In Monuments of Despair, a Ray of Hope : Public Housing: Assigning social workers to ‘the projects’ may go a long way toward providing services to those who need more than just a roof over their heads.
As city planners and architects across the United States focus on how to provide more low-income housing, they repeatedly confront the specter of large public housing projects that never fulfilled their purpose or promise. All too often, what seemed like perfectly good buildings on the outside had become walled ghettos for gangs, drugs and poverty.
Los Angeles is about to implement some pioneering measures to remedy that sort of thing and, perhaps, to see that it is not repeated here anymore.
Last November, the Los Angeles City Housing Authority announced plans to locate social services and social workers in public housing projects. This proposal merits careful attention and support from all who are concerned about some of today’s most pressing social problems.
One of the bitter ironies of our time is that a significant portion of homeless people are alumni, as it were, of public housing projects.
The Federal Housing Act of 1949 enunciated the goal of a decent home and suitable environment for every American family. But it has taken all these years to drive home the lesson that achieving that goal involves more than simply handing people four walls, flooring and a roof and leaving them to fend for themselves.
Candidates for public housing are, by definition, people lacking some of the resources necessary to cope with the rough-and-tumble of the market system. And this nearly always involves more than just rent money.
Applicants for public housing, most often women on public assistance, usually carry some baggage of woe, past or present--teen-age pregnancy, domestic violence and abuse, divorce and desertion, drug and alcohol addiction. The growing number of homeless families come from among these women.
In addition to roofs over their heads, families in public housing need day-care facilities, job counseling, guidance in financial planning and assistance in transportation. These are necessary adjuncts if such families are to stabilize their lives and eventually leave the welfare rolls. Both adults and children need recreation programs. There need to be services or arrangements for excluding gang violence, drug trafficking and other crimes.
At the bottom of the whole problem is a longstanding lack of coordination between the Department of Housing and Urban Development and federal welfare programs. Public housing projects have been treated as a substitute for adequate welfare payments. The result has been a shortfall on both ends--inadequate public housing and insufficient outlays to cover both shelter and the support services necessary to get people off welfare.
In some communities across the country, public housing tenants, by remarkable bootstrap efforts, have brought about the needed social services. The National Council of Neighborhood Women in Brooklyn is an example of such effort. But self-help know-how is not universally on tap. In too many projects, the housing has ended up as squalid, unlivable magnets of disorder and crime, suitable only for tearing down.
Social workers assigned to public housing projects should not be seen as vigilantes on a mission of ferreting out anti-social elements. They should be there to provide counseling and referrals to a range of health and mental health agencies, to help parents care for and educate their children effectively, to organize after-school activities for children and adolescents and to start support groups for young and old. Their presence among the most “high-risk” people in our city offers a singular opportunity for early intervention and possible prevention of destructive behavior.
If the social worker’s role is seen as primarily guiding and assisting residents in improving their lives and cultivating a constructive environment, the Los Angeles plan can serve as a model for an important, much-needed advance toward reversing the decline in low-income housing.
