Should Door to Public Housing Ever Be Closed?

With the dawn of the new welfare age, America ordered 11 million aid recipients to get a job.

Now, should 3 million residents of public housing be told to secure places of their own? What about the 7 million more whose rent is partly paid by government vouchers?

“Why should somebody who qualifies for public housing then become subsidized for life?” asks Howard Husock, a housing expert at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Giving public-housing residents a deadline to find a private roof and four walls, he wrote recently in an influential housing journal, “would nicely reinforce the message . . . sent by time limits on cash public assistance.”

While evictions are not likely any time soon, such talk is percolating beyond the pages of the Journal of Housing and Community Development, which featured Husock’s plea on its May-June cover.

Rep. James P. Moran (D-Va.) proposed in May that tenants be forced to leave subsidized units after five years if the local public-housing authority has a waiting list of one year or more (most large cities do).

Republicans liked the idea, promising to fight for a pilot project on housing limits and to hold congressional hearings. The House of Representatives and the Senate will discuss requiring able-bodied adult residents to name a “target date” for moving out.

Earlier this spring, a federal judge in Texas assigned a mediator to settle a lawsuit against the Galveston Housing Authority and recommended a “wholesale revamping,” including a limit on the number of years a family or individual could live in public housing.

Most public-housing tenants do leave within five years; annual turnover is about 15%. But 25% stay a decade or more.

Here in Chicago, home of the nation’s third-largest public-housing agency (behind New York and Puerto Rico), there is already plenty of reform in the air. The federal government has taken over. The wrecker’s ball is biting into high-rises at notorious projects where gangs battle over the drug trade while the virtuous cower. The working class is being wooed to come live as neighbors in new townhomes with the poorest of the poor.

But a deadline does not sit well with Joseph Shuldiner, the official dispatched from Washington to oversee the changes.

Noting that there is considerable overlap between public-housing tenants and welfare recipients whose benefits are winding down, he wondered: “How much change can be thrown at a family at one time?”

Once a person loses shelter, he added, “it’s a great inhibitor in getting a job.” How to stay clean, make appointments, get messages?

Most of all, Shuldiner worries that a time limit would undermine the very transformation he was sent here to champion. “The real issue,” he said, “is, what’s the goal here? More than just providing a physical unit, I believe [housing authorities] should be building strong communities. Low-income people should have an opportunity to live in those communities, and forcing them to leave would by definition mean an unstable community.” And an unstable community breeds crime, graffiti and decay, which in turn would repel the employed role models he is trying to lure.

History is not exactly on Shuldiner’s side. In the Depression era, government projects were founded on the “up and out” theory, which ran roughly like this: If poor people had a safe and sanitary place to live--an alternative to tenements and ramshackle bungalows--they would be so encouraged that they would stay in school and get jobs. The idea was that, once on their feet, they would leave within three to five years, making room for the next poor family.

Still, “I never heard of an actual deadline,” said Devereux Bowly Jr., author of a book about Chicago public housing from 1895 to 1976.

At first, the theory worked even without formal limits, but Bowly said that was largely because the hard-core underclass was kept out of the projects in the first place. A social worker inspected an applicant’s current dwelling; poor housekeepers didn’t make the cut. And once in, tenants were subjected to fines, such as the $1 exacted at Dearborn Homes for taking shortcuts across the grass.

“The real question facing public housing now is whether it should be housing of last resort,” Bowly said. “I think there is a case to be made that if you have a certain number of families who have problems, whether it is drugs or something else, that they need to be taken care of long-term.

“Can the private market really provide for such people? A deadline is going to cause some homelessness, and anything is better than the street.”