Building the American Dream: the Politics of Housing
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Dignity Village, Portland, Oregon. and uncertainty have egrippedathe natiron as the market rises and falls in the wake of the mortgage mess. It is becom- ing clear that the cost of the housing crisis will be measured not in billions but in trillions. Numbers most of us can’t comprehend. fA persistent anomaly, and once defined as the boomiest and bustiest of cities, Houston so far stands apart in this crisis. The economy continues to exhibit elasticity—buoyed by (the diminishing) windfall profits of the energy industry—and the low cost of living. Building the However, our housing problems are real and a drive through Houston’s most neglected neigh- borhoods illustrates this clearly. The cost of American Dream: rental housing has increased nearly 30 percent in the last eight years, foreclosures in Harris County are averaging over 1,000 a month, and one in five households (totaling nearly 300,000 The Politics of households) in the Houston region cannot afford fair market rent on a two-bedroom by Susan Rogers apartment. Initiatives in Houston such as the Housing 99K House Competition and the joint program 14 of Houston Hope and the Land Assemblage e t i Redevelopment Authority are boosting the c . 8 0 tireless efforts of our nonprofit community 0 2 L housing organizations to provide affordable L A F housing in the city. Yet however laudable their Hoovervilles, or shantytowns ” efforts, the scale is simply not proportionate to the housing the slum accommodations.” This greed brought to need, especially given the larger framework of a cities the squalor of the tenement house, so aptly failed national housing policy that provides no sup- dispossessed illustrated by Jacob Riis, and the slums it both bred port. Thousands of families in Houston and more and was born in. While reformers begged the gov- throughout the country will find that while they named in honor ernment to take action, housing at least for a time were looking the other way, the social safety net of President would remain a purely private pursuit, with regula- was pulled out from beneath them. Talk of the tion only slightly taming the excesses of the tene- Great Depression and a new New Deal has become Herbert Hoover ment house. Capitalism was young, and the market commonplace as we look backward to understand after 1929, was firmly in command. how we might move forward. A bit of history. The second crisis was spurred by the economic Clearly, housing matters: shelter is a fundamen- blanketed open catastrophe of the Great Depression, which shook tal human need. Yet from the late 19th-century spaces and parks the very foundation of the American Dream. (an era typified by the evils of the highly profitable “Hoovervilles,” or shantytowns housing the dispos- tenement) to today, the question of affordable and in cities across sessed named in honor of President Herbert decent housing for all Americans—as defined by Hoover after 1929, blanketed open spaces and parks our national housing policy—has been blown the nation as in cities across the nation as thousands of people lost around in the tumultuous winds of societal and thousands of their homes, their life savings, and their livelihoods. political change. The responsibility for building the The misery created in the wake of the financial col- American Dream, at least for those with little people lost their lapse forced policy makers in Washington to con- means, has long shifted back and forth between the homes, their life sider, albeit only cautiously, public intervention in private and the public sector. Today, in the midst of the housing market. It would take the sweeping what may be the last throes of the “ownership savings, and their policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New society,” the housing question is again coming Deal to chart a course for federal housing relief, but sharply and painfully into focus. Modern era livelihoods. even then the concrete production of housing took a “Hoovervilles,” such as Dignity Village in Portland, backseat to programs focused on saving the falter- are springing up across the country, the foreclosur“e ing construction industry and providing relief to rate is higher than it has been since the Great homeowners and mortgage lenders through the 30- Depression, affordable housing is being lost in year federally insured mortgage. However, among record numbers, home ownership is in decline, and the policies passed during this era was the 1937 the largest federal bailout in history—largely Wagner-Steagall Act, which for the first time in blamed on the mortgage mess—is in progress. U.S. history made housing a public concern and the The question of housing, both as a problem and construction of public housing a federal priority. as something out of reach for millions, is historical- While the 19th-century progressive reformers had ly a relatively recent phenomenon. In the last 100 stood alone in their call for government interven- years, three periods of crisis highlight our nation’s tion in housing, by the late 1930s the American peo- shifting priorities, our collective pursuits, and our ple supported the basic tenets of a federally funded private greed in achieving the American Dream, a public housing program to house the poor. home of one’s own. At the end of the 19th century, Just over a decade later, the federal government’s the housing problem was one of supply not meeting role in the direct production of public housing was demand: cities were bursting at the seams, and their further expanded in response to the severe housing populations were greatly expanding. It did not take shortage that faced the nation after World War II. 15 S long for the builder of this time to discover that, as The 1949 Housing Act established the goal of “a L e E t i U Lewis Mumford wrote in The City in History, decent home and a suitable living environment for c . M A 8 S “maximum profits came, not from providing first every American family” and included the provision 0 . 0 C 2 A class accommodations for those who could well to construct 810,000 units of public housing. The L D L N A I F L afford them at a handsome fee, but from crowded middle of the 20th century was a time of optimism, Tax Delinquent Properties Houston Hope Neighborhoods Raised Graphic Key 1 Acres Homes 2 Independence Heights 3 Trinity/Houston Gardens 4 Settegast 5 Clinton Park Tri-Community 6 Sunnyside 1 2 3 4 5 6 < Houston’s Median Income > Houston’s Median Income One in five households (totaling nearly 300,000) in the Houston region cannot 1950s - 1960s afford fair market rent on a two-bedroom apartment. LARA and Project Hope are Highrise “Tower in the Park” the city’s best efforts to fill the void left by the market and failed federal programs. Out of the 75,000 tax delinquent properties available, LARA will develop 3,000 with homes. At best, the program will meet one percent of the total need. For many, both ownership and rent are out of reach. $852 - Fair Market Rent (FMR) in Harris County $16.38 - Wage required to afford FMR* $10.23 - Average Wage from the six highlighted neighborhoods *From “Out of Reach 2007-08,” Low Income Housing Coalition, www.nlihc.org. Housing wage refers to the amount a person working full time must earn to afford 1940s “Garden Style” Lowrise the fair-market rent on a two-bedroom unit without paying more than 30 percent of his or her income in rent 1990s-2000s “Ownership Society” economic expansion, and collective resolve. The wrong with government intervention. As a result, adopted wholesale a program initiated in 1993 to social safety net was greatly expanded, and new by 1972 President Richard Nixon placed a morato- replace public housing projects with mixed-income programs sought not only to end the housing prob- rium on the construction of new public housing communities through public-private partnerships— lem but (by the 1960s) to end poverty and ensure and turned instead to the private market with bulldozers have razed nearly all of the most infa- equal rights as well. housing choice vouchers and incentives. A year mous high-rise public housing projects including later the failing Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Robert Taylor Homes, Cabrini-Green, Henry Louis was demolished and with it the hope of social Horner, and Stateway Gardens. Ironically, it is housing. By the 1980s the War on Poverty was here that a proposal for a national public housing n time societal priorities shifted again, and replaced by the War on Drugs (and two decades museum is being put forward; according to Blair the goals of ending poverty and providing a later by the War on Terror), as the nation’s commit- Kamin of the Chicago Tribune, “the museum will decent home for everyone were largely ment and public support for the social safety net keep memories alive . [and allow us] to learn abandoned and forgotten. New political quietly unraveled. from the past and build better communities in the winds began blowing as thousands fled Today, the 20th-century quest to eliminate the future.” The museum proposal includes exhibition 16 cities for the suburbs and took up bowling housing problem has largely faded from collective space portraying the experience of living in public alone. The social spending of the New Deal and the memory. In fact, in New York City the tenement housing, a restaurant, and a gift shop. Just imagine e S t i R c Great Society was called into question as despair, experience has been neatly repackaged as history— snow globes with models of Cabrini-Green.