Why should I work hard to pay a mortgage, while my tax dollars go to a government plan to help other people pay their living expenses? Is this fair? On the surface it looks like a pretty bad deal, and in some cases it is, but it is important to realize and understand when and why these programs were first instituted and who the beneficiaries were earlier in history. Our country is based on the idea of equality, and to believe in this, we must judge equally. Therefore, to justify the reasons for public housing in the era of the Great Depression (used for the “temporarily poor”), we must also accept the reasons for it in the current era.
It is important that we first discuss how public housing is defined. While the common name states “public housing,” it is actually the exact opposite. Public housing is defined as government owned housing for the poor. It is housing that is aimed at low income families and generally does not have a fixed rent, but instead has a rent based upon the individual family’s monthly income, or can even be paid by government plans. Public housing is most often found in major cities in the form of apartments or multi-family houses.
Public housing is not a new phenomenon, and has been instituted in many other countries besides the United States. The history of public housing “goes back to the New Deal’s Public Works Administration, whose housing division constructed over twenty-one-thousand units by 1937. (Next) came the Wagner-Steagall Act of 1937, which established the United States Housing Authority, empowered to make construction loans to specially created local housing authorities and to provide subsidies…to the housing authorities to keep the rents at levels the poor could afford” (Freedman, 1969, p.2). During World War II, there was a large amount of government housing built for wartime workers, “with more than one-hundred-seventy thousand new permanent units, some of which were absorbed into the public housing program after the war” (Freedman, 1969, p. 3). All of these factors led to the beginnings of public housing.
Public housing became a major issue towards the end of the Great Depression. Unemployment was at an all-time high, leaving many Americans penniless. As unemployment grew and incomes fell, many families could not afford any kind of housing and were forced to live in makeshift shelters, resulting in the emergence of city slums. In order to control this, the Housing Act of 1937 was passed “to alleviate present and recurring unemployment and to remedy the unsafe and insanitary housing conditions and the acute shortage of decent, safe, and sanitary dwellings for families of low income” (Bratt, 1989, p. 55). This new government policy quickly annoyed many real estate owners because they argued that the emergence of government subsidized real estate would drive down their current prices, based on the law of supply and demand. To accommodate the private market, the new legislation included an “equivalent elimination” provision requiring local housing authorities to eliminate a substandard or unsafe dwelling unit for each new unit of public housing built. Public housing could replace inadequate units, but it was not to increase the overall supply of housing, since doing so could drive down rents in the private housing market (Bratt, 1989, p. 56). In addition, the Housing Act of 1937 created the United States Housing Authority (renamed the Federal Public Housing Administration in 1942, then Public Housing Administration in 1947) (Federal, RHOL, 2006).
As the Great Depression faded away, many financially stable families continued to use public housing as a means of saving money. The families now had incomes that were enough to satisfy most rental or mortgage contracts, but they still could be found living in government-subsidized housing. Again, this angered many real estate capitalists in the private market, arguing that the Housing Act of 1937 was again lowering their profits. The government agreed that in light of this, new provisions needed to be made to further separate who would qualify for public housing assistance. The Housing Act of 1949 “limited public housing to very-low-income people by requiring that the highest rents be twenty percent lower than the lowest prevailing rents for decent housing in the private market, and by authorizing the eviction of above-income families” (Bratt, 1989, p. 58). This newly implemented section was a way of making public housing available only to the very poor.
Modern day public housing is controlled by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, also known as HUD. Presently, there are approximately 1.3 million households living in public housing in the U.S. and they are monitored by over 3,300 housing agencies (HUD, 2006). A local housing agent verifies that an applicant meets the eligibility requirements based on annual income, health qualifications (elderly, disabled, or low-income family), and citizenship or immigration status. To qualify, a lower income applicant must be at eighty percent of the median income for the county they reside in, or fifty percent of the median income for a very low-income applicant (HUD, 2006). After qualifying, the waiting lists can be very long and preference is given to certain applicants, so not everyone is guaranteed housing.
In the beginning of this essay, I asked a question. I deliberately began this paper with that question, “Why should I work hard to pay a mortgage, while my tax dollars go to a government plan to help other people pay their living expenses”. This question is one of the main reasons that public housing is considered a failure. If a person was asked about the government’s Medicare program, they undoubtedly would be in favor of it. We all get old and we all anticipate retiring. We also anticipate the need for some sort of Medicare assistance in the future in our own personal lives, and therefore it directly affects us. Medicare cuts across the lines of the rich and the poor because we all will need help dealing with the ever-growing costs of medical treatment. We don’t all need public housing, and most people never will use any of the funds that are taken from their taxes to fund public housing. This makes getting the funding for public housing very tough.
In 1965 Congress passed the Economics Opportunities Act, two different “aid to education” bills, and the Medicare program (HUD, 2006). In this same session, Congress passed a rent subsidy provision of a housing bill by the barest possible margin, and concluded its session by refusing to appropriate funds for the program. The behavior of Congress is symptomatic of the status of public housing in the United States: while there is an increasing willingness to extend and implement public welfare policies in many new directions, there is no similar willingness to extend and support public housing programs” (Pynoos, 1973, p.114).
Many of the opinions about public housing are based on the deserving and the undeserving. When we look at a program such as the education provisions of 1965, they are enacted to protect people from losing the right to education based on their financial status. It doesn’t matter if you are poor or rich, if you are working hard to achieve an education, everything possible will be done to help you achieve your goal. The key word in this matter is “working”. The government is rewarding these individuals for putting effort into something, but if the individual’s grades are not satisfactory or they drop out, the award is no longer given. In other words, a deserving individual is rewarded for their efforts, but also held accountable and their financial reward is based on some kind of performance standard that must be held. Also, once the individual achieves their goal (i.e. a college degree), the benefits stop and the graduate is expected to provide for themselves with the training. Public housing’s rules don’t make individuals live up to these standards.
Public housing has been met with disapproval because it is viewed as rewarding an undeserving individual. Its requirements have nothing to do with the performance of an individual, and more often than not, it rewards those that underachieve. “Job retraining programs, for example, are self limiting; that is, once the individual is retrained, aid stops, and he is once again on his own. Public housing does not have a self limiting mechanism for the lower class; if a family’s income remains below a certain level it still retains its apartment…If family incomes is an index of achievement, then public aid continues even after lack of achievement has been demonstrated” (Pynoos, 1973, p. 115). A better way of saying this may be that under current public housing laws, individuals (or families) have no incentive to work harder, because if their incomes rise too much, they will actually lose their housing. Without performance incentives, public housing will always be looked at as a failure.
After reviewing the information on public housing, I can see where people have a problem with it. My own view is very similar to that of most of the public. I have worked very hard to get where I am. It has taken uncountable hours of studying, working, and pain to achieve my goals, and it will take a lifetime of work to attain the rest of them. Why should a portion of my blood and sweat be rationed out of my paycheck to provide for someone who has chosen not to take the unbeaten path, but rather take a nap under the covered bridge? The only problem with my rationale is that like many people, I think of public housing as aid to the poor, and not necessarily aid to the truly disabled, and that is one of the downsides to public housing assistance. I think that in order to better qualify recipients of public assistance, and therefore increase the overall public’s support, Congress and HUD need to make public housing performance based and punish those who do not put forth efforts to rid themselves of the need for assistance. I work hard for my paycheck. I believe that to truly appreciate what we have, like food on the table and a roof over our heads, that it should not be given to us, but instead earned.
Works Cited
Bratt, Rachel. Rebuilding A Low Income Housing Policy. 1st Ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.
“Federal Housing Acts.” RHOL. 20 Oct 2006 .
Freedman, Leonard. Public Housing-The Politics of Poverty. 1st Ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc., 1969.
Meehan, Eugene. Public Housing Policy. 1st Ed. New Brunswick: Rutgers University, 1975.
Muth, Richard. Public Housing-An Economic Evaluation. 1st Ed. Washington, DC: AEI Institute, 1973.
