The Dark Side Of Public Housing

1. The Dark Side Of Public Housing The top ten cities in the U.S.A population 250,000 or more , highest poverty rate How it fosters corruption Destroys families and hurts cities

2. HUD waste of taxpayers money and corruption The $65 billion Department of Housing and Urban Development has been plagued by mismanagement and scandal in recent decades. Numerous HUD secretaries have used their power to enrich themselves or to confer special benefits on people with political and financial connections A root cause of HUD scandals is that the department has a large number of costly subsidy programs, and each involves a tangled web of stakeholders. Many HUD programs divide responsibilities between federal, state, and local policymakers, and they involve private interests such as developers and financial companies. The multiplicity of interests and the complexity of the programs create opportunities for people in the public and private sectors to take personal advantage of programs.  The recent meltdown in the U.S. housing and financial markets makes it crucially important to understand the distortions created by HUD's programs and the political drivers of its decision-making. HUD policies played an important role in the meltdown, and this essay sheds light on why some of HUD's bad policies were put in place. Federal housing policies illustrate some broader realities of federal intervention. When making decisions, policymakers usually have political and self-interested ends in mind, not the broad general interest of the public. Also, lofty interventionist visions—such as using the government to boost home ownership—often fail because of the imbalances they create in private markets. Housing was traditionally a private and local concern without federal involvement. The scandals and policy errors discussed here provide good reasons to start dismantling HUD and ending the housing subsidies that have caused so much damage.  Source: Cato Institute. Read whole article at http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/hud/scandals

3. Detroit Michigan Poverty 32.5 % Detroit Housing Requires Private Management By Dr. Robert Kleiman | One of the most disastrously mismanaged public housing programs in the nation is in Detroit, Michigan. Even the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) thinks the program is a failure, prompting The Detroit News to editorialize that "the city is incapable of managing housing for the poor." The Motor City's public housing has been plagued with problems for decades. The department operates about 9,000 public housing units, more than 50 percent deemed virtually uninhabitable. Despite millions of dollars of subsidies to rehabilitate and update housing units, hundreds of units stand empty while nearly 2,000 families looking for homes languish on waiting lists. The units have a 55 percent vacancy rate. These difficulties provide strong evidence that the current system is not working. The public housing units need professional management, not city bureaucrats placed in positions of authority on the basis of seniority or personal contacts. . It seems that Detroit's public housing bureaucrats do not want to clean up their act and don't want anybody cleaning it up for them either. No private owners or private managers of rental housing could behave in this fashion and get away with it. Nor could they draw upon the public purse to subsidize and perpetuate it year after year. When private capital is at risk, the private sector has an incentive to refurbish and maintain housing units on a timely basis and within budget. That's why management and/or ownership by accountable private parties or the tenants themselves would provide direct and immediate incentives to improve the living environment. Government-provided housing rests on dubious assumptions to begin with, but surely its prime objective should never be to provide employment for bureaucrats. Accordingly, Detroit should liberate public housing from an inept bureaucracy by selling off its housing units to the tenants themselves (as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did with more than a million public housing units), or at least privatizing the management of city housing. Detroit's continuing failure is ample evidence that it should get out of the public housing business.

4. Buffalo New York Poverty Rate 29.9 % This is merely the latest of the endless questions about Bflo's "political housing".Logic would dictate that waterfront housing on valuable land in an impoverished city would pay significant taxes. Instead Bflo has 616 heavily subsidized public housing apartments on the waterfront with rents starting at about $250 monthly, INCLUDING ALL UTILITIES. Tenants, accustomed to cheap waterfront living for decades, many even wintering in Florida because the waterfront was too cold, lobbied City Hall & NYS officials to keep their bonanza. Taxpayers keep pouring in public housing subsidies . . and more resources to do damage control on the endless stream of scandals.

5. Cincinnati Ohio Poverty 28.8 Housing boss wants more Hyde Park units The Chairman of the Cincinnati Housing Authority board wants to buy more property in Hyde Park for low-income renters.It comes after Cincinnati Attorney Robert Newman filed a complaint with HUD (U.S. Department of Urban Housing and Development )accusing the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Board of limiting opportunities of African-Americans to go into certain neighborhoods.Newman asked HUD to take over the housing authority in part because he says the housing authority has a policy of harassment by the strict enforcement campaign. A complaint about loud music from neighbors could get a Section 8 resident kicked out. Hyde Park residents protest saying that bringing these units into their neighborhood lowers property values and increases crime. The Riots of Cincinnati People in the projects say one cause of the riots was the city’s efforts to attract investors and affluent young professionals to the area is the police crackdown on homeless people, panhandlers and unemployed youth in the neighborhood.

6. Cleveland Ohio Poverty Rate 27 percent Cleveland lost 10 percent of its population this decade, census data shows The 14 years of Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes Stokes is a strong proponent of public housing he believed that such developments should be dispersed throughout the city has divided even the black community. When Stokes announced plans for a low-cost housing project in Lee-Seville, a middle-class black neighborhood, the council blocked Stokes' proposals. An attempt to put public housing into the white, blue-collar west side was similarly blocked. The honeymoon between the mayor and his white supporters ended in a shootout between police and black militants during his term in office. Ten people, including three policemen, were killed during the gun fight, and Stokes' decision to remove white policemen from the black neighborhood —credited by some with averting a holocaust, criticized by others as giving in to militants—split the city along racial lines. Months later it was discovered that $10,000 of "Cleveland: Now!" funds had gone to a militant group, and part of the funds had been used to purchase guns for the bloody shootout.

7. Miami Florida Poverty Rate 26.9 % The unfolding scandal at the Miami-Dade Housing Agency continues to haunt us as we remember the families whose quest for simple, decent housing were squelched by that agency's corruption. On the other hand, the staff and volunteers of Miami Habitat for Humanity visit all qualified applicants in their homes before making the final decision about who will be selected to purchase a Habitat house. MIAMI  The City of Miami has one of the highest poverty rates and one of the lowest median incomes among large US cities, according to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey released Tuesday.   The survey places Miami's poverty rate at 26.9%. . Corruption Plagues Miami-Dade's Housing Agency The Miami Herald chronicles how the nation's most ambitious public housing effort in decades has become plagued by corruption and greed.

8. St Louis Poverty 26.8 % The local Housing Authority was taken over by HUD because it was so poorly run it was falling apart. The School District where these students went to school had to be taken over by the state because it was so poorly run and falling apart. ( East St Louis) Lessons In Public Housing Despite its aura of constant change and dynamism, St Louis has one aspect of its landscape that is seemingly permanent--public housing. The St Louis Housing Authority is the city's biggest landlord. Other cities--Philadelphia, Newark, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis and San Francisco-public housing reform has been driven by catastrophe. Many projects quickly became miserable places to live--so decayed, dangerous and detested that they were demolished, (some, like St. Louis's Pruit-Igoe in 1972, in public ceremonies in front of cheering crowds).

9. EL Paso Texas Poverty 26.4 % Many illegal immigrants live in public housing Untold thousands of illegal immigrants live in public housing at a time when hundreds of thousands of citizens and legal residents are stuck waiting years for a spot. Authorities may be unaware of thousands more, and critics say no illegal immigrant should get housing benefits. A 1977 federal consent decree in a class-action lawsuit that prohibits the state from denying the benefit to illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants are a big problem in El Paso where 15.5 percent of the homes are HUD subsidized.

10. Philadelphia Pennsylvania Poverty 25.1% Government seizes Housing Authority The federal government today took charge of day-to-day operation of the Philadelphia Housing Authority, the largest to be displaced since the Department of Housing and Urban Development was created in 1965. The move followed by one day a request for federal intervention by PHA Chairman Jonathan A. Saidel, who said the authority was too mired in political corruption to oversee hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds targeted for it in the next five years. Mayor Edward G. Rendell (D) also has expressed concern.

11. Milwaukee Wi Proverty 26.2 % ACORN and HUD Corruption Under the guise of "consumer advocacy," ACORN has received money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD funds hundreds, if not thousands, of left-wing "anti-poverty" groups across the country led by ACORN. Last October, HUD announced more than $44 million in new housing counseling grants to over 400 state and local efforts. The White House has increased funding for housing counseling by 150 percent since taking office in 2001, despite the role most of these recipients play as activist satellites of the Democratic Party. The AARP scored nearly $400,000 for training; the National Council of La Raza ("The Race") scooped up more than $1.3 million; the National Urban League raked in nearly $1 million; and the ACORN Housing Corporation received more than $1.6 million.As the Consumer Rights League points out in its new expose, the ACORN Housing Corporation has worked to obtain mortgages for illegal aliens in partnership with Citibank. It relies on undocumented income, "under the table" money, which may not be reported to the Internal Revenue Service. Moreover, the group's "financial justice" operations attack lenders for "exotic" loans, while recommending 10-year interest-only loans (which deny equity to the buyer) and risky reverse mortgages. Whistleblower documents reveal internal discussions among the group that blur the lines between its tax-exempt housing work and its aggressive electioneering activities. The group appears to shake down corporate interests with relentless PR attacks, and then enters "no lobby" agreements with targeted corporations after receiving payment.

12. Newark N.J. Poverty 24.2 % Newark is New Jersey’s largest city – about 272,537 people call the city home, according to the latest U.S. Census – and like many older U.S. cities, it experienced enormous changes over the last 50 years: the decline of industry, and with it good-paying blue-collar jobs and the exodus of the white and black middle class to the suburbs beginning in the 1950s. Power in the city shifted along with the population: from Jewish and Italian to majority African-American – 52 percent according to the last census, with a rapidly growing Hispanic population of 30 percent. As the population declined, many of those who remained had the fewest resources and the greatest needs – for affordable housing, adequate health care, jobs that paid well and schools that worked. Newark was one of the first cities to apply for public housing and built more units per capita than any other city in the U.S. Newark’s problems became more severe because the city attempted to help poor and minority citizens and because it was a leader in civil rights, Newark’s children are less likely to receive immunizations, more likely to fail in school and more likely to suffer from health problems than children living elsewhere in New Jersey.

13. These Slides represent the top 10 cities with a population of 250,000 or more and they are an example of where this great American Social Experiment has taken us. This same story is playing out all across America. The unintended consequences of Public Housing has created family breakdown, high illegitimacy, fraudulent education and rampant crime. Thomas Sowell writes: “ just mention Public Housing and people recoil at the thought of all the crime, violence, drugs and single parent families with mutable problems. The partnership of HUD and GHA is a enmity of its own, using tax dollars and answering to not even the mayor. This in itself makes a mockery of democracy. City officials know the class make-up of the city, all one has to do is see that a high percentage of Ball High students are receiving free lunches, that puts them at or near the poverty level. They know that job opportunities in the city are at a all time low. They know of the flight of the middle class from the Island and they should know that all this is a recipe that will keep poor people locked into a lifetime of poverty. The Public Housing issue should be a high priority on the plate of the city council. It is not complicated, there are 40 years of data laid out before them and it is a fact that many of those paying the taxes are going to move where the jobs are. Galveston can choose to move forward to restore the middle class and set policies that create job opportunities or they can go down a path where we already know the ending. .

14. Einstein once said,'The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.‘ "You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence.You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves."Abraham Lincoln ===================================================