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Blacks don’t in fact make up a majority of residents receiving housing assistance nationwide today (the number is closer to about 44 percent). But the picture looks starkly different in the public housing projects of big cities where much of that image is cultivated. Within the Detroit Housing Commission, according to HUD data, 99 percent of public housing residents are black. Within the D.C. Housing Authority and the Housing Authority of New Orleans, 98 percent are. The condition of the public housing that these residents have lived in has suffered from a fatal flaw in the program going all the way back to 1937. Because rents were supposed to cover the costs of upkeep, housing authorities across the country have never had enough money to maintain these buildings. As a result, repair backlogs in cities such as New York stretch for years. And as residents have grown progressively poorer, the capacity of their rent to maintain these buildings has dwindled, too. Many of these properties also didn’t wear well because they were designed on tight budgets and built with cheap materials — problems compounded in many cities by corruption in the construction deals, political patronage in the housing authorities and public resistance to putting these buildings anywhere other than in the ghetto. In projects like Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes, the elevators often didn’t stop on every floor. Boiler systems that should have served one building fed many. High-rise balconies that became hazardous were barred over, making them look like cages. And because housing authorities designed these buildings specifically to house families — with units containing multiple bedrooms — they created demographics unlike those anywhere else in the country. Most communities, even during the baby boom, have more adults than children. Large housing projects had dramatically more children than adults, making it that much harder for adults to maintain order. The stigma that would become attached to the residents was, in many ways, built into the buildings themselves. “When they were first put up, the closets didn’t have doors, the bathrooms didn’t have showers, the light bulbs didn’t have covers, the walls didn’t have drywall,” says the Urban Institute’s Susan Popkin, who has studied public housing in Chicago. “They were built like college dorms almost — bad college dorms.” After residents in projects such as Pruitt-Igoe began to complain that they were paying rent for homes that weren’t maintained, the federal government in the 1970s began to cap the rent for public-housing residents. Today, that cap is set at 30 percent of their income. The change, though, made paying for maintenance even harder as it further reduced rent revenue, and the deteriorating conditions helped drive out remaining families with a more stable income. “That’s the point at which you got the really deep concentration of poverty,” Popkin says. “You already had bad racial segregation. You already had bad living conditions. Now you had really deeply poor single mothers who had been left behind.” That concentration of poverty then contributed to the problems that became closely associated with public housing: violence, broken families, drug use. But these ills were never so much inherent to the people who lived there — families who need housing assistance are not intrinsically more prone to violence than anyone else — as products of the way these places were created. In 1974, a year after President Richard Nixon described public housing as “monstrous, depressing places,” Congress passed a new housing act that tried to leverage the private housing market to solve these problems. In creating “Section 8 housing,” it called for the construction of new homes, but also a voucher program that allowed residents to use their public subsidies with private landlords.
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