THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, August 31, 1995 TAG: 9508300011
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A20 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives' proposal to cut public-housing operating subsidies by 20 percent in the 1996 fiscal year and 5 percent a year thereafter will cheer all who view public housing in the way that Prohibitionists of an earlier age viewed saloons: as the source of many if not most of society's worst ills.
While public housing has been a godsend for many at or near the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, many public-housing projects have become notoriously squalid places terrorized by violent youths, many of them trafficking in drugs and firearms. Who isn't appalled? There's widespread sentiment for demolishing public housing or selling its units to people who will take care of them - and care for their neighborhoods, too.
St. Louis' crime-infested Pruitt-Igoe high-rise public-housing project, built during the Eisenhower years, was demolished - dynamited by the federal government in 1972. It is a stark symbol of public housing's failings. Chicago's public housing, similarly bleak and drug- and-crime-ridden, is another. And there are too many other horrible examples.
Washington - presidents, Congress, the Department of Housing and Urban Development - is largely to blame for public-housing disasters. Originally intended as decent shelter for low-income families, including families in which at least one parent was gainfully employed, public housing was transformed by Washington into units occupied almost entirely by the poorest of America's poor. Typically, these are single-parent households dependent upon Aid to Dependent Children and elderly and disabled women and men no less dependent upon government checks.
The transformation followed decrees from Washington that deprived local housing authorities of the right to set rents and choose tenants who would help maintain healthy neighborhoods. The subsequent concentration of the poorest Americans in housing projects spawned all the ills common to clusters of poor people anywhere. The emergence of crack cocaine in the 1980s further degraded the projects along with other poor urban neighborhoods.
Public-housing in Norfolk, Portsmouth and many other U.S. cities is blighted by crime, drugs, welfare-dependency, illegitimacy, illiteracy, failing schoolchildren, and other wretchedness that most people, including many residents of public housing, deplore. But these are far from being catastrophes. Would their condition be improved by drastic cuts in federal operating subsidies - essential because Washington bars local housing authorities from raising rents and requires that they give priority to the poorest Americans?
Not likely. Norfolk, for example, which was the first city in Hampton Roads to erect public housing on cleared slum sites, would lose $4.1 million in federal funds in fiscal 1996, dropping the current federal subsidy from $19.7 million to $15.6 million. The cut would force Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority to skimp on basic maintenance and, among other things, eliminate entirely a million dollars in funds for its drug-elimination campaign.
If what the House cuts stands (the Senate has yet to act), Washington should at least free local housing officials to raise rents to reasonable levels and welcome once again into the projects working-poor families disposed to treat public housing as a waystop rather than a final destination. by CNB