The worst city government in America - Washington, D.C

Washington Monthly, Jan, 1989 by Jason DeParle

If bad local government were simply a matter of waste, we could just rub our sore wallets and hold a legitimate grudge. Sure, the bureaucracy functions first as a jobs program for its employees and only secondarily as a government. Sure, civil service rules keep incompetent workers in, and strict residency requirements have kept lots of talented people out. But the point isn't that city workers get more than they deserve; it's that city residents get less, particularly those most in need.

There's no small amount of irony in this since the the leaders of most big-city governments sell themselves as friends of the poor.

"The ones everybody's saying all along they're doing for-they're the ones suffering the worst," says Wilson, who, like a certain Washington, D.C. mayor, has civil rights roots in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. "The elderly The poor."

Pesky budget officials

Somewhere inside Washington's public housing authority, she's #247-56-2910. But her real number is eight. That's how many years have passed since 59-year-old Lilian Wade first applied for a place in public housing.

Back then Wade held occasional jobs as a maid or nurse's aide; now, after a heart attack, she gets by on a $359 monthly disability check. This, as you might gather, does not make her a major player in the Washington real estate market. Wade has fashioned a solution: she splits a $427, two-bedroom apartment three ways, with two other disabled women. Wade sleeps on a fold-out cot in the dining room. But even with this variation of breakfast in bed, she spends more than half her income on utilities and We go to churches and get some canned goods," she said. "We get pork and beans. We don't beg."

But not far from Wade's home there's a familiar Washington sight: empty public housing, and lots of it. In some cases, entire courtyards of shuttered, silent brick. Some of the city's vacant apartments are scattered throughout occupied projects; others are part of whole buildings emptied for "modernization" projects and often forgotten for years. Together they account for 19 percent of the city's public housing-more than 2,400 empty, waiting homes. And it's not as though the District lacks the money to fix them up: In the past three years, the city has allocated about $100 million to modernize the apartments-so much that the housing authority can't figure out how to spend it all. A few years ago, the federal government got so tired of the District's decade-long failure to spend modernization funds, it finally stopped forwarding the money. At least Wade has shelter. Others aren't so lucky. As the District's inventory of empty public apartments has grown, so have the numbers of homeless families lining up at shelters.

The District's mismanagement of public housing has a long and proud history. In 1971 auditors from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development voiced their dismay over the "apathy" of the D.C. housing employees and th"despair" of the tenants. Those were the good old days. By 1987 the mayor's blue-ribbon commission on public housing argued that "the picture had changed . . . but not for the better." And those are the mayor's own emissaries speaking.