Why do housing projects fail

Others criticize the architecture, arguing that high-rise buildings were unsuitable for families and designed with common spaces that residents did not maintain or supervise.

Similarly, some point out that public housing was not well-integrated into neighborhoods or surrounding public infrastructure. Other critics blame housing legislation that has long favored private solutions and thus worked to limit its scope. Ultimately, the combination of each of these issues has produced animosity toward public housing and resulted in its current conditions.

Contemporary arguments against public housing often mirror the arguments made since the s, including high development costs, wariness of government involvement in housing, and fears of the influence of communism and socialism. This article examines the values and policies that have shaped these stereotypes and critiques of public housing in the United States since its beginning in the s.

We must understand these influences to thoughtfully analyze the current conditions of public housing in America. Currently, approximately 1. In total, there are roughly 3, housing authorities throughout the country. Nearly half of the housing authorities in the United States are responsible for units or less and most often house seniors. There are only ten housing authorities in the country with more than 7, units, but they comprise nearly a third of all the public housing in the nation.

The overall supply of public housing increased from the beginning of the program in the s through the s. Since the s, the public housing stock has decreased, and funding has since gone toward preserving or redeveloping the existing stock instead of new construction. Nearly a fourth of all public housing are low-rise townhouses. Although the main goal of public housing in the United States should be to provide safe, affordable housing to low-income people, policies over the past eighty years have not all centered this goal.

The government began its involvement in the regulation of low-income housing, specifically tenements, around the turn of the twentieth century. However, this housing was privately-owned, and while the government created standards for decent housing, it did not build housing. At the beginning of the s, the country was coping with the effects of the Great Depression.

The housing crisis of the s was exacerbated by the Depression, which resulted in widespread foreclosures and an overall lack of supply due to unemployment in the homebuilding trade.

The purpose of the legislation was to put people back to work and to increase the supply of housing. It also introduced slum clearance in relation to public housing, which entailed demolishing existing dilapidated buildings in low-income neighborhoods and replacing them with public housing developments.

Beginning in the s, federal housing policies both created and exacerbated patterns of residential segregation in cities as well as within individual public housing developments. The rule mandated that PWA public housing could only be integrated if the surrounding neighborhood was integrated.

Beginning with the Housing Act of , policymakers have crafted housing policies that propagated a version of the American Dream that is based on homeownership.

This version was influenced by values central to liberalism and capitalism, such as privatism and individualism. Send Us Your Comments:. Content comment Latest Most Read. Sponsored Links. The idea was that the public sector was better equipped to serve low-income households than private landlords. The federal government was tasked with financing construction of public housing units where slums currently stood, and local housing authorities would put together development deals to ensure completion.

Southwest "slum" off 4th Street, around Image by Library of Congress licensed under Creative Commons. The law consolidated public housing with other slum clearance housing programs, including the precursor to Urban Renewal , and dedicated funds to build up to , units of public housing nationwide by However, that goal was undermined in the same law, which also permitted housing segregation, capped federal contributions to public housing, and shrunk federal subsidy periods from 60 to 40 years.

Additionally, both the and the laws placed a ceiling on construction costs per room, disincentivizing use of quality materials despite the inclusion of modern appliances, and restricted use of annual federal disbursements to only cover the difference between operations needs and rent revenue.

The next presidential administration had further reduced federal funds for public housing construction. Meanwhile, although hundreds of thousands of public housing units had been built by this time, the lack of continued investment in maintenance of public housing led to rapid deterioration.

From the outset, the federal government left maintenance funding and procedures up to each of the local housing authorities, presuming that rental revenue at each development would cover maintenance costs.

Housing authorities, which tasked third-party property management companies with overseeing repairs, were able to blame lack of federal funds or mismanagement for lax or inconsistent upkeep, and management companies could point to low rental revenue to justify deferred maintenance.

The rental revenue gap was widened further as households were forced to move once their incomes exceeded maximum requirements, perpetuating concentration of poor households together. Any attempt to do so would have to be gradual, especially in a place like New York, where subsidized housing is such a large part of the residential real-estate system. Some housing projects would have to remain as de facto poorhouses for the most dysfunctional.

Knowing that the promise of a lifetime of subsidized housing was gone along with a lifetime of welfare payments since the reform , young single mothers would be less likely to enter the system—and perhaps less likely to have children out of wedlock in the first place.

Some current tenants the least dysfunctional could be offered housing vouchers that they could use in the private housing market in exchange for vacating public housing. The voucher would come with a time limit, too, to discourage dependency. As the number of tenants fell, it would then become possible to sell some public housing buildings or at least the sites, after the demolition of the emptied buildings to private buyers, bringing more property back onto the tax rolls.

This does not mean that government would have no role to play in the creation of affordable housing. A compassionate conservative housing policy would work to dismantle the myriad government-made obstacles to the creation of housing by the private market—such barriers to building as rent control, irrational zoning regulations, expensive permit requirements, and overly demanding building codes.

With such obstacles out of the way, newly dynamic urban economies could then be free to create private housing for all income groups, as they did decades ago, in the days when Boston three-deckers, Chicago two-flats, Brooklyn brownstones, and Oakland bungalows housed so many millions of struggling working families on their way toward the middle class. Cities would be better places for it—at all income levels. Send a question or comment using the form below.

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