Public housing leaders express concerns about plans

What is the “City of the Future”? This plan doesn’t include the 41,000 persons that live in public housing. Where are these residents going?

They are going to be disbursed among smaller pockets of subsidized housing (yet to be built) spread all over the greater metro area – in the City and outside of it. The literature supporting this is easy enough to find in the assorted City of the Future documents available to the public.

It’s amazing that the leaders of these places would want to preserve them. No one agrees that tracts of public housing solve anything. The sooner they go, the better for everyone.

On the RRHA web site they have a demographic report

http://www.rrha.org/html/public/demo.pdf

There are about 10k people living in public housing developments (not including section 8 and other subsidized housing). Anyway, the poverty dispersal policies enacted (most notably the Gatreaux case in Chicago) have not been uniformly positive for adults…displaced kids tend to have better life outcomes due to moving to suburban school districts. But adults seem to be less able to shake a life of, lets call it place-dependency (on the Authority, their neighbors and the local social and religious institutions they use) That said, the other options to improve these developments may seem even more draconian and involve increased work-fare policies, tighter leases that evict for criminal and socially undesirable behavior (truancy for instance). The demographic tables also, to some degree, answers Bob’s rhetoric, in that more than 1/4th of the households in these developments receive a majority of their income through employment. This is not exactly good, but it does mean that some of these folks are working. The real issue, and I think I have wrote this before, is that there are 3700 househholds in these communities, with about 5000 kids, and only 23 married couples. This, more than the physical environment, gives a good clue into the cause- effect cycle of family poverty in these developments.

The complexity of this issue is mind boggling, and I think that is why people want so much to simplify it into a “they” issue. “They” are lazy. “They” are worthless. “They” dont want a better life. “They” dont want a job. etc. etc.

But the fact of the matter is that people (yes people) that live in public housing are more like those of us that dont live in public housing than perhaps some would like to admit. Everyone has their own story, their own family structure and their own set of life experiences.

I do believe that most people want a better life and most people want to be self sufficient. Some people have had it better than others and the road they have taken has been full of opportunity or perhaps less wrought with discrimination and hardship. Some people either havent had the same opportunities, or due to perceptions didnt see them.

I think the first step in this challenge is begin to talk about people, individual families that currently live in public housing. Any plan that discounts the needs and dreams of individual families is doomed to failure. There is no easy “one size fits all” answer-we already tried that and WE failed miserably.

Individuals that choose to lump people together and perpetuate stereotypes are just as much of the problem, as those residents in public housing that meet those expectations.

Peace.

The RTD’s Michael Paul Williams weighs in with Tenants seek voice in housing.

Lets solve this sterotype.

Why do people in public housing never pick their trash? If they want improvement, that is the simplest and easiest. I pick up garbage off my street each week.

I live in Highland Park, adjacent to the Dove Court project. If you look at the monthly crime reports on the Richmond Police website, you’ll see that much of the drug activity and crime occurs on and very close to that property. The residents in the adjoining neighborhood, comprised of many races, ages and economic groups, would like to see the area redeveloped, and affordable housing mixed into the neighborhood with single-family owned homes. At Councilwoman Robertson’s last monthly Town Hall meeting, the question of how to best address the city’s housing situation was asked. The overwhelming answer, given by a 99% African American audience over the age of 45, was to create mixed income neighborhoods, where folks needing housing subsidies resided side by side with homeowners of all economic and social brackets. This bears out what the residents of Dove Court themselves said when they met with representatives of RRHA. The residents said they did not want to return to a “project” – they wanted to have other housing choices such as vouchers to live in mixed-income neighborhoods. On a national level, HUD, and cities across the country, are finding that concentrations of poverty do nothing constructive for the residents who live in public housing, and so both HUD and city planners are moving away from the “project” model. While it may take a while for folks who have depended on housing in those projects to adjust to living in mixed-income, race and cultural neighborhoods, I believe that the former residents will find that life can be more stable and safe outside those projects. By the way, linking affordable housing to stipulations such as clean crime records and keeping children in school is not “draconian”, it is common sense.