The Bronx housing project where Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor lived as a child is being portrayed as some sort of “urban log cabin,” says Howard Husock, vice president of the Manhattan Institute. However, since children who live in public housing do the worst in school, according to a 2008 New York University study, public housing is much more likely to lead to long-term poverty than a seat on the high court.
After injecting a trillion dollars into the housing market over the past few decades and even triggering its collapse via the Community Reinvestment Act, government officials still haven’t learned their lesson. In many U.S. cities, government is the largest landlord. The infamous Cabrini-Green public housing development in Chicago consisted of a group of mid- to high-rise apartment buildings built to house 15,000 low-income people – the same sort of high-density development long favored by the environmental crowd. But, like other government-run housing projects around the nation that cost millions of tax dollars to erect, Cabrini-Green became a run-down crime and drug-infested hellhole that had to be completely torn down.
Unfortunately, the cycle is starting to repeat itself. This month, the Department of Housing and Urban Development freed up $3.6 billion for more public housing, in addition to the $11 billion released in February when President Barack Obama signed the $787 billion stimulus bill. The billions of dollars now flowing to state and local governments will enable them to expand their public housing portfolios, crowding out private investors. For example, Fairfax County, Virginia – one of the wealthiest counties in the nation – recently spent more than $3 million to purchase an entire apartment complex in an effort to increase its supply of public housing. Sure enough, the red-brick complex has quickly become a crime and drug-infested magnet for gang members and illegal immigrants. Odds are good that the new public housing projects coming on line will likely turn out just as disastrously as the old ones.
In his 2003 book, “America’s Trillion-Dollar Housing Mistake,” Husock countered the prevailing myth that the concentration of poor people was the only problem with Cabrini-Green and similar socialized housing projects. Section 8 vouchers, housing tax credits, and other attempts to “help” the disadvantaged were just as destructive, he argued, because they undermined the private market and created disincentives that perpetuated government dependency. Not to mention the fact that high real estate taxes necessary to support thousands of public housing units drive up home prices for everybody – just the opposite of the government’s good intentions.
