Article Spotlight: “Public Housing Did Not Fail in the U.S. But it Was Sabotaged.”
Photo: Banks Avenue Public Housing—Wikimedia Commons
One of this newsletter’s features is occasionally training a spotlight on important books and articles connected to our housing crisis. This week, we lift up “Public Housing Did Not Fail in the U.S. But It Was Sabotaged,” a December article in Vox by Abdallah Fayyad. The full article is linked here, and I hope you read it in its entirety on Vox’s site.
(I also encourage you to read Fayyad’s other excellent articles on race, class, poverty, criminal justice, etc. You can find them here. You may recall this newsletter previously commending Fayyad’s colleague Rachel Cohen’s thoughtful pieces on housing and other social policy topics, available here.)
I am an enormous fan of public housing. Years of experience and research have led me to conclude that public housing is the silver bullet that can end our current crisis.
For some people who know the work of our law school clinic, that view comes as a surprise. We have on multiple occasions helped residents of our local public housing agency sue over deeply unsafe, unhealthy conditions.
But less well known are two other facts about our clinic work: One, our clients living in public housing largely want to remain there. That is especially true for our clients who are seniors or living with disabilities, since they have built a community of mutual support even in challenging settings. And two, we almost never see residents of public housing in the eviction courts where we work—because they can afford their rent.
The inability to afford for-profit rent is the chief reason we see folks lined up in eviction court. A client we met a few weeks ago was scrambling each month to pay rent and utilities that actually added to more than 100% of his monthly disability check. By contrast, public housing rent is locked in at 30% of the residents’ income. For a person living on a disability income, that can mean rent at $300 per month, versus for-profit units that cost $1,000 or more. Affordability is the reason there are always huge waiting lists to get into public housing, in our community and beyond.
That doesn’t mean that our local public housing agency always does a good job providing its residents with a decent place to live. It doesn’t. But Fayyad’s important article points out that public housing is not always in bad condition--and it never has to be.
Fayyad’s first subhead tells the important origin story of U.S. public housing: “A Bold Experiment That Was Designed to Fail.”
From day one, the for-profit real estate industry attacked public housing, successfully lobbying the federal government to cap construction costs that forced the use of cheap materials, aggressively segregating public housing, and blocking the mixed-income public housing models that work so well in other nations.
“The demise of public housing was not an inevitable outcome,” Fayyad writes, “Other countries have successfully pulled it off. Governments around the world have shown that they can operate mixed-income housing developments that have reliable maintenance and upkeep and that public housing doesn’t have to segregate poor people away from the middle class.”
Fayyad also rightly points out that U.S. public housing’s image is often worse than the reality. After all, it does provide affordable housing to our clients and two million other residents across the country. And many of those homes are clean and safe. Fayyad cites the conclusion of housing historian Edward Goetz: “The story of American public housing is one of quiet successes drowned out by loud failures.”
Those failures are still quite real, as I can attest from first-hand observation. But substandard public housing is a problem that is easily fixed by investing in proper maintenance and repair, which could be fully funded by diverting just some of the billions we now spend subsidizing wealthy landlords.
As Fayyad concludes, “If America wants to be a public housing success story, it can. It just has to stop sabotaging its own efforts to get there.”
For other important reports on public housing, I encourage you to read this 2022 report by Human Rights Watch, “We Deserve to Have a Place to Live,” and this 2015 article in The Atlantic, “The Power of Public Housing.” I have written about U.S. public housing, “Public Housing Can be Great, Actually” and about successful public housing in places like Vienna and Singapore.
