The Unkept Welfare Housing Promise
I was watching a local housing project resident on TV one night. The camera panned over a roach nest behind a sagging wall as she complained about poor maintenance and demanded that the Sarasota Housing Authority send a crew to fix her apartment. “We have rights, too, you know,” she said angrily.
But was this woman keeping up her side of the welfare bargain? Looking at her dirty apartment, it seemed liked she wasn’t. And why was she — unemployed, with plenty of time on her hands — demanding repairs instead of asking for tools and training so she could do the work herself? Welfare is a two-way street. Ideally it’s a hand up, not a hand out. We seem to have lost that thought somewhere along the way, and we need to get it back. And we can, once we get beyond the old-style “liberal vs. conservative” folderol and start thinking of new ways to deal with people who are having trouble finding jobs or having trouble making ends meet even if they work.
Generous but budget-minded
I am “liberal” enough to believe a country as rich as the United States should provide basic food, housing, clothing, and medical care for all of its citizens. I am also “conservative” enough to believe people who receive government largesse aren’t entitled to the same lifestyle as people who work hard for their money.
Some years ago I wrote a blistering op-ed piece for the Baltimore Sun about the excessive cost of subsidized housing. Back then my wife, her teen-aged son, and I were living comfortably in a single-wide trailer I’d bought for $14,000. I found it outrageous that Baltimore City was spending $240,000 per unit to build new housing projects. Why, I wondered, was I living in a low-cost house trailer while my tax money bought lawyer-priced townhouses for people who didn’t necessarily work? Couldn’t HUD (which paid for the Baltimore Welfare Mansions) buy house trailers instead? Why couldn’t people who were paying either reduced rent or no rent at all live the way we did?
The trailer park we lived in at the time was very nice: Lots of greenery; surrounded by streams and woods; a community pool; underground utiltiies; well-maintained common areas. There were a few non-working “Section 8″ people — mostly handicapped — living there on rent subsidies, but most of our neighbors were working, taxpaying citizens: Plumbers, cops, mechanics, and so on. The cost of building a similar park, brand-new, would have been no more than $60,000 per unit including land and all lot improvements, and with smaller lots, fewer amenities, and bulk trailer purchases it could have been done for less than $40,000 per unit. It seemed to me that if HUD and the local housing authorities were sincere about housing as many people as possible per dollar, they would have gone this route instead of opting for high-end townhouses.
That’s when I ran into the dirty secret of the whole “welfare housing” scheme:
Welfare housing isn’t there to help poor people
Housing subsidy dollars don’t go into poor people’s pockets. They go to the landlords, contractors, government employees, and others who build and maintain those properties. While you and I, as taxpayers, want to see tax money that goes toward housing used to bring as much benefit as possible to as many people as possible, the people who get that money want to get as much money per unit and per hour as they can. No one in this chain — from the landlords renting units to Section 8 recipients to the government workers and contractors doing rehab and maintenance on goverment-owned housing — is interested in having subsidized housing residents do their own repair work or in helping them build new dwellings for themselves. And those contractors, landlords, and workers shudder at the idea of low-cost, factory-built housing because they can’t make nearly as much money from it as from traditional construction.
Doing it differently
Why can’t we set up “house factories” staffed by people who are out of work? Why can’t people who work in those house factories then get priority placement in new developments when they are built? The reason assembly-line production is cheaper than craftsmanship is that it takes less training to perform the same act over and over than to build a whole house (or car or whatever) from scratch. Sure, you’d need to have some trained engineers, carpenters, and other tradespeople to run the place, but most of the work in a housing factory would be easy-to-learn repetitive tasks.
“But I have to stay home with my children,” is not a good excuse; if you have five single mothers, one can take care of all their kids while the other four work. “I can’t do heavy labor because I’m disabled,” is a similarly poor excuse. Housing factories and housing parks need people to track inventories, inspect subassemblies, pick up trash, do security patrols and watch security cameras, and perform many other tasks that are not hard physically and vary in the amount of mental acumen they require. A cleverly-managed housing factory and park could find work for every potential resident, even those considered too handicapped to function in “normal” jobs.
An aside: On a simple and immediate level, why aren’t housing projects the cleanest places in town? Why do they so often look trashy and unkempt? Why aren’t all residents required to spend at least a few hours every week picking up trash, raking leaves or doing minor landscaping and painting? If I was running a housing project, I would institute a resident work requirement in about two seconds. If anyone didn’t show up for their details three months in a row, I’d evict them. After the first six months — and a few dozen evictions — I bet there’d be no problem getting people to show up for their assigned hours — and that “my” project would have a long waiting list because it would be the cleanest, nicest-looking one around.
It’s good to help those who are less fortunate than ourselves, but I see no reason to provide anything beyond the simplest, most basic accomodations, and I see no reason why either government or private largesse should be thought of primarily as a way to put profits into pockets of people theoretically able to fend for themselves instead of funneling it directly to the people who need it most. My system doesn’t require land near central cities, either. I see no reason why anyone has a “right” to live in a certain place that might be best used for something other than low-cost housing.
Let’s put our camps out at the edges of the suburbs, even in the country. Sure, have (free) bus service to shopping and jobs, with drivers drawn from the camp population, same as we want to draw most of the building and maintenance staff from the camps. The air is purer outside of cities, anyway, and kids who might get into trouble playing in city streets might do better if they have a little greenery around them. Once upon a time, poor people lived in the country and rich people lived in the city. This was a fine pattern. We should return to it.
Everybody works
My camp system is also an educational institution. If you live there, you work. You may not work full-time, but you will do your share to keep the place clean and neat. Your food may not be prepackaged, but you will have access to plenty of healthy rice, beans, meat, poultry, and other basics you need to cook tasty meals. In my system, you won’t be able to sit on your butt and whine about your “rights.” If you want something done you’d better be prepared to help do it. If you want better food you’d better get on that (free) bus, go into town, and find a job. If you want to get a better job and you need new skills we’ll happily help you learn, just as we’ve helped you learn basic things like showing up on time as a condition of life in this better-than-normal subsidized community.
I’d have no problem with “pocket” entrepreneurs, either — people selling candy or sno-cones out of their houses. There are people who simply can’t hold down real jobs for one reason or another, and I see no reason to deny them a chance to do something from home to draw in a little extra income — which had better be split at least partly with the community in the form of extra rent.
The main thing is that there is contribution of some sort, from everyone, whether it’s in the form of streetsweeping, builidng or repairing dwellings, or cash from an outside job. This is a hand up, not a hand out.
Under my system, people would automatically get enough training and experience that they would be suitable for “real work” before long. If they wanted to stay in the camp and pay market-rate rent, fine. If they wanted to move on, that’s also fine. And there may be some who choose to do the absolute minimum and never acquire real skills. We’ll put up with them as well. As long as they do the minimum, why should we push them? Perhaps they’d rather put their energy into home-schooling their kids or writing novels than learning job skills. Or perhaps they’re just lazy. Some people are.
We’re talking about an institution that is cheap to run. Add a decent-sized farm to it and it could be nearly self-sustaining, not to mention the fact that farming work doesn’t take any great mental skill and can lead to market-rate employment.
In any case, a work farm — even if that’s a name we don’t like to hear these days — could be a clean, pleasant, low-cost place to live for people who don’t have anywhere else decent to go. It would be as fair a way to provide a basic “safety net” as any other we’ve come up with in this country so far — and one that would ask recipients of taxpayers’ generosity to put something back in the pot, thereby making “subsidized housing” a bargain that required responsible behavior from people on both sides of the equation instead of a system that demands nothing from its “clients” in return for what they receive from it.