House Votes Building Ban for Low-Income Projects

The Democratic-run House voted Thursday to put a virtual end to the construction of new government-owned low-income housing in a move that could portend the demise of a controversial welfare program often criticized for creating publicly run slums.

During debate on an omnibus housing bill, lawmakers approved by a 223-180 margin an amendment that in the future would channel most funds earmarked for construction of new public housing projects to the modernization of dilapidated existing units instead.

Passage of the entire bill, which authorizes more than $14 billion in spending for federal housing programs in fiscal 1987, is expected next week. The Senate is expected to embrace the concept of a new construction ban but it is unclear whether the Republican-controlled chamber will balk at other provisions in the legislation.

The bill originally targeted $800 million for the construction of new public housing units next year but most of that money would be diverted to rehabilitation projects if the revision stands.

Texas Republican Steve Bartlett, who sponsored the proposal, argued that it is wasteful to spend money on new housing when 36% of government-owned units nationwide, about 459,000 in all, are considered substandard and many are uninhabitable.

But opponents argued that low-income housing problems are distributed unevenly around the country. Acknowledging that some areas had high vacancy rates and do not need new housing, critics said that many large cities are plagued by a severe housing crunch, leaving tens of thousands of low-income families on waiting lists.

Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez (D-Tex.), chairman of the House Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs subcommittee on housing, said that more than 200,000 families are waiting to get into public housing in New York City alone. At current turnover rates, he added, it would take 30 years to accommodate them.

One member of Gonzalez’s panel, New York Democrat Robert Garcia, warned that many units are in such poor shape that they cannot be renovated and must be torn down. “You’re not helping the poor if you end up reducing the total number of units for the poor,” he said.

Bartlett’s move was welcomed by Bob Zampino, acting executive director of the agency that oversees the 8,900 publicly operated housing units in Los Angeles. Even though the waiting list to get into those units bears more than 9,000 names, Zampino said, the city has no room to build new large-scale public housing projects and could make better use of federal housing money by spending it on rehabilitation.

‘End of Era’

“It’s an end of an era of clustering large projects,” Zampino said in a telephone interview. “There’s a trend toward getting people dispersed so there won’t be clustering of ethnic groups, to get more of an ethnic mix throughout the community.”

But Ed Marciniak, an expert on public housing at Chicago’s Loyola University, said that the approach taken by the Bartlett amendment is simplistic. Although many large public housing projects in that city suffer from a 20%-30% vacancy rate, he said, many of the units have been condemned.

The approach proposed by Bartlett would accelerate a trend away from large low-income projects such as the sprawling Jordan Downs and Nickerson Gardens projects in Watts. That trend began in 1970, when a federal court limited low-income housing projects to no more than 35 to 40 units and banned high-rise projects.

Since then, construction of government-operated public housing units has dropped substantially. During the Jimmy Carter Administration, the federal government funded about 20,000 new units annually. That number has dipped to about 5,000 a year in the Reagan Administration.