How public housing was destined to fail

While the US public housing system may have started off with the intention of providing quality homes to low income and vulnerable populations, those efforts were quickly dashed by how the program was created and managed.

Inadequate funding, poor maintenance, and media sensationalization helped create a narrative of substandard slum living, and the system set up to help so many hardly stood a chance. Here is how the public housing system was doomed to failure.

The foundation of the public housing system was faulty from the beginning

Public housing emerged as a concept in the 19th century largely as a response to the prevalence of densely-packed, substandard “slums” in urban areas. The idea was that the public sector was better equipped to serve low-income households than private landlords. The federal government was tasked with financing construction of public housing units where slums currently stood, and local housing authorities would put together development deals to ensure completion.

While this system was formally established in 1937, the Housing Act of 1949 accelerated these efforts as part of a larger package of programs that set the goal of “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.”

The law consolidated public housing with other slum clearance housing programs, including the precursor to Urban Renewal, and dedicated funds to build up to 810,000 units of public housing nationwide by 1955. However, that goal was undermined in the same law, which also permitted housing segregation, capped federal contributions to public housing, and shrunk federal subsidy periods from 60 to 40 years.

Additionally, both the 1937 and the 1949 laws placed a ceiling on construction costs per room, disincentivizing use of quality materials despite the inclusion of modern appliances, and restricted use of annual federal disbursements to only cover the difference between operations needs and rent revenue.

The dawn of federal disinvestment

The next presidential administration had further reduced federal funds for public housing construction. Meanwhile, although hundreds of thousands of public housing units had been built by this time, the lack of continued investment in maintenance of public housing led to rapid deterioration.

From the outset, the federal government left maintenance funding and procedures up to each of the local housing authorities, presuming that rental revenue at each development would cover maintenance costs.

Housing authorities, which tasked third-party property management companies with overseeing repairs, were able to blame lack of federal funds or mismanagement for lax or inconsistent upkeep, and management companies could point to low rental revenue to justify deferred maintenance.

The rental revenue gap was widened further as households were forced to move once their incomes exceeded maximum requirements, perpetuating concentration of poor households together. Neglected maintenance and stringent regulations led to public housing replicating the same issues seen in the slums that housing was meant to replace.

In tandem with public housing residents enduring the reality of slumlord behavior from housing authorities, they also had to endure stigmatization and negative public perception. Along with general disdain for low-income people, federal investment in suburban homeownership solidified the white middle class and exacerbated housing segregation, particularly by backing affordable mortgages in areas with restrictive deed covenants.

This process cemented in the public’s imagination an association of Black people with the rundown highrises of the inner-city and white people with the curated sprawl of the suburbs. Housing segregation was similarly pronounced within DC, where land with restrictive covenants occasionally abutted whites-only public housing.

By the 1960s, the federal government began exploring different means of subsidizing housing rather than investing in new construction, including such approaches as permitting local housing authorities to rent units from private owners to sublet to households that would qualify for public housing, or letting housing authorities purchase newly-completed buildings directly from developers.

In the meantime, however, no innovative approaches to low-income housing could stem the tide of public intellectuals that frowned upon public housing and media coverage that sensationalized crime incidents.

Notably, influential journalist and urban sociologist Jane Jacobs cited several anecdotal examples of crime in public housing in her germinal 1961 text The Life and Death of Great American Cities, criticizing the slum clearance system and advocating instead for mixed-income, low-density developments.

“Both of these opera­tions, “renewal” projects and public housing projects, with their wholesale destruction, are inherently wasteful ways of rebuilding cities, and in comparison with their full costs make pathetic con­tributions to city values,” Jacobs wrote. “Project building as a form of city transformation makes no more sense financially than it does socially.”

A few years later, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan released “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (better known as the Moynihan Report), a text that shaped opinion on the plight of Black America for decades to come. While the report acknowledged the legacy of racism and enslavement, it also added fuel to stereotypes blaming single-parent households for crime and poverty, arguing that if more children were born into wedlock and in houses with employed fathers, there would be less welfare dependence. Moynihan also became known for recommending “benign neglect” of Black households after the 1968 riots leveled city corridors nationwide following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The Biggest Slumlord in History”

But the pendulum swung decidedly in favor of divesting from public housing in January 1973, when the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) George Romney, despite his personal opinions and under the direction of then-President Richard Nixon, announced an 18-month moratorium on slum clearance-and-development projects and new production of subsidized housing.

While this rule change was ostensibly to give HUD the opportunity to study and reform the public housing system to shift more responsibility for funding and construction to local authorities, it ended up doing more of the latter than the former.

A report submitted by HUD that year criticized how public housing was financed, noted inconsistencies among the standards within and enforcement of building codes nationwide, and highlighting the inefficiencies of federal housing policy toward low-income households.

By that fall, Nixon was declaring federal housing programs a failure, parroting mainstream characterizations by arguing that it was “wasteful” to build new housing for low-income households. In an address to Congress in September of 1973, Nixon further derided the existing public housing system, citing it as a failed experiment.

“I have seen a number of our public housing projects. Some of them are impressive, but too many are monstrous, depressing places—run down, overcrowded, crime-ridden, falling apart. The residents of these projects are often strangers to one another—with little sense of belonging. And because so many poor people are so heavily concentrated in these projects, they often feel cut off from the mainstream of American life….All across America, the Federal Government has become the biggest slumlord in history.”

A pivot from public housing to housing subsidies

Nixon insisted on a pivot toward giving low-income households voucher subsidies so they could find their own housing. Although this concept wasn’t broadly accepted at the time, it was enough to swing momentum to diversion of funds from construction and maintenance of public housing.

Public disdain toward government “giveaways” was further inflamed by images of the “welfare queen” in the late 1970s, which made the idea of simply subsidizing existing rental units more politically palatable over the two decades that followed. Mismanagement of federal funds by local housing authorities also cast doubt on the efficiency of spending more on public housing.

The District’s then-Department of Public and Assisted Housing (DPAH; now DC Housing Authority) was no exception: in 1977, DPAH requested and received funds from HUD to renovate 28 units deemed uninhabitable at the (one-time whites-only) Fort Dupont public housing community. Four years later, the funds remained unspent and rising costs led DPAH to request demolition of those units instead. After another two years, the demolition request increased to 112 units, and residents had already begun moving out or were threatened with eviction.

The debacle led residents to file a lawsuit (Edwards v. District of Columbia) which shone a light on the practice of demolition becoming a necessity due to willful neglect of housing maintenance.

HUD’s complicity in delaying consideration of DPAH’s initial demolition requests indicates the federal government’s shift in priorities, as HUD began testing out new means to relieve local public housing authorities from the financial pressures associated with housing low-income families. One of those means was the creation of Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) in 1986, which use taxes to incentivize the construction and renovation of affordable housing. These were first used in DC to build Atlantic Terrace in Washington Highlands and to update the historic Mayfair Mansions workforce housing development in Northeast. LIHTC has since grown to become the most prevalent source of affordable housing units nationwide.

The 1990s was primarily marked by establishing a series of programs meant to reform the housing system, including HOPE VI, which awarded federal grants to replace public housing with mixed-income units, and Moving to Work (MTW), which gives some housing authorities more flexibility to experiment with federal funds. In DC, HOPE VI kicked off with the construction of the Townhomes at Capitol Hill on the former site of the Ellen Wilson Dwellings, and MTW has primarily been used to cover operating expenses and subsidize vouchers in more submarkets citywide.

By then, the DC Housing Authority could not begin implementing subsidies and renovations fast enough — after all, HUD had graded the city’s public housing portfolio a 22.38 on a 100-point scale, identifying 2,000 out of roughly 11,000 units as inhabitable in a 1992 audit.

As a result of the pivot to redevelopments and the increased reliance on vouchers, over 250,000 public housing units nationwide (and over 4,000 in DC in the past three decades) have been demolished or converted via subsidies, federal funds for public housing have steadily decreased, and negative public perception of subsidized housing has become further entrenched. Between 2002 and 2017, federal dollars for both maintenance (via the Public Housing Operating Fund) and renovations (via the Public Housing Capital Fund) decreased in all but two fiscal years.

A 2010 HUD study noted a nationwide backlog of $26 billion in capital funds; the DC Housing Authority more recently cited the need for $1.3 billion to bring its portfolio up to standard. That public housing was allowed to fail is the cumulative effect of decades of public disdain toward, federal disinvestment from, and poor mismanagement of public housing.

Correction: The original version of this article incorrectly inferred that President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration was in power in 1951. The article has since been corrected.