Keeping them on the plantation - public housing reform - Rebuilding America: A Citizens' Guide

National Review, May 28, 1990 by Tom Bethell

IN TRYING to think of new ways to approach some of the country's problems, one of the main obstacles is habit. It is deeply engrained in almost all of us to believe that if people are to be helped, "the government" must "do more." Not that people must do more to help people. An abstract thing called "the government" must do it instead. (Then we don't have to think about doing something ourselves. Someone else-some thing else-is taking care of it for us.) There is a temptation for us all, politicians, journalists, and citizens, conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, to be locked into this way of thinking. Nonetheless, we must make an effort to escape from it. If we are to succeed in finding solutions that work, we must first of all recover the perspective of common sense. And we must be willing to discard the approaches that have been tried and failed.

Common sense suggests that, if people need to be helped, perhaps people rather than bureaucracies should be encouraged to help them. But such people-to-people help, without the intervention of bureaucracies, is today frequently illegal. Consider the case of public-housing projects, often little more than crime-ridden slums. Until recently the people who lived in them were not allowed to initiate needed reforms. The Housing and Community Development Act of 1987 now permits the formation of resident management corporations, so that the people who live in these dangerous places may take some degree of control over their lives.

Unfortunately, further changes in the law are needed. Dick Armey, a Republican congressman from Texas, points out that, at the moment, the resident management corporations that do exist are bound by union contracts entered into by the public-housing authorities. Public-housing tenants, Armey says, should be permitted to fix up their own apartments, "to put their own sweat equity into their own homes, just as you and I do. Most of us could not afford to own our homes if we couldn't go in and fix our own leaky faucets or replace light switches." When housing is privately owned, he said, "owners become part electrician, part plumber, part painter." But in the case of public-housing tenants, the law says that union labor must do the job.

This provision was put into the law by Congressman Bruce Morrison of Connecticut (now running for governor of that state), and it is interesting to go back over what happened on the floor of the House of Representatives when Mr. Armey tried to remove the provision. Morrison argued that public-housing tenants should not have any new rights or restrictions" imposed on them. He admitted in open debate that he wanted to deny these people "new rights."

Congressman Jim Kolbe of Arizona replied, These restrictions are going to prohibit resident management corporations from hiring low-income, hardcore unemployed inner-city residents [to] perform on-site maintenance in their own housing projects." He added that this was anti-poor" and lanti-minority."

Congressman Bruce Vento of Minnesota then chimed in on Morrison's side, with this revealing argument: We have plumbing problems. We have electrical problems. We have carpentry problems that need to be addressed. Are the tenants that are living in assisted housing, are they the skilled mechanics that can take on these tasks of doing the electrical rewiring of a multi-complex housing unit? Are they the glaziers that will hang out there and put a piece of glass into a window? I think on its face it is obvious that they cannot do that."

Protect Them from Themselves

BUT MORE bluntly, Bruce Vento was saying that the poor are really not capable of helping themselves. And therefore (notice this) they should not be permitted even to try. The unions will do the work for them. Liberal politicians often claim to be acting in the name of 'compassion." But what is compassionate about this attitude? Condescending" would be a better word for it. Is it not clear that what Morrison and Vento are doing is putting the interests of the poor in whose name they act beneath those of organized labor?

Furthermore, as we know, a high percentage of public-housing residents happen to be black. But what was the reaction of the Black Congressional Caucus when the motion to overturn the Morrison provision came to a vote on the floor? A deputation of black public-housing residents actually showed up on the steps of the House of Representatives and urged Caucus members to vote against Morrison. Congressman Ron Dellums of California seemed to be sympathetic at first, but inside the building the trade-union lobbyists surrounded him and presented their case. Along with most of the Black Caucus (including Representatives Conyers, Crockett, Dixon, Dymally, Savage, and Stokes), Mr. Dellums voted with labor rather than with the low-income blacks. And so the Morrison provision remains the law today.

We should always be suspicious of the rhetoric of helping the poor." The truth is, those who support a bureaucratic welfare state have a lot invested in keeping poor blacks together in housing projects, and keeping them dependent on the welfare state. Among other things, bunching them together makes it easier to bus them to the polls on election day. For this reason Kimi Gray, the chairman of the Resident Management Corporation of KenilworthParkside, a 464-unit public-housing project in Washington, D.C., has called these projects "the new plantations."