The housing crisis – built into the system

According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), some 5.3 million households have “worst case” rental housing needs, defined as having a family income less than half the median income in their area and paying more than half of it for rent. Most live in severely substandard housing and receive no federal housing assistance.

Although these households – about 12.5 million people, including 4.5 million children, 1.5 million senior citizens and more than a million adults with disabilities – qualify for HUD housing aid they can’t get because Congress has denied the department the necessary funding. Presently HUD only provides Section 8 rental assistance to 3 million households and provides subsidized public housing units for another 1.3 million households.

Today the number of households with unmet worst-case needs is greater than the number receiving HUD assistance. The situation is made even more urgent by the fact that 4 million of these households have incomes below the federal poverty level and that 70 percent of them receive no federal housing assistance

Three trends have created the crisis in affordable housing: Rents have increased at an annual rate twice the increase in the overall consumer price index and even faster than the wages of the growing number of low-paid workers. The second contributing factor has been the policies of the federal government that emphasize home ownership – and the private market – as solutions. Third is the drying up of low-rent apartments – some 900,000 units just between 1993 and 1995 – on the private market.

By 1998, the median rent of a new rental unit – $726 per month – remained out of reach for most low-income families. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), a worker would have to earn $11.08 per hour to afford that apartment, using the generally accepted standard that “affordable” rent is rent that does not exceed 30 percent of family income.

This shortage of public housing leaves more than 1 million families – like the 100,000 applicants who applied for rental assistance when the Chicago list was opened for just two weeks last summer – waiting for as long as five years for assistance. That the crisis is particularly acute in Chicago comes as no surprise: One-quarter of the low-income public housing units slated for demolition across the country are in the Windy City.

The situation will not get better anytime soon, as the Bush administration has produced what is essentially flat-line funding for affordable housing in its 2003 budget, with no additional investment aimed at solving the country’s most serious housing problems.

In a statement released last February, Sheila Crowley, president of NLIHC, said although the budget prepared by President Bush called for ending chronic homelessness in ten years, “its rhetoric was not matched by dollars.” She said the budget, with its emphasis on expanded tax credits for home ownership, “is wholly inadequate,” adding that HUD funding for 2003 is little more than half the amount the department provided in fiscal year 1976.

The method of choice has been “tax expenditures” – tax breaks that go to homeowners in the form of deductions for mortgage interest, property taxes or capital gains on sale of homes where the tax is exempted or deferred. While revenue losses from housing-related tax expenditures increased by $91.7 billion between 1976 and 2000, housing assistance outlays increased by only $24.4 billion, less than one-third of the increase in the cost of tax expenditures.

As one might expect, them that has gets when it comes to who gets what of the $114.8 billion of annual tax expenditures in housing assistance. According to NLIHC, households in the top fifth of the income distribution will get an estimated 63 percent of the total expenditures while households in the bottom fifth will benefit from an estimated 18 percent of all expenditures – all of it in the form of outlays to reduce their housing costs and, unlike tax expenditures for homeowners, none of which will go directly to the assisted households.

As a step toward solving the crisis, NLIHC calls for the establishment of a National Housing Trust Fund with dedicated sources of revenue to build, rehabilitate or preserve 1.5 million homes for those with the most serious housing problems in the next 10 years. The coalition also calls for a $15 billion increase in federal housing appropriations.

Crowley said that if HUD had provided additional low-income units at the 500,000 annual rate projected in 1976, there would now be about 14 million families living in federally assisted low-income housing. “But we moved in the opposite direction and now there are more very low-income renter households with worst case housing needs than there are families living in federally subsidized low-income housing.”

The dilapidated state of the nation’s housing stock available to the 15 or 20 million families (including over 3 million homeless families) who have critical housing needs, would come as no surprise to Frederick Engels. Although best known for his joint authorship of the Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx, Engels wrote extensively on the housing crisis and solutions to it.

In his essay, “The Housing Crisis,” Engels said the crisis “is a necessary product of the bourgeois (read capitalist) social order” where “great masses of the workers” depend exclusively on wages – and therefore a job – for their livelihood. He said this relationship and “regularly recurring industrial vacillations” created a situation where large numbers of the working class were forced to “always be tenants” of landlords who not only have the right, but “the duty of ruthlessly making as much out of [their] property in house rent as [they] possibly can.”

Although Engels recognized the need for day-to-day struggle for better housing and lower rent, he was under no illusions about the fundamental solution to the problem. “In such a society (read “capitalist society”) the housing shortage is no accident,” he said. “It is a necessary institution and it can be abolished together with all its effects on health, etc. only if the whole social order from which it springs is fundamentally refashioned. As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers.”

Engels concluded: “The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labor by the working class itself [and the establishment of a socialist society].”

The author can be reached at fgab708 [at] aol.com
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Barbara Moore vs. CHA Fighting to save public housing
Brandi Kishner


It wasn’t until later that evening, when I saw in my own neighborhood the torn rubble of another Chicago Housing Project, half destroyed, half standing undamaged, that I realized the impact of all Barbara Moore had said. When I saw the crumbled wreckage of children’s slides, clothes, refrigerator and books I understood what it means for a people – and their community – to lose their home.

“Born in Chicago,” she says, “but raised in Mississippi.” She came back to Chicago to stay when both her parents had passed. Barbara Moore has lived in public housing for more than 28 years. So she has seen the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) at its best and now at its worst.

Until her recent years of disability, she has always worked, supporting herself and her family. It is easy to tell by her smile and strong attitude that this is a woman who is more than able to do for herself. Although now she is a citywide activist, she began as the president of her building.

That was when CHA told her, and everyone else in Chicago’s 60,000-plus population of the projects, that the project was over. All CHA highrise buildings would be torn down and ten years later the people, their families and their communities could move into the new decade’s scattered-site housing, dispersed throughout the city.

Moore, other tenants in her building and many other residents of public housing, resisted the “demolition, then build” policy. “Why couldn’t replacement housing be built first, before we where thrown out?” she asked in letters and at meetings. But CHA remained adamant, so just after Christmas 1999, her home on 5256 Federal was destroyed.

The library they had built, the garden, the food pantry, the job training center – nothing left, nothing replaced. Her home, the Robert Taylor Homes, was to be used for more convenient purposes by developers. Moore wasn’t surprised that the community resources weren’t replaced – after all, it was the community, not CHA, that had staffed, built and developed them.

Although she had to move many times, going from a building that was clean, well-maintained and safe, to one less so, still, she is the last one to complain. In fact she spends a great deal of time explaining how even the empty apartments in her current building could be used to help people. “Shelters are closing all over the city, and still they [CHA] won’t let people live in the empty apartments here.” I know how right she is, because even I’ve heard the stories on the news of the cuts in not-for-profit spending.

She tells me how the demolition of the projects before there is a viable alternative has real consequences. “There is no longer any support network left for us without our community,” she says, adding that this means losing not only family and friends, but community programs, church congregations and even schools. “Children,” she says “deserve to have somewhere to call home, to know where there roots are.”

But coming back is unlikely for most people, she says, due to lease compliant clauses and job requirements.

I ask her why she thinks the projects are being torn down, and with a smile she tells me that they are being blamed for all the drugs, gangs and violence in Chicago, but “we don’t cook drugs in our kitchens, we cook food,” she laughs. She mentions that academics and politicians are all quick to lay out their plans for working-class people. “We’ve been studied more than monkeys.” But she maintains that there is nothing wrong with her community and ticks off a list of accomplished people who came out of public housing: actors, musicians, athletes and academics.

Now, she says, she will continue to fight, staying in public housing until they’ve all been demolished. She refuses to be bought out, like many of the other housing leaders. Through the time I spent with her I saw children and relatives coming in and out, getting help from each other with cooking, cleaning, washing clothes or doing homework.

All in all, I learned from Barbara Moore that community is more than just the people who live next to each other They are people who work toward joint goals, who take pride in each other’s accomplishments and who make sacrifices for each other. I wish we were all like that.

The author can be reached at brandikishner [at] yahoo.com