AMERICA'S HOUSING MESS

I was born an urbanite. My home city was voted the most densely populated city in the United States in the 1950's. About 45,000 people in just under one square mile. Urban density is a subject I know quite a bit about.

Our small city, adjacent to Boston, had a couple of housing projects which were built post-WWII. While the hubbub of the city's streets was generally amicable and free of violence, the projects were off limits to children who lived near them. I had a few close encounters with the minute gangsters of one of the projects which was close to my own neighborhood. It always puzzled me. Why were these peers so different, so angry, so aggressively violent?

I learned to accept that housing projects simply were vortexes of negativity. Attending my Jesuit prep school on the other side of Boston from where I lived confirmed this opinion. A huge high-rise public housing project sat on a point of harborside land adjacent to my prep school. It was known as "Columbia Point" back then.

That public housing project has subsequently been torn down and replaced by a mixed-income gated community with green parks. University of Massachusetts has also absorbed some of the land where the asphalt-concrete hell once existed. Our Jesuit faculty cautioned us against ever venturing into that hell. So, one afternoon, several of us did. We were heckled, hit with projectiles and chased out of the place before we got very far into it. We felt lucky to escape without serious injury.

Throughout my half century of big-city living since leaving my native small city behind, I have occasionally lived near public housing projects in Boston and New York. They have always troubled those neighborhoods around them. Daytime burglary, the threat of gang violence at night, having to circumnavigate the project to get to anything on its other side. The site of roving adolescents in a group coming out of a housing project raises an alarm for any savvy urbanite.

Boston's South End, now a posh urban oasis for young posh urbanites, was undergoing gentrification by gay men and lesbian women when I last lived there in the 1980's. It had been a rundown slum of previously respectable single-family brick townhouses. Waves of cheap immigrant labor and the flight of prosperous owners to the leafy streetcar-accessible suburbs of Brookline and Newton had created a nasty convergence of absentee landlords, low rents and poor upkeep.

The presence of the left-behind Catholic cathedral and its archbishopric in the South End, combined with the city's overwhelmingly Irish and Italian Catholic political elite, led to the development of three massive public housing projects to be followed during the years of gentrification by several large single-block apartment buildings, plunked down in the middle of the rehabilitated zones.

What was the result of all that socialist 'charity' that went into building publicly owned housing? Despite doing the city a service by improving its South End immensely in a matter of two decades with private capital, Boston's gay-lesbian community was constantly ravaged by gangs originating in the public housing projects. Stabbings, beatings, robberies. The attitude of the Boston Police, then headquartered nearby, was punctuated by shrugs and yawns. Most of the crime went unreported.

What sort of genius would imagine that concentrating poor, addicted and uneducated people on welfare in one location would benefit them or the communities around them?

The Reagan Era saw a wave of intelligence as antidote for these misguided policies of previous Democrat administrations and Congresses. Privatization, which can sometimes be equated with theft of public assets by capitalists, brought some sanity to providing affordable housing for those who showed merit. Building large publicly-owned housing projects became passe. A huge step forward for cities and their poorer inhabitants. Unfortunately, many projects still remain.

Mixed-income privately-owned housing has largely replaced the concept of concentrated publicly owned housing. And, if administered appropriately, it can be a win-win for all involved. It seems obvious that exposing a less successful population to a more successful population of renters or owners will educate the former and the latter. As long as the property is administered by a responsible overseer that enforces rules and regulations indiscriminately, the win-win is a no-brainer.

But...

Peter, whom I met 17 years ago, used to live in mixed-income subsidized housing during the first nine years of our relationship. We also rented an apartment in a mixed-income complex after we moved from our previous home until we moved to our current location. In other words, my opinions on the subject are not purely theoretical.

The Obama-Biden administration (2009-2017) engaged in social engineering by way of forcing suburban governments around major cities to require developers to build an increased number of "affordable" housing units in new developments. This in itself doesn't sound bad. However, their policy was racialist and ethnocentric, rather than economic. Under the policy, suburban governments are required to file intricate applications based in demographics of sex, race, ethnicity and national origins.

The Obama-Biden policy seeks to end zoning restrictions to pave the way for massive developments with larger numbers of "affordable" units. These developments would replace the green streets and small-scale single-family homes of suburban neighborhoods with fat blocks of apartments and condos. This contradicts the superficial pro-green press of the Obama-Biden administration. In fact, these housing policies are guaranteed to produce ugly urban sprawl.

The Trump administration, with Dr. Carson at the head of HUD, has suspended this executive order through that agency. One of the counterproductive regulations that the Trump administration has eliminated. However, so-called Progressive suburbs may well continue to hector developers with increased pressures to accommodate subsidized renters and lower-income buyers. The net effect of this on the ground is a mistrust of suburban governments by resident taxpayers. The NIMBY rebound is obvious to anyone who has attended meetings of neighborhood associations, as I have.

Why do so many people feel the need for subsidized housing in a country where home ownership is more accessible than it is in most nations on the planet? And why is home ownership declining in relation to population growth?

It is easy to throw stones at the banking system, but the reality is that interest rates on mortgages have been at an all time low for almost two decades. The financial crisis of 2008 wasn't due to banks being stingy with mortgages. Quite the opposite. They were being too liberal with granting them to customers who were unable or unwilling to make their payments on time.

We are a nation of obese people on food stamps. That fact alone speaks to the failure of structured primary education provided by local governments. For at least two generations, the youth of America have been failed by teachers who are obsessed with race, ethnicity and class. Public school budgets have been eviscerated by illegal immigration. So much time and expense has been spent on educating students with English as a second language, that English-speakers have been deprived of a deep curriculum. 

The failure of public education to teach basic capitalist economics to students from an early age works well for those who profit from mindless consumerism. Those same profiteers are the first to cry "free market" when the government intervenes against them. But how "free" is a market that is stacked against ignorant consumers? It isn't. It is rigged.

The reduction in home ownership coincides with the mushrooming of massive rental housing corporations, like Avalon and Amherst Holdings. The glut of foreclosures after 2008 was feasted upon by investment companies, which now specialize in rental of single-family houses. 

Soon the white picket fence may only be available to rent for the vast number of American families. This is a form of rent servitude, like sharecropping. Tenants are doomed to a lifetime of no equity and the necessity to move in accordance to their ability to afford rents in less expensive areas if they are unable to earn in sync with inflation.

These mega-landlords placate local authorities by conforming to token rules on "affordable" housing, like the Obama-Biden rules. For part of 2017, Peter and I rented a unit from a mega-landlord in a sprawling complex. Our unit was at market price and barely affordable for us. Ground-floor units were occupied by people on some form of subsidy. Some of these units were beehives of prostitution and drug dealing late at night. Since they were at parking-lot level, they operated like drive-in dispensaries. 

The ground level unit three floors below ours was frequented by a local policeman who came and went with packages on a daily basis. Late at night, the female occupant, apparently a single mother of three, had many male visitors in sequence. Each stayed for about an hour. Perhaps she was reading palms? 

In any case, the atmosphere of the 300-unit complex was tainted by the ground floor units. Few tenants would walk around the buildings. I myself was approached by a female prostitute in the middle of the afternoon. She came from her first floor patio in a neglige to ask if I wanted company. When I declined politely, she giggled and rejoined her three companions on the patio. She obviously had no clue how out of place she seemed to an urbanite now renting in the suburbs for $3000 a month.

My point is simply that the great freedom of homeownership in America is being undermined by the lack of education among our average citizens. And the federal government has a hand in it. By doing abysmal social engineering to accommodate the unsuccessful and uninformed, governments are ensuring an ever growing population of people who will need support to afford to pay the high rents of corporate landlords. 

If those who are profiting immensely from rental serfdom are not more appropriately taxed, the whole scheme will eventually collapse. This is obvious. If workers are paying exorbitant rents, they will not be paying high taxes. If the indigent, who do not pay significant taxes, must be subsidized, where will the money come from to pay those subsidies? 

It is truly despicable that our politicians have gotten us to this place. Our nation's greatest strength was its huge land mass in proportion to its population. It made us the reliable food source for much of the world for many decades. It also gave the promise that any American could eventually own a small patch of land and a home. That equity was the promise of prosperity for subsequent generations. And now, within a couple of generations, that equity has been decimated by bad education, dropping wages, unwise consumerism and urban sprawl. 

The Soviet Union was a monumental failure. Home equity did not exist in the Soviet system or previously in the Chinese Communist system. The Chinese Communist system has lasted in part due to its surrender to capitalism, most notably in its large millionaire population. That population, which has driven the economic revitalization of China, has acquired home equity in the form of suburban mansions and other real property. It is likely that the equity they have accumulated will induce them to remain much more supportive of Beijing than they would be otherwise. 

The disillusioned mobs of young people who are rioting in America may well have good reason beyond the trend of the month. They have been indoctrinated by poor education on all levels to embrace a false Marxist narrative. The unattainability of equity in our society will not persuade them otherwise. They may all expect to be coddled and subsidized throughout their lives by government, but they simply do not understand that there is nobody interested in paying for it. The tent cities of the future may well be massive.