Reform of Public Housing Is Funded
The Clinton administration, continuing its drive to remake public housing, awarded $716 million Tuesday to help 36 cities tear down decaying and dangerous public housing projects and enable other cities to relocate more than 15,000 tenants to private housing.
The program, which includes projects in Los Angeles and San Francisco, marks another major step in dismantling the government’s traditional program for housing the poor. For nearly a half-century, the federal government provided shelter for the poor in massive high-rises and sprawling complexes. In recent decades, those projects have fallen into despair and disrepair as they were overridden by drugs and violent crime.
The funding will provide $7.27 million for the relocation of 350 families from East Los Angeles’ Aliso Village, which is scheduled to be renovated. Under the administration plan, 78,000 public housing units are expected to be demolished nationwide by 2000.
As the old projects close and are destroyed, the poor are being given a variety of housing options.
Some are moving to smaller-scale housing complexes that have the feel of single-family neighborhoods. Others, in keeping with an approach that has been the cornerstone of many Republican housing reform plans, are being given Section 8 government subsidies to help pay their rent in privately owned housing.
Still others, borrowing an idea long embraced by Republican vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp, a former secretary of Housing and Urban Development, are being given government assistance to buy their own federally built units.
Under the awards announced Tuesday, a total of 74 cities will receive funds. Besides the money going to those cities which will demolish aging public housing and relocate tenants, the funds will be used to build smaller, redesigned new projects and carry out programs to reduce crime and increase job training and employment in existing housing projects.
To date, about 22,100 units of public housing have been destroyed under the Clinton administration initiative--a number that is expected to rise to 30,000 by the end of the year. The awards announced Tuesday will bring down another 17,000 units of public housing next year and will fund the construction of 4,000 new units.
In announcing the awards Tuesday, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry G. Cisneros said that the money will help transform “isolated ghettos of poverty, crime and despair into neighborhoods of hope and opportunity.”
The announcement came on the eve of the debate between Vice President Al Gore and Kemp. The debate could turn heavily on issues of urban policy and showcase differing partisan approaches to renewing the nation’s inner cities.
In an interview Tuesday, Cisneros defended the often-controversial disbursement of funds in the midst of an election campaign, noting that last year’s announcement of housing funds came at a similar time in the budget cycle--in late September. He charged that by forcing the shutdown of the federal government early this year, Republicans had slowed the process of choosing worthy projects for federal funds, pushing Tuesday’s announcement deeper into the campaign season.
Indeed, many housing experts said that the administration’s approach to reforming public housing could only have been done under a Congress dominated by Republicans. When they were in control, Democrats turned back Republican plans that would have resulted in reduced public housing.
But with Republicans in control of the 1995-96 Congress, the long-standing requirement for the government to replace every unit it demolishes was dropped. The administration, which has pushed for smaller public housing complexes, took advantage of these circumstances.
“It’s kind of a Nixon-to-China phenomenon,” said Christopher Walker, an expert on public housing with the Urban Institute. “It took the Democrats to demolish public housing.”
In Los Angeles, housing authority officials had mixed reactions to news of the $7.27-million award. Kenneth De Gon, assistant executive director of Los Angeles’ Housing Authority, said that the city had applied for $30 million to demolish and rebuild the 685 units of Aliso Village and to relocate its tenants while work is underway. The money allocated Tuesday will cover only the costs of relocating 350 tenants, leaving the housing authority to scramble for $23 million to complete the project, which will contain 485 units when it is finished.
“Seven million dollars is not a disappointment but $30 million would have been much nicer,” De Gon said. “We can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
The relocation funds will provide tenants with Section 8 payments, which are meant to bridge the gap between what the tenant currently pays at Aliso Village and the cost to rent private housing.
Aliso Village is one of three adjoining housing projects, constructed in the early 1950s, called Pico-Aliso. Today, Pico-Aliso’s rate of violent crime is 4 1/2 times higher than the national average.
Housing authority officials already had obtained $50 million to demolish and renovate 577 apartments south of 1st Street--in the Pico Gardens and the Aliso Extension sections of Pico-Aliso--and the construction of 440 townhouses for eligible low-income families and senior citizens.
Cisneros lauded what he called a milestone in bipartisan support for a program that has sparked complaints from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress.
“This strategy is now more firmly cemented and this strategy now has bipartisan support,” Cisneros said. “We got everything we need” from Congress to proceed, he added.
The administration also is celebrating plans to demolish housing along Chicago’s notorious “State Street Corridor” of public housing complexes. Chicago’s Housing Authority will receive a grant of $122.2 million--the largest single award to any city--to begin demolition and the remaking of three drug-, gang- and crime-infested public housing projects.
Although Cisneros touted the bipartisan support behind the administration’s program, some Republican lawmakers said that the plan has serious problems.
Rep. Rick A. Lazio (R-N.Y.), chairman of a House subcommittee responsible for housing, complained that the administration’s policy of building new housing on the sites of demolished projects--rather than moving tenants entirely into the private market--is a half-step that will leave many of the nation’s poor cut off from good jobs and schools.
“We are not making progress when we are simply replacing bad housing with new housing in the same inferior locations and that is unfortunately the strategy being pursued here,” said Lazio. “You are really not helping poor people break the cycle of poverty and move up.”
Times staff writer Nora Zamichow contributed to this story from Los Angeles.
