Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 22, 1995 TAG: 9503220033
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT B. HAWKINS JR.
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
After years of experience, we now agree that government housing has not worked. Go to any big city and find out where the highest levels of crime, drugs, teen pregnancy and deplorable living conditions are, and chances are you will find a government housing project.
The lesson we seem to have learned is that if government cannot solve these problems, then we ought to tear down these projects and let the private sector solve the problems through rent vouchers.
What's wrong with this analysis is the poverty of our concepts. By categorizing solutions as either government or private sector, we exclude a vast set of possibilities on how we can organize productive forms of social organization.
While we should build no more of these projects, the policy question is, can we transform these projects into productive communities where social problems are solved rather than relocated?
Eleven years ago, Kenilworth Parkside typified the worst possible living condition for a group of human beings. It was on the Department of Housing and Urban Development's list of worst housing projects. It had one of the worst crime rates in Washington, D.C., averaging one homicide a month. Its physical plant was a disaster. With high teen pregnancy, more than 85 percent of its residents were on welfare, few children graduated from high school and few families lived in the project.
Today, Kenilworth Parkside is transformed. It has one of the lowest crime rates in Northeast Washington. Teen pregnancy has been cut in half, children are going to school, and drugs have been eliminated. Its buildings have been renovated, and residents are starting to buy them. Only 5 percent of the tenants are on welfare because many have been hired into jobs created by the community.
Tenants now actively govern their community. In short, a killing ground has been changed into a community of character.
Similarly, one of San Francisco's worst housing projects, Hunter's View, under the leadership of the Rev. Willie Carter, in two years of tenant self-governance has seen a significant drop in crime. The physical appearance of the community also has improved 100 percent because the San Francisco housing project has contracted with tenants to maintain the grounds.
These transformations contain lessons that we need to relearn, for they contain the principles we can use to solve many of our problems that now seem insoluble.
The real poverty in many of our housing projects is one of authority. Tenants simply do not have the authority to make the fundamental decisions that affect their lives. They have been disarmed politically. They have no stake.
Simple decisions such as deciding who will live in the developments are lodged downtown. The downfall of Pruitt-Igoe, the famous housing project in St. Louis that finally was dynamited, can be traced in part to taking the authority to approve new residents away from tenants in the 1960s.
Kimi Gray, one of five welfare mothers who started the transformation of Kenilworth Parkside, utters a long-lost truth when she states that 11 years ago, "we decided to build a community, one that had no drugs, no hot goods and one with a curfew." The process of building a community, a shared vision with common purposes, is absolutely critical because it provides the social glue for governing where none existed before.
It is also critical that public administrators change their view of their role, from a top-down service-provider vision to one of developing the capabilities of tenants to govern their communities. The ultimate providers of most critical services in housing projects are the residents themselves. This new vision for public administrators must be accompanied by a sharing of authority with tenants.
Government housing projects can be turned into productive public-housing developments if we strive to make them self-governing. They can also be places where real welfare reform takes place because young women can live in supportive communities in which the vision is a life of independence.
Finally, we can see from successful projects that they comprise elements that are public, government, private and nonprofit. The real challenge is to develop our capacities to design and create productive communities no matter how these elements are mixed, so long as they work.
Robert B. Hawkins Jr. is president of the Institute for Contemporary Studies in San Francisco.
by CNB