Two million Americans live in public housing. Because conditions at housing authorities across the country have deteriorated for decades, most of them live in substandard homes – amid rats, lead paint, leaky pipes, mold, broken elevators, and heating outages. Since the government owns public housing and could, using only a small fraction of the federal budget, allocate enough money for its full repair, this arguably represents, for a presidential administration, the most fixable of all major problems in the United States.
Yet, year after year, this particular problem gets worse, not better. During the second half of the 20th century, Americans came to regard public housing developments as inherently problematic arrangements: unwholesome concentrations of poverty where crime naturally sprung and architecturally grim tower blocks fell apart thanks to the neglect of the tenants and predictable public-sector fiscal mismanagement. Political solutions formed around this discourse, which disincentivized reinvestment: public housing had been a mistake, and elected officials could either ignore it entirely or focus on tearing it down. Neither option helped its residents.
A number of the candidates competing in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary have proposed ambitious plans for healthcare, climate change, and student debt, which have prompted a great deal of discussion. Thus far, none of the moderators of the televised primary debates has yet asked about public housing, and most of the candidates seem disinclined to mention it – as though it belonged to the progressivism of the past, not of the future, despite all the people still living in it.
Traditionally considered a local issue, housing in general has not historically played a major role in presidential campaigns of the modern era, but rising rents in US cities – along with, it seems, a recognition by some national politicians that perhaps the Democrats can’t win on the backs of suburban soccer moms alone – have forced the candidates to expand their platforms. Among the top 10 candidates in the latest national polling average (Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Andrew Yang, Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, and Julian Castro), eight have released specific plans for housing policy.
What they’re saying
Three of these plans – Sanders’s, Harris’s, and Castro’s – mention public housing. Warren’s, Buttigieg’s, Booker’s, Yang’s, and Klobuchar’s don’t. Many of the plans focus on reducing single-family zoning, creating funding for affordable housing by private developers, and narrowing the home ownership gap between white and black Americans.
Harris and Castro touch on public housing only tangentially, with the former conflating public and affordable housing in his bid to grow the National Housing Trust Fund. Harris, meanwhile, promises to “expand HUD’s fair housing program to make public housing more inclusive by banning discrimination based on gender identity, marital status, source of income, and sexual identity.” (The Fair Housing Act currently prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability.)
Only Sanders’s “Housing for All” plan addresses the public housing crisis in substantive terms. Most significantly, Sanders pledges to give an additional $70 billion to HUD specifically for the repair and modernization of public housing, while the Green New Deal will fund its decarbonization. By comparison, in 2019, the federal government allocated $2.75 billion for public housing’s capital needs and $4.55 billion for its operating costs within an overall HUD budget of $52 billion. As the United States’ largest housing authority, NYCHA alone requires $32 billion in capital improvements for its decrepit stock.
Sanders also calls for high-speed broadband and improved community spaces for public housing residents. Finally, he hopes to repeal the Faircloth Amendment, which in 1998 ended the construction of new public housing units in the United States.
What they’ve done
If the other candidates willingly give no hint of public housing’s prospects under their future administrations, we might instead look to the past by examining their records and statements as public officials. Not every Democratic contender has come into contact with a public housing authority in their career (Yang, an entrepreneur, has never held office), but some have.
As the former Secretary of HUD, Julian Castro may have left the most significant imprint on America’s public housing. He did this by overseeing the implementation of Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD), a program designed to lease or transfer ownership of public housing to private landlords, who receive project-based Section 8 subsidies in exchange for bankrolling renovations and maintaining affordable rents. The program has grown since the departure of Castro, who had capped it at 185,000 units; with 455,000 units eligible for RAD conversion under Ben Carson, some public housing authorities have already privatized their entire portfolios. If RAD continues at its current pace, it won’t be long before public housing no longer exists in America.
When the current Democratic frontrunner, Joe Biden, ran for public office for the first time, as a 27-year-old looking for a seat on the New Castle County Council, he spoke in favor of expanding public housing in suburban areas. Since a successful Senate campaign brought him to Washington only two years later, he didn’t have time to transform the housing landscape of northern Delaware, but his autobiography Promises to Keep shows that his early concern related to the need (in his view) to spread the burden of public housing equitably across communities, not to increase the number of units.
“I thought we should change the way we allocate federal money so we could mandate scattered-site public housing and quit packing the poor into high-rises like Cabrini Green in Chicago that invariably turned into slums and chaos and didn’t help anyone,” he wrote in 2007. “The first thing we should do… was tear down the concentrated high-rise public assistance housing.”
The most extensive legislation with regard to public housing in recent decades was the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998 (QHWRA), a spiritual sequel to Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform law, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. In addition to imposing the aforementioned Faircloth Amendment to prohibit federal funding for new public housing, the QHWRA made “illegal drug users and alcohol abusers” ineligible for public housing, imposed a community service requirement for unemployed residents, and cleared the way for more demolitions under HOPE VI. At the time, Biden was serving in the Senate, where the bill passed by unanimous consent; Bernie Sanders voted against it in the House.
In 2017, Donald Trump nominated former neurosurgeon and author Ben Carson to run HUD despite a lack of related experience or expertise. Elizabeth Warren drew rebukes from her liberal base when – as part of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs – she voted in favor of advancing Carson’s nomination on account of the “good, detailed” answers he’d written in response to her questionnaire on HUD issues. At his confirmation hearing before the full Senate, Warren changed her mind and voted against him. Under Carson, HUD’s budget request for the fiscal year 2020 proposed a complete elimination of the capital fund for public housing.
Like Biden, many of the other Democratic candidates started out in local politics. In 2015, Mayor Pete Buttigieg replaced the entire board of commissioners at the South Bend Housing Authority in Indiana, promising “new leadership” and a “new vision.” Two months ago, when the FBI raided the housing authority on apparent suspicion of financial improprieties, Buttigieg emphasized that the authority was “not part of the city administration.”
In 2005, shortly after Beto O’Rourke’s election to the El Paso City Council, the future congressman from Texas married the daughter of a billionaire real estate developer. Her father then presented to the city a massive downtown redevelopment plan, premised explicitly on the displacement by eminent domain of low-income Mexican-American communities near the Juarez border to make way for white-collar professionals who, with any luck, would flock to El Paso once it had transformed itself into a trendy destination for arts, entertainment, and retail.
Despite the apparent conflict of interest, O’Rourke threw his support behind the plan. Before the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, he testified that “really central” to the revitalization effort was the demolition and redevelopment of Alamito Place, El Paso’s oldest public housing project. Due to the 2008 financial meltdown, his father-in-law’s plan never came to fruition, but Alamito Place fell nevertheless, replaced by a private-public partnership for mixed-income tenants.
Although Cory Booker’s floundering campaign may have ended by the time this issue goes to print, he is, right now, probably the presidential candidate most associated with public housing, thanks to the eight years during which he lived at Newark’s Brick Towers, a low-income complex that became property of the Newark Housing Authority (NHA) after its landlord pleaded guilty to tax fraud.
Before his mayoralty, Booker had worked alongside housing activists at the Greater Newark HUD Tenants Coalition, and when he took office in 2006, he sought, by his account, to “turn around the troubled Newark Housing Authority. We moved it from one of the nation’s worst to one of the nation’s most improved; housing authority officials from all over the country came to study our turnaround and take lessons back to their cities.” Newark’s Star-Ledger noted that, by 2011, the authority had “improved its federal rating by 80 percent.”
But the record shows that Booker embraced the neoliberal consensus of the time, which led, for instance, to a privatization deal that replaced 500 public housing units at Baxter Terrace – a historic NHA complex that donated a portion of its facade to the Smithsonian upon demolition – with fewer than 400 units of mixed-income housing. At the start of Booker’s administration, the NHA owned 8,800 units; by the end, it owned only 7,200. Modia Butler, chairman of the NHA under Booker, now serves as his campaign’s senior strategist.
As mayor of Burlington, Vermont, between 1981 and 1989, Bernie Sanders amassed a very different record, in which he used municipal dollars to protect his city’s residential real estate from price-gouging developers. In 1984, amid rising property values, the Sanders administration founded the Burlington Community Land Trust to fend off gentrification in the Old North End by taking swaths of it off the private market.
An innovative concept at the time, the Burlington Community Land Trust sought to create an affordable pathway to home ownership for low-income Vermonters. It would purchase land and develop housing on it, subsequently allowing home buyers to pay for the cost of the houses (565 of them as of 2019) without paying for the cost of the land beneath them, which the trust would retain. In exchange, buyers would agree to a cap on the profitability of their investments; if they wanted to sell, they’d have to sell at an affordable price – meaning that the housing would remain within reach for low-income families in perpetuity. The land trust also developed its own rental housing and operates as a not-for-profit landlord with a portfolio of 2,200 apartments.
Many other community land trusts have emerged in the United States since Sanders’s early experiment, but since they function as independent nonprofits without significant municipal backing, they haven’t had the same power to combat local real estate speculation and assert community ownership as the Burlington Community Land Trust (now called the Champlain Housing Trust), which remains the largest in the country. While it isn’t technically a government agency, Sanders instituted a small property tax increase in Burlington to sustain its operations after providing seed funding, and city officials sit on the board alongside residents.
It’s not the same model as public housing under HUD – it was something a city could do on its own – but it represents a similar socialistic impulse toward decommodification and shared resources. For some voters, this small-town success story may lend credence to Sanders’s bigger promises for housing on the national stage.
