved to be much more receptive to elderly residents than to low-income families.

Local Control over Siting

Local implementation meant control over where public housing projects were built. Specifically, city councils and mayors had influence over the siting of public housing projects as each project required a “cooperation agreement” between the PHA and the local council. In many cities, including Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., city councils quickly took control of the siting process, and inserted local political concerns directly into the process of determining where public housing projects would be placed.30 This led to a distinct pattern of spatial segregation of projects, and further isolated public housing units from the mainstream market, and public housing residents from the rest of the community. Within central cities public housing tended to be placed in poorer, more rundown neighborhoods, and neighborhoods with high concentrations of minority households.31 Part of this had to do with congressional directives that public housing be tied to urban renewal. But a good deal of the spatial pattern of public housing was the result of the desire of local leaders to concentrate it in poor and minority neighborhoods, or on otherwise unwanted parcels.32 Public housing projects were often located in otherwise unattractive locations. The Dallas Housing Authority, for example, located a public housing project across the street and downwind from a lead smelting plant. The plant spewed as much as 269 tons of lead dust into the air annually during periods of peak production and directly into the apartments and play areas of public housing residents for twenty-five years.33

When white and middle-class communities resisted the placement of public housing in their midst, local elected officials steered the projects into black slums.34 There is evidence that the siting options available to PHAs would probably have been limited even without the direct involvement of city councils in siting decisions. In Chicago, white backlash in the form of mobs and riots erupted after the CHA opened public housing adjacent to a white neighborhood. The event significantly altered the agency’s subsequent location strategies.35 Philadelphia and Detroit also saw significant and violent response among whites to the prospect of their communities playing host to public housing.36

Two other factors contributed to the marked tendency for PHAs to place public housing in black slums. First, the alternative—building public housing on vacant land—was seen by some as direct competition with private real estate developers. The thinking was that PHAs should restrict their efforts to neighborhoods (such as the black slums) in which private developers would not operate.37 Second, there was an objectively large need for more and better housing in the black communities of American cities. So concentrating public housing in those communities not only avoided the visceral response of white constituents, but it could also be said to be addressing one of the central needs of the black community. Under these circumstances, “housing officials took the safest and quickest road—providing more black housing opportunities in black neighborhoods.”38

By the 1980s, the cumulative impact of the slum clearance objectives of public housing, local discretion over whether or not to participate in the program, and local siting authority was a pattern of pronounced spatial concentration of public housing units within central cities of metropolitan areas, and in high-poverty, racially segregated neighborhoods within those central cities.

Cost-Containment and the Fiscal Model for Public Housing

From the outset, the public housing program was constrained by significant pressures to limit costs. The 1937 bill contained an absolute limit on construction costs of $5,000 per unit through an amendment to the original legislation by Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia. For his part, Byrd saw the cost limits as a means of restraining government spending. Though some of the earliest public housing developments were able to achieve distinctive and pleasant architectural and design outcomes, for the most part cost containment led to shortcuts, the use of inferior materials, and regrettable design decisions. This was especially the case when federal officials at the U.S. Housing Authority (USHA, the federal agency in charge of the program) decided to pressure local authorities to reduce costs even beyond the niggardly federal guidelines in a misguided attempt to demonstrate to program opponents that public housing could be cost-efficient.39 The imposition of these cost limits ensured that while public housing might initially be better than the slum conditions it replaced, it “would never grace the landscape and bring pleasure to the eye.”40

Indeed, supporters felt that the cost-containment elements of the program essentially guaranteed a poor physical standard for public housing. Almost immediately, public housing was criticized for its “unnecessarily barracks-like and monotonous” look.41 Internally, the units bore the marks of countless cost compromises; elevators stopped on every other floor, closets were built without doors, apartments had cement floors and cinder-block walls. Many of these design “innovations” were recommended by the federal oversight agency as means of keeping costs down. The USHA advocated for placing public housing on “superblocks” that interrupted the local street grid and set the projects apart from their surrounding communities. This was seen as both a positive design objective (so as to keep the public housing separate from the slum that surrounded it) and as a means of keeping costs down.42 Ultimately, PHAs turned to high-rise construction as the most cost-effective approach; in some cases it was the only way to build significant amounts of public housing within the cost guidelines imposed by USHA. The modernist design approach was “trimmed to minimalist designs under the pressures of density and cost considerations, resulting in a readily identifiable ‘government housing’ aesthetic.”43 The result was often high-rises that were particularly sterile and unwelcoming. Even public housing advocate Catherine Bauer called them “gray fortresses that loomed menacingly over the cityscape.”44

Cost-containment pressures extended to the fiscal model that was adopted by Congress for the public housing program. Initially, the federal government subsidy was in the form of construction capital to build the developments. The capital debt was retired through annual contributions from the federal government to the PHA. This method of financing in effect extended federal government control over local projects. Through the annual contribution contracts (ACC), the USHA and later HUD exerted influence in the design and operation of public housing. One local public housing administrator said that despite the nominally decentralized nature of public housing, “running a local housing authority was akin to being an East German business manager” dealing with a highly centralized, top-down system of authority and administration.45

The shortcuts taken during construction and design to minimize upfront costs had the ultimate effect of contributing to higher operating costs down the road. The shortcuts in materials and design led to more rapid decline of the structures. The poor site design and lack of defensible space increased security and maintenance problems at the buildings.46 The impersonal architecture and the large number of children in the projects sometimes led to accelerated wear and tear. Residents who cared about the maintenance of common spaces often organized themselves but could not keep up with the deterioration of those spaces.

The projects themselves were required to cover operating expenses out of rent collections. Cash reserves for public housing buildings were limited and until 1968 there was no allowance for capital replacement reserves, which meant it was extremely difficult for PHAs to replace building systems that had aged and deteriorated. Because public housing, as government-owned property, was exempt from local property taxes, PHAs were required to pay a fee in-lieu of taxes to local governments equal to 10 percent of project income. Cash surpluses beyond the allowable limits for reserves were paid back to the federal government to offset the annual contributions and pay down the capital debt.

Even given the inadequacies of the program’s design, local PHAs were able to operate the program successfully for the first twenty-five years. But inflation and inner-city demographic changes combined to transform public housing from a way station for the temporarily poor into more permanent accommodations for low-income families. Without operating subsidies for the first twenty-five years of the program many PHAs found themselves in serious fiscal straits by the 1960s. When operating subsidies from the federal government were first introduced ($10 monthly for elderly residents in 1961 and then for all residents in 1964), these were made available only to PHAs with low reserves, in effect punishing the more efficient operations. Rising costs led PHAs to increase rents. As inflation drove construction and maintenance costs higher, Congress and the PHAs were adopting tenant selection guidelines that resulted in an ever-more impoverished resident base. By the end of the 1960s, operating costs and in-lieu tax payments were greater than revenues for many PHAs.47 The squeeze on public housing residents became so extreme that in some projects residents were paying in excess of 60 percent of their income on rent. An Urban Institute study in twenty-three major cities found that 80 percent of the cost increases between 1965 and 1968 were due to price inflation.48 With trend lines in costs and revenues moving in opposite directions, PHAs across the nation approached fiscal crisis. By 1968, one half of the largest PHAs in the nation had a deficit.49

A well-publicized rent strike by public housing residents in St. Louis brought the issue to a head. Congress responded with the Brooke Amendment, which limited public housing rents to 25 percent of tenants’ incomes. This immediately eliminated the rent burden of public housing residents but just as quickly shifted the financial crisis onto the PHAs by severely restricting income. Congress attempted to make up for the revenue crisis they had initiated by providing operating subsidies to PHAs, but that legislation did not pass until 1970 and regular payments to PHAs did not arrive until 1972.50 In the interim PHAs sank into further financial crisis.

There was awareness at the time that the cost constraints imposed on the program were warping the results. The stultifying architecture and site design, forced by cost considerations that overrode all others, was remarked upon at the time. Some strong proponents of public housing, including Catherine Bauer and other original supporters of the program, were openly disillusioned as early as 1957. Officials who built public housing high-rises, with some exceptions, understood they were misguided but kept building them.51 The planners did not feel good about high-rises, and the residents knew firsthand the difficulties of high-rise living. “We live stacked on top of one another with no elbow room,” said one resident quoted by a Chicago newspaper, “danger is all around. There’s little privacy or peace and no quiet. And the world looks on all of us as project rats, living on a reservation like untouchables.”52 Residents rejected the Pruitt-Igoe high-rises in St. Louis almost from the beginning, pushing vacancy rates above acceptable levels after only a couple of years of operation. The project was 16 percent vacant before five years had elapsed, and two-thirds empty before it was fifteen years old. The sense that cost-containment considerations were leading to suboptimal outcomes was palpable in some places. Bradford Hunt describes the history of Chicago public housing as a slow-moving train wreck in which all participants could see the impending crash, but no one could or would do anything to prevent it.53

Tenant Selection

Tenant selection was always a contentious issue for public housing advocates and administrators. Tension existed from the very beginning with slum reformers favoring an approach that reserved public housing for the neediest and avoided competition with the private sector in all cases. Their model of public housing was to be reserved for physical locations the private sector would not venture into and for socioeconomic groups the market would not serve. The Modern Housing advocates on the other hand favored an approach that targeted the working class more broadly. With the adoption of the slum clearance model advocated by the Progressives, the controversy was settled in favor of a program that would focus on very low income families.

In the beginning, PHAs adopted policies that reserved units for the working poor. Initially, PHAs across the country were selective in filling public housing units, often making judgments not only about the ability of the family to pay rent but also about their moral character and their suitability as residents of the new communities being created.54 Most families residing in public housing in the early years were two-parent households in which one was employed. Welfare recipients and single mothers were generally avoided in the tenant selection process. In fact, as Lawrence Vale puts it, “ ‘eligible’ did not necessarily mean ‘acceptable’ ” in public housing.55 Initially, then, public housing was exclusive, and the early projects were considered “a little heaven for poor people”56 and in places such as Boston became a patronage benefit that politicians handed out to friends and constituents.57 In New York City, where the influence of the European model of modern housing was greatest, the selectivity of the local housing authority persisted longer than in other cities.58

But over time the face and nature of poverty in the United States began to shift and with it the profile of public housing residents. As Vale argues, “the mandate to serve low-income applicants was in perpetual conflict with the desirability of retaining a stable base of fiscally and socially responsible tenants.”59 Congress was strict about limiting eligibility for public housing to those with low incomes. Reflecting the concern that public housing not compete, and that it clearly be set aside for the poor, the program provided for a 20 percent income gap between those who qualified for public housing and the minimum income necessary to compete in local housing markets. Some congressional supporters expected the private sector to “build down” to the income level of public housing and thus fill the unmet housing needs of people whose incomes fell in the 20 percent gap.60

Those who were able to improve their earnings over time lost their eligibility for public housing and were required to leave. This put PHAs in the position of having to evict their highest income tenants, a step they took with varying degrees of enthusiasm. In 1940 the Chicago Housing Authority reduced rents to more precisely target lower-income families and as a result made one quarter of their existing tenants ineligible for further occupancy. All of these tenants were evicted; all were white. CHA repeated this step shortly after World War II ended. In fact, once the Depression ended and families who had been temporarily submerged by the economic conditions began to increase incomes in a reviving economy, the clientele for public housing began to shift to the chronic poor. As more working class families had choices in postwar America they moved out of public housing and into the private market. Gradually during the 1940s the face of public housing began to change.

The advocates of public housing recognized this trend early on. They had warned against public housing becoming “welfare housing,” thinking that the shift would make the projects themselves more difficult to manage, and strip the program of its political constituency. Housing reformer Edith Elmer Wood argued against the growing practice of setting rents according to the income of tenants (preferring to attract tenants with incomes sufficient to pay rents that were set at levels that would support building maintenance and operations).61 But when demand for public housing among working families began to wane, and when waiting lists began to be dominated by families without employment-based income, many PHAs changed policies, effectively reducing their own revenue stream and serving a lower-income clientele.

The racial character of public housing also changed early on. Although most PHAs enforced segregation within their housing stock, maintaining separate buildings for white and black tenants, enough of the early projects had been built in white slum areas (or on vacant land) that most residents of public housing were white. But white families always had greater choice in local housing markets than did blacks, given the prevailing patterns of residential segregation and discrimination in American cities of the era. There were, in fact, chronic shortages of decent housing for African Americans in most cities. Thus, most applicants for new public housing projects were black. When Wentworth Gardens in Chicago opened in 1946, thousands of black families showed up to submit applications. The handful of whites who showed up did not stay.62 It took a strong management approach to maintain a racial mix in the overall tenant profile for large-city PHAs; whites were moving out in response to their own improved fortunes and the expansion of options in the private housing market, while blacks, still confronted with the shackling constraints of segregation in the private market and an acute housing shortage, increased their demand for public housing. The advent of urban renewal in 1949, authorized in the same legislation that renewed the public housing program, generally worsened the housing shortage for blacks by displacing them from their existing housing and demolishing it in favor of new commercial or high-rent development.63 As more blacks entered public housing, more whites fled, worried about having to share buildings with black families.

Implementation Challenges

Several trends were converging in public housing in major U.S. cities in the 1950s. The income profile of tenants was declining as working families moved out and were increasingly replaced with households whose income was based on public assistance. The racial profile was changing as well given the greater housing choices available to whites and the enduring shortage of housing among blacks. The fiscal profile of public housing was beginning to suffer as costs rose in the postwar economy, but rents—frequently based on the income of tenants—stagnated or declined. Finally, PHAs began resorting to more extreme cost-cutting strategies in the design and construction of new public housing. In the 1950s many cities began building the stark high-rises that in subsequent decades came to symbolize the dehumanizing aspects of the worst public housing. The result of this convergence was the marginalization and stigmatization of public housing. Vale argues that in Boston by the late 1950s, a mere twenty years into the program, public housing was seen as “housing of last resort.” Rhonda Williams claims that, by 1962, public housing in Baltimore was seen as a place for “problem families.” Chester Hartman wrote in 1963 that public housing in larger U.S. cities had become the “receptacle for the very lowest elements of society.”64

The trend continued in the ’60s as the welfare rights movement gained momentum and many PHAs began to pursue policies to integrate their housing. Whites fled in even greater numbers, and PHA tenant selection began to emphasize families with severe need living on public assistance. As single mothers began to emerge as the fastest-growing segment among the poor, they began to dominate the profile of public housing. By 1966, almost half of all households entering public housing across the country had no employed adult, and half had only a single parent. In large cities, those figures were higher. Very few local housing authorities, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) notably among them, were able to resist the inexorable slide into welfare housing. The NYCHA worked hard to maintain a more diverse income and employment profile among its residents, but it was severely criticized for doing so by local advocates for the poor.65 Generally, however, the transformation of public housing into a welfare program was complete by the end of the 1960s. In 1968, HUD required PHAs to use a first-come-first-served system for tenant eligibility, eliminating the ability of PHAs to screen tenants on more traditional bases related to ability to pay. In subsequent years, Congress codified this transition by establishing preferences for the neediest.66 These policies helped to ensure that those in greatest need received public housing, but it also increased the economic, social, and political distance between public housing residents and those in private housing.

The incomes of public housing residents steadily declined in comparison to the trends for society as a whole. Between 1950 and 1970, the median income of public housing residents fell from 64 percent of the national median to 37 percent.67 By the 1980s, the average income of public housing residents nationally was one-fifth the national average. It was lower than that by 1995.68

Mismanagement

On top of the process of physical decline and social transformation, public housing in some major cities was simply badly mismanaged.69 Public housing was the backwater of local public administration in many cities, reserved for patronage appointments of politically connected individuals with little expertise in running a large and complicated social service and welfare program of the type that public housing had become. In Chicago, for example, the CHA was headed by Charles Swibel, “a slumlord of dubious character” whose appointment gave him responsibility over a real estate empire that he systematically mismanaged to the detriment of hundreds of thousands of low-income residents over a nineteen-year period.70 Rhonda Williams writes of the nepotism and party cronyism that ruled public housing management in Baltimore.71 In 1993 the Baltimore Sun ran a story describing conditions in Lexington Terrace in which a

31-year-old mother of four lives in a mildewed and roach-infested apartment on the sixth floor…. She must bathe by candlelight because of an electrical problem in the bathroom. Water runs without interruption from the spigot in the kitchen because the spigot’s valves don’t work. Her 5-year-old son…recently contracted a bacterial infection in his eye from the mildew in the apartment and must undergo minor surgery next week…. Children play on filthy mattresses discarded in the hallways and get skin rashes from bugs and germs…. “This is a living hell,” said [one resident]. “You have no cooperation from the management and the maintenance.”72

The story prompted a visit from the city’s mayor, Kurt Schmoke, who apologized to tenants: “I couldn’t believe what my eyes were seeing. No wonder you’re angry. It looks like a place we forgot.”73

In Boston, Housing Authority management positions were also used as party patronage, providing secure employment regardless of management experience or interest.74 Cronyism and the use of public housing jobs as patronage, as seen in Baltimore, Boston, and Chicago, resulted in most PHAs being “grossly overstaffed” and inefficient.75 A nationwide survey in 1969 found that most PHA commissioners harbored “antagonistic and negative feelings towards public housing families”—the very families they were entrusted with housing.76 Where outright antagonism was not the cause of unresponsive management, simple incompetence often was.77

As Michael Schill argued in 1993, “although there are no systematic nationwide evaluations of PHA management practices, allegations of mismanagement are ubiquitous.”78 HUD began initiatives aimed at improving management as early as the 1960s. During the decade of the ‘70s alone HUD offered up the Housing Management Improvement Program, the Target Projects Program, and the Public Housing Urban Initiatives Program, all of which were aimed at improving conditions in public housing communities and improving the management capacities and performance of local housing authorities. The programs, however, did not build on each other in any meaningful way, nor did later ones even tend to incorporate the lessons learned from earlier efforts. As Raymond Struyk concluded in his assessment of these programs, “often the initiatives were conceived simply as a method of channeling additional resources to distressed or ‘deserving’ Authorities.”79

The tenant management movement that emerged in the 1970s was a direct response to the poor management of public housing projects by PHAs. Residents organized rent strikes in several cities to try to force local authorities to maintain the buildings, replace broken building systems, and make repairs when necessary. There was some feeling, especially among public housing residents, that property management began to fail when the projects turned predominantly black:

Well when I first moved in it was a country club, okay. Because you had services. See everybody wants to say we became a prison or whatever you want to call it because black people moved in. But you see if they would have gave us the same services as I got when I first moved in here, this place would still be looking good, okay? But what happened was black people moved in and the services were gone.80

When building materials and systems began to age, many public housing authorities lacked the resources and the internal capacity to upgrade them. In addition to allowing large systems to fail, minor repairs often took weeks and public housing residents were made to endure substandard living conditions. Developer Richard Baron, who has completed a number of public housing redevelopment projects, notes that “one could argue that the difficulties of traditional public housing were caused largely by a failure of management.”81

An Exaggerated Discourse of Disaster

The popular image of public housing changed when its demographics changed. Scott Henderson argues that prior to the 1960s national periodicals did not disseminate a negative perception of public housing, frequently depicting projects as important slum-clearance efforts that were improving central city areas.82 When negative images were attached to public housing they generally focused on what critics claimed was the intrusion of the state into private market processes and creeping socialism. In the 1960s, however, the prevailing discourse about public housing changed. The debate about urban slum clearance vs. socialism gave way to a storyline about public housing that focused on race, welfare dependency, and crime. Several factors contributed to the change, including the increasing presence of African Americans among public housing residents, the emerging dysfunction of some high-rise projects in large cities, and the urban racial unrest of the ’60s. The racial changes and tensions occurring in America’s largest cities were centrally important in the changing discourse about public housing. As Henderson argues, the shift in perceptions happened “during a period when some of America’s largest cities gained black majorities, and as the black civil rights movement entered a more militant and confrontational phase.”83

Media stories zeroed in on the most dysfunctional high-rise projects, the fantastic failures of public housing, highlighting a largely black population living in dangerous and alienating communities. Chicago Daily News coverage of the Robert Taylor Homes in 1965 described the project as

a hellish way of life…. Its own tenants label it a “death trap,” a concentration camp, and even, with sardonic self-derision, “the Congo Hilton.”… Here live 28,000 people, all of them poor, grappling with violence and vandalism, fear and suspicion, teen-age terror and adult chaos, rage, resentment, official regimenting.84

The 1972 demolition of the massive Pruitt-Igoe complex of high-rises in St. Louis provided a lasting image of catastrophic failure that was echoed twenty-five years later by the demolition of other notorious public housing projects across the country. Pruitt-Igoe’s demolition produced for it “a symbolic significance unparalleled by any other American public housing project.”85 For years afterward, the fate of Pruitt-Igoe was invoked as emblematic of the public housing experience in America. The project was the subject of over seventy articles in popular and trade periodicals and scholarly works.86 In the 1980s and 1990s, the storyline of public housing became conflated with a growing moral panic about violent crime and drug use in the nation’s urban ghettos. Visions of the “other America” crowded the evening newscasts. Steve Macek offers an example, citing two stories reported on the CBS Evening News on consecutive nights in February 1994:

The story opens with a shot of two men silhouetted against a gritty, downscale city street. “They are there every day” [the] voice-over begins, “outside Chicago’s big housing projects, shadowy figures who gather on street corners and stand in doorways, hang out near the playground and sometimes push baby strollers.” Meanwhile…we are treated first to a shot of four black men in stocking caps sitting on the stoop of a severe, institutional brick building; this is followed by a shot of black men standing in shadows, a shot—partially obscured by steam rising from the gutter—of a group of men on a street corner, a glimpse of three black men standing in the doorway of a housing project, a shot taken through chain link fencing of some men milling around an outdoor basketball court, and, finally, a quick take of a black man pushing a baby stroller past a desolate vacant lot.87

This popular understanding of public housing has led analysts who ought to know better into unfounded generalizations and exaggerations about the state of the nation’s public housing stock. The scenario of failure and dysfunction “is a scenario for almost all public housing in the United States,” declared Robert Burchell, an urban expert at Rutgers University, in 1987. “There are no more good stories that emerge from public housing. Public housing is viewed nationally as troublesome, difficult to maintain and a blight in every single one of its locations” (emphasis added).88 Richard Baron, head of McCormick Baron Salazar, a real estate development firm that has done many public housing redevelopments, falls into the same trap. Speaking about the Dixie Homes in Memphis and their advanced state of decline, he told the Memphis Daily News in 2010 that “all of the public housing in the United States was like these. They were all distressed, all filled with large, low-income families, very marginally managed by local housing authorities.”89

As Henderson notes, the image of public housing broadcast by the popular media was not wholly inaccurate; hellish conditions existed at many large public housing projects in America’s biggest cities. Accidental deaths due to malfunctioning elevators, snipers killing policemen, and gang control of entire projects were a reality in some places. The failures of public housing were appalling, they were highly publicized, and they produced sickening conditions for the low-income families who had little choice but to endure them. These failures became the main element of the public housing storyline that dominated public perception and came to shape public policy in the 1980s and 1990s.

The public-housing-as-disaster scenario was a reality in several large and medium-sized cities and adversely affected the lives of thousands of tenants; it was a real public policy problem. Nevertheless, it presents a narrow and distorted understanding of the public housing experience across the country. Specifically, it (a) suggests a passivity among public housing residents and ignores the active steps taken in city after city by residents who, seeing no help from those nominally responsible for the management of their communities, took it upon themselves to attempt to establish order out of chaos; (b) discounts the value that residents attached to their homes and neighborhoods, and the community they were able to establish even amid desperate conditions; (c) overstates the prevalence of the fundamental breakdown of public housing by ignoring the large majority of projects that operated well, and the large majority of cities and towns in which public housing has been decently managed and provided a much better standard of living for very low income families than was available to them in the private market.

The image of public housing communities wildly out of control, with a tenant base made up of violent criminals on the one hand and passive, cowering victims on the other, does not, in fact, describe the overwhelming majority of public housing in the nation. In most cities at most times, public housing provides a better alternative than private-sector housing in poor neighborhoods. One study provides evidence that households in public housing nationwide are less likely to suffer from overcrowding and their children are less likely to have been held back in school than a comparison group of poor families.90 Even among HOPE VI projects, sites that have presumably met HUD’s threshold for dysfunctionality, there are projects that are a far cry from the extreme conditions depicted in the discourse of disaster. For instance, in Portland, Karen Gibson characterizes a demolished project as having been “well designed, racially integrated, and well managed”—facts that many displaced residents recognized and which provided the basis for their attachment to the original project.91

The nation’s largest PHA, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), has largely avoided the problems seen in Chicago, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. NYCHA has run a very large program of public housing (more than ten times larger than most major cities’ public housing stock) quite successfully, providing clean, decent, and safe affordable housing for low-income families. That the vast majority of public housing is in decent condition and that the program “is quietly performing a very tough assignment quite well” is what James Stockard calls “the great secret” of public housing.92 Though the popular image of public housing is the high-rise, even at the peak of such housing only 27 percent of public housing units were in high-rises, and many of those housed seniors. Instead, about one-third of units nationwide were in garden apartments, 16 percent in other low-rise buildings, and 25 percent were single-family homes.93 These public housing units do not share the same problems as the run-down, crime-infested, dysfunctional high-rise buildings found in a few of the largest cities in the country. More than 80 percent of the PHAs in the country operate less than five hundred units of public housing, and most of this stock is very functional and provides an essential housing resource for its residents. Seventy-five percent of public housing residents nationwide express satisfaction with their living conditions.94 In 1999, HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo told members of the Public Housing Authority Director’s Association that “public housing is an overwhelming success in this nation.”95 As one analyst commented, public housing seems unpopular with everybody except those who live there and those who are on waiting lists to get in.96

Figure 2. Cheatham Place, Nashville, Tennessee: the first public housing in the city, built in the 1930s for whites only.

For residents of the worst public housing in American cities, creating order amid the chaos of life in the projects was a formidable task, but residents did not passively acquiesce to the deteriorating conditions around them. On the contrary, they went to great lengths to make up for the deficiencies of design, construction, and management that shaped their living environment. Recent scholarship has demonstrated the efforts of public housing residents to build and maintain community, to create order in environments effectively abandoned by management and by city services. Roberta Feldman and Susan Stall have documented more than four decades of grassroots effort by residents of the Wentworth Gardens project on Chicago’s South Side to reverse the deterioration of the buildings, the grounds, and the services they were provided by the housing authority.97 Rhonda Williams studied the efforts of women in Baltimore’s public housing to combat the decline of their communities. These activists organized themselves and other residents to fight for better management responsiveness, and when that produced no change they organized rent strikes and forced local authorities to institute resident management systems. Sudhir Venkatesh’s study of the Robert Taylor Homes also points to the efforts of public housing residents working to establish livable communities in the face of housing authority indifference and neglect.98 Each of these studies as well as others describe residents’ efforts to construct workable communities within the constraints of poverty, segregation, and discrimination. Ironically, in some of these studies the “discovery” that public housing residents were able to create and nurture their own communities occurred through the recollections of those who had already been forcibly displaced from those communities because of demolition.99

Figure 3. Ocean Bay Apartments, formerly known as Edgemere Houses, in Far Rockaway, New York City, built in 1961.

Residents in the most troubled public housing were not blind to the conditions in which they lived. Their desire for better conditions is what drove their activism. At the same time, most public housing residents have a different view of their communities than the image of severe crisis and dysfunction described in popular discourse. There has for some time been evidence that “the overwhelming majority of tenants do not accept the tarnished image of public housing.”100 Surveys of residents in St. Louis, Boston, Wilmington, Delaware, and elsewhere showed residents largely satisfied with their housing, while acknowledging the difficulties created by building neglect and poor management. The long waiting lists maintained by most public housing authorities bear witness to the desire of many very low income families to live in public housing (and are equally eloquent in identifying the lack of alternatives in the private sector). A national survey in the mid-1980s found that the average wait for a two-bedroom public housing unit was eighteen months, with twenty-three months the norm for larger units.101 As Alvin Rabushka and William Weissert noted in 1977:

Is it not ironical that people should want to move into this housing of last resort? And that people in public housing don’t want to leave? Even some tenants who can afford better alternatives in the private housing market don’t want to go. Every year public housing authorities have to evict people who exceed the income limitations of the program but who would stay if permitted.102

Nevertheless, the discourse of disaster dominated media representations of public housing. By the end of the 1980s, there was a widespread sense among policy makers, city officials, and legislators that public housing in the United States was severely broken, indeed had become, among those less inclined to fix blame on the residents, “a humanitarian disaster.”103 Dysfunctional public housing, furthermore, became part of a larger discourse about system failure in many cities. Reeling from the economic dislocations of the 1970s and ‘80s, suffering massive job losses, plant closings, and neighborhood deterioration due to economic restructuring, American cities were suffering high levels of crime, violence, and disinvestment. Crack cocaine, which hit city streets in the mid-1980s, was ravishing communities, fueling gang battles for control of turf and control of drug markets. Concentrations of poverty were getting larger and more numerous. At the vortex of this was public housing; it was where “the other America” lived.

Assessing Public Housing

Controversy follows the public housing program everywhere. Public housing was the most hotly debated housing program ever undertaken by the federal government. Controversy continued through the implementation of the program, as questions about the merits of the program and its place in the system of housing assistance shifted to the local level, generating political debates over the role of government in private markets, racial segregation, and the renewal of inner-city ghettos. There is controversy even in the collective assessment of what public housing has meant over the years. There are three schools of thought about public housing. The first regards the program as a failure of government, as a well-meaning but misplaced attempt to tackle social problems through heavy-handed government action that in the end produced as many problems as it addressed.104 The problems of public housing are, in this scenario, the problems of all large governmental interventions: it was not nimble enough to respond to changing conditions of urban poverty; it produced the wrong incentives for families by shielding them from the discipline of the market; it was subject to too much political manipulation by both local and federal politicians; and it was terribly mismanaged in too many places. Public housing is thus the quintessential example of public intervention gone awry, and further evidence of the inefficiencies of welfare state policies. By the late 1950s, observers argued that public housing was destroying the neighborhoods in which it was located. Even past supporters and those who advocated for it from the beginning were disillusioned with the program’s performance.105 Currently, even some staunch supporters of affordable housing and government-subsidized housing acknowledge what they see as the abject failure of public housing.

The second school of thought places the explanation for public housing failure at the feet of those who designed the program and who compromised it from the beginning. This argument also acknowledges that public housing has been a tremendous failure, but argues that the failure is a reflection of specific design features of the program that crippled it from the beginning.106 To these analysts, public housing was never given a full chance in the United States; it was designed to fail. Thus, the inability of PHAs to maintain their buildings is due to the impossibly difficult program guidelines created by a Congress unwilling to commit the resources necessary to provide for a workable program. Ultimately, the opponents of public housing, though unable to prevent passage of the program, were able to compromise it to the extent that it would not be successful.107 This argument is most closely connected with the work of Eugene Meehan, who argued that the opponents of public housing distorted the program during the congressional debates leading to enactment of the 1937 and 1949 bills, and that in order to secure the votes necessary for passage of the bill, public housing advocates made too many compromises, compromises that, in the end, led to the inevitable failure of the program. Specifically, Meehan points to the restrictive fiscal model for the program that led to construction and design shortcuts and pinched administrators during the postconstruction period. Bradford Hunt also argues that fear of political opposition led to overzealous cost-cutting—even beyond congressional guidelines—by the USHA for decades after the program was created, leading to a series of poor decisions about the siting and design of public housing projects in major cities.108

In the end, the distinctive elements of these two perspectives blur. According to a third school of thought presented in the previous pages, what is left is an exaggerated focus on the problems of public housing, a somewhat myopic focus on the worst cases without an appreciation for the fact that the conditions that prevailed in Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and other cities were not universal, and in fact did not characterize the majority of public housing. A more realistic assessment of public housing acknowledges the sometimes spectacular failures of the program, but places those failures alongside the lasting successes of PHAs in New York City, St. Paul, Minnesota, Portland, Oregon, and countless other communities. A more nuanced and full understanding of the public housing story in the United States notes that the design of public housing often set it apart in communities, became identifiable, and contributed to the stigmatization of the communities and its residents. Yet, in the early years, public housing produced notable architecture and archetypal expressions of New Deal design that remained—while they were still standing—historically important representations of that era. Public housing was also certainly diminished in quality by severe cost-cutting pressures. Tenant selection policy contributed to high concentrations of poverty that led to the concentration of social problems in public housing communities.

Mismanagement further impoverished the system in many though not all cities. The program was made to serve the segregationist agenda of local officials during most of the period when new projects were being built. In some places, the combination of these forces led to catastrophic failure. Public housing residents were forced to endure deplorable living conditions made worse by the fact that these were produced through the hand of government, not despite it. But, in most places, even all of these forces together did not lead to disaster. These factors produced difficult but workable housing that was, and continues to be, an extremely important segment of the housing market, providing decent housing for families that are not served well or at all by the private market. Public housing works for hundreds of thousands of people, and waiting lists that have always been long and remain so today provide testament to this fact.