The Need for Racial Justice in National Housing Policy
Chicago’s Cabrini Green, the quintessential example of disaster in public housing. Photo by John White.
Who deserves protection under the umbrella of the welfare state? Exclusively the destitute? Or does everyone deserve assistance in attaining certain basic entitlements? The relationship of the United States government with housing centers around its response to this question. To that end, American housing policy has been defined by two approaches, each flawed, progressing upon one another historically. First, from 1949 to 1993, the government committed itself to supporting only the most destitute. The approach did not yield positive outcomes, instead being widely characterized by segregation, concentrated poverty, and neglect. When it became apparent that this was a massive failure, Congress attempted to reimagine those fundamental questions about the role of a welfare state in a new policy approach. It launched a new system in 1992; instead of taking on the burden of providing housing itself, it opted to cede as much control as possible to private developers through a grant system. This attempted to fix previous errors that created communities of concentrated poverty by dictating that grants integrate affordable housing into middle class communities. The reforms have been controversial; the problem of creating these new model communities is that it drastically decreases the proportion of affordable housing produced by each dollar of government funding. While it has been said that residents who lived in the neglected communities created by the old government-run model are much better off in new mixed income communities, with access to better employment, education, and quality housing, the problem is they rarely make it there. The new approach has ultimately proven damaging to most of the low-income residents whom these policies initially claimed to serve.
There is another critical issue to examine with contemporary housing policy, aside from the national government’s decision to step back and attempt to meet the demand for affordable housing through models of privatization; to date, American housing policies have not taken adequate account of race and racism. Whether by deliberately promoting segregation or failing to positively redress long-standing discrimination, national policies have prevented millions of minorities who are statistically most in need of housing from attaining those stable housing outcomes as well as broader economic prosperity.
Early public housing in America: a welfare policy for the impoverished
To understand problems in contemporary housing policy, one must return to decisions made nearly 100 years ago when the national government first became engaged in housing. In the midst of the Great Depression, mass poverty and class-conflict created a unique opportunity for reorganizing society and unprecedented attention was paid to social welfare. However, in response to real estate lobbies fearing competition, government funded housing took on a particular character; Congress committed to serve an exclusively low-income population, plans that optimistically envisioned a “compassionate stopover for the working poor.” The negative consequence of this choice would emerge over time.
In the wake of WWII, as the United States prepared for unprecedented economic boom, the character of public housing was fundamentally altered. Public housing was no longer intended for the downtrodden middle class, as during Depression years. Instead, it was reserved for the most destitute, which–due to a longstanding history of institutional and social discrimination–were predominantly Black Americans. Official policy per the Housing Act of 1949 was to provide “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.” But importantly, this was accomplished in different ways for white people than it was for minorities. As Columbia University historian Ira Katznelson explains in his book When Affirmative Action Was White, the G.I. bill propelled white families into middle class homeownership through subsidized loans without requirement for down payments. These opportunities were not extended across racial lines. Subsidized housing was provided for families of color almost exclusively through the sprawling system of public housing, which was far from a path to middle class life. This stratification exerted a natural pressure towards the economic segregation of public housing, though it was also facilitated through an explicit process: the Housing Act of 1949 set a limit on incomes for applicants and accepted only those who “lived in unsafe, insanitary, or overcrowded dwellings, or displaced by public slum-clearance or redevelopment project.” The combination of these shortcomings resulted in a concentration of destitute residents in public housing, isolated from social and economic integration.
A classic example of the practical consequences of the Housing Act of 1949 can be seen in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, where housing policies created a community marked by racial segregation and concentrated poverty. Cabrini-Green, constructed in 1942, was originally a predominantly white community. But it was transformed over a period of two decades, in no small part by the Housing Act of 1949, into an impoverished and overwhelmingly nonwhite population. Recognizing this shift in the racial diversity is critical to understanding why it failed. It is imprudent and unjust for governments to attempt to concentrate residents it views as undesirable in communities that are out of sight and out of mind. The strategy was not unique to Cabrini-Green or Chicago: it reflects a national mood of developing white communities at the expense of people of color. Underfunding and neglecting “undesirable” communities allowed social crises to blossom, creating challenges that local and national governments continue to grapple with to this day.
It is no exaggeration to say that Cabrini Green was set up to fail. As public housing funds dried up, and Chicago’s overall tax base eroded, in part due to white flight, the City Hall used its available funds to prioritize white neighborhoods. Basic services were withheld from Cabrini-Green such as police, transit, maintenance, and building upkeep. As Cabrini Green grew increasingly isolated from economic opportunities, employment rates plummeted and residents who had previously been responsible for paying a maintenance fee were no longer able to do so. Instead of addressing this, City Hall and the Chicago Housing Authority simply allowed the community to fall into disrepair. Lawns were paved over to save on maintenance. Broken lights were left powerless for months. The final 1,000 units that were added to Cabrini Green in 1962 were constructed on budgets so thin that their low-quality infrastructure was prone to frequent issues. When those units incurred damages, they were simply left vacant to save money instead of rehabbed and allocated to another resident. Severe economization resulted in a policy of decay and neglect, and a pleasant neighborhood of garden apartments soon became a deteriorating concrete jungle of deep poverty and boarded windows. Crime, gangs, and drugs thrived in a community deprived of economic and educational opportunities. It was textbook structural poverty, sanctioned by the United States government. Cabrini-Green became infamous as the neighborhood that “represented everything wrong with public housing in America.”
Paradigm shift in nationwide approaches
While these problems were particularly prevalent in Cabrini-Green, American public housing at-large was increasingly identified with decaying infrastructure, crime epidemics, and social isolation throughout the later 20th century. Troubled by this, Congress established a national commission in 1989 to investigate and respond to the dire circumstances. It noted critical conditions in which residents were “paralyzed by fear of widespread neighborhood crime, incapable of securing meaningful employment, confined to safe and unsanitary units, and unable to access much needed self-sufficiency programs.” To combat these problems it launched a new policy objective in 1992, HOPE VI, to fundamentally redefine its public housing approach. HOPE VI would no longer prioritize housing the extremely poor. Instead, it aimed to revitalize public housing through public-private partnerships that would provide homes integrated into surrounding communities where both market-rate renters and public housing beneficiaries would reside. Integration was intended to provide welfare recipients access to pillars of social mobility, including quality education and employment opportunities. Segregated, impoverished, and ill-maintained high-rise projects would be demolished. Importantly, there were no measures to redress the racial inequality that had been nourished through previous housing policies. Reforms treated the housing crisis as a purely economic issue: a decision at the root of its continued ineptitude.
Mixed-income communities were successful in some cases, with a number of neighborhoods experiencing growth in per capita income as well as significant decreases in unemployment rates, dependence on government aid, and crime. But there are also undesirable side effects to making mixed-income housing a policy prerogative in order to reduce concentrated poverty: as influxes of higher income residents pour into these communities, they gentrify it and resegregate it with a population of upper income, predominantly white residents. The government is then needed to provide deeper and deeper subsidies to keep rent within the bounds of incomes for beneficiaries, and fewer and fewer people are able to be assisted and afford housing.
This was precisely the case with HOPE VI reforms in Cabrini-Green. Owing to its existence atop the national consciousness of disastrous public housing projects, it was one of the first to receive a HOPE VI development grant in 1993. Over the course of 16 years, neat rows of townhomes replaced the old and dilapidated high-rise buildings. A mixed-income resident profile was aggressively pursued: 50% of units were listed at market price, 20% subsidized moderately for the working poor, and 30% designated as public housing. The influx of middle-class families transformed Cabrini from a predominantly Black community to increasingly white. Displacement was a central issue. A small fraction of former residents were granted access to the new townhomes, while most were pushed to substandard housing on Chicago’s periphery and denied the opportunity to return.
When “revitalization” becomes equivalent to gentrification, these communities remain segregated: the pendulum merely swings in the opposite direction. Federal audits determined that just 11.4% of former residents return to revitalized HOPE developments, while the majority are displaced to peripheral areas that are equivalently racially segregated and socially isolated. Thus, the mixed-income approaches only ameliorate problems of concentrated poverty, leaving segregation largely untouched.
Lessons for equitable housing
Failures in both the specific case of Cabrini-Green as well as national housing policy at-large are a reminder of America’s persistent racial divisions. Inequalities extend far beyond segregated, substandard public housing, they are apparent in education, employment, healthcare and life expectancy, legal access, law enforcement relations, and prison populations.
Problems rooted in racial inequality cannot be eradicated by solutions designed to curb economic inequality. Eliminating poverty and racial inequality is a much more extensive undertaking than bulldozing dilapidated infrastructure and forcing the residents elsewhere, as if welfare beneficiaries are pieces of dust being swept around a room. Sustainable communities depend on open spaces, reliable public transit, quality schools, robust employment opportunities, community centers, and equitable city services. The aforementioned 11.4% relocation rate of former residents to redeveloped communities is insufficient, and why scholars assert, “the racial pendulum has swung too far from Black to white in many HOPE VI developments.”
Policies that facilitate mixed-income communities provide quality housing resources to wealthy residents at the expense of the displacement of an ever increasing proportion of working class people most in need of housing. While the initial integration of higher income residents into the community may appear to successfully create diverse communities, Northwestern Professor and expert on HOPE VI reforms Thomas Kost proclaims it “inevitably succumbs to the homogenizing force of officially sanctioned gentrification.” Even though the stated goal of these policies is racial integration, the constant pressure of gentrification undermines any kind of long term attainment. Once segregated communities of Black Americans living in concentrated poverty then become gentrified and predominantly white communities. Meanwhile, the root causes of the housing crisis, as well as the widespread need for immediate aid, remain unaddressed.
To tackle today’s salient housing problems, local and national authorities must recognize the strong link between race and class within American society; racial minorities are the most affected by poverty, which is an outcome that came about by deliberate historical processes. Racial segregation and concentrated poverty in public housing did not happen by accident. Economic disparities are a symptom of the underlying disease that has pervaded American society: systemic racism. Its ills have been embedded within housing systems across the nation: through redlining, urban renewal, restrictive covenants, disinvestment, and white flight. Katherine Gonsalves, who writes on the historical progression and legacies of discrimination in national housing policy, proclaims “the ghetto is not just a place but a structural process.” Racial discrimination in public housing was the source of the ensuing issues of concentrated poverty that Congress faced when it undertook the HOPE VI reforms: but in treating it as purely an economic problem and ignoring the underlying root, policies are utterly incapable of a lasting remedy. Thus, when shaping policy that addresses the combined problems of racial and economic disparities in housing, policies must be oriented around racial justice and integration. Income deconcentration will be addressed as a byproduct, but importantly, whenever there is a policy conflict the race-conscious prerogatives must take precedence. This is the best way to aid those stakeholders to which national housing policy actually is intended to serve, and more broadly remedy root causes of poverty and urban decay.
Professor Ulf Torgensen famously declared housing as the “wobbly pillar of the welfare state.” But housing is integral to effective and equitable policies and societies–it cannot be that wobbly pillar. It also must be integrated into a broader welfare strategy, as sustainable housing policy is intimately connected with good employment and educational opportunities. Forging an egalitarian and democratic society depends on ensuring all people have quality access to all these pillars of social mobility: housing, employment, and education.
Traolach O’Sullivan (GS’24) is a staff writer at Columbia Political Review studying History. He enjoys writing articles late into the night at Kent Hall.