News and Updates
PETRA: Does Public Housing Have a Future?
By Peter Dreier - June 8, 2010, 5:14PM
Everybody hates public housing, except the low-income people who live there and the people on the long waiting lists to get in.
Now, after years of neglect, the Obama Administration wants to save public housing for future generations. It has a plan to inject billions of dollars into the developments to make long-deferred repairs.
But a few liberal Congress members, advocacy groups, and left-wing academics view the proposal with skepticism, worried that it is really a scheme to "privatize" the government-run housing projects and lead to rising rents, evictions, and perhaps the elimination of scarce affordable housing.
A recent memo written by some radical urban studies professors makes it seem like Obama wants to hand public housing over to Goldman Sachs or turn the low-income projects into luxury housing. And separately, in an article for Huffington Post, George Lakoff, the well-known UC-Berkeley linguistics professor, warns that the Obama administration is trying to "privatize all public housing in America" and "give conservatives a victory they could not have anticipated." It is, Lakoff wrote, evidence of Obama's "move to the right."
The critics raise some important concerns, but their attacks on the Obama administration's motives and objectives are misguided. By doing so, they are playing into the hands of most Republicans, who would like nothing more than to destroy public housing, which to them is a symbol of "big government" and an excessive "welfare state" for the poor. The liberal critics - including some tenants groups, anti-poverty lawyers, and academics -- need to stop the scare tactics and figure out how to seize this rare opportunity to take advantage of having a president who actually wants to preserve public housing for the long term.
As the National Low-Income Housing Coalition stated in its Congressional testimony: "Private resources could be public housing's savior or its greatest enemy." What's important is how the White House and Congress shape the legislation. Recent experience with big banks, the oil industry, the coal mines, the insurance companies, and other sectors suggests that government has to be more than a just a neutral watchdog when it comes to business. The progressive agenda is for government to establish tough rules and regulations, and enforce them with adequate inspectors and penalties, to make corporations behave responsibly. To read entire article, click here