Sunday, November 21, 2010

It apparently CAN be done!

From City Journal:

...if you think that America no longer encourages long-term dependency or underclass poverty, you haven’t been paying attention to public housing. Like cash welfare before the reform, public housing is dominated by extremely poor single-parent families (53 percent of public-housing households nationwide earn less than $10,000 a year, and only 13 percent have two adult residents). Like welfare, public housing offers recipients a disincentive to marry: because rents are fixed at 30 percent of household income, there’s good reason not to put a second wage earner on the lease. And like welfare, public-housing projects—and the closely related voucher programs run by housing authorities—impose neither a work requirement nor a time limit on recipients. So not only do 2.2 million people live in public-housing units in America; they spend an average of more than eight years in them. And dwarfing their ranks are the 5 million living in private, voucher-paid housing, where the average length of residency is six years.

In short, American housing policy encourages the formation of households in which low-income single women raise children—exactly the sort of homes where kids’ prospects are bleakest. Crime rates, moreover, are consistently high in and around public housing, and voucher units have been widely implicated in the spread of social problems to formerly safe areas. The problem is financial, as well: housing vouchers alone, which didn’t even exist until 1974, now cost taxpayers $18 billion, more than the $16.9 billion that we spend on welfare. And it’s a policy that disproportionately affects the African-American poor. Nearly 45 percent of public-housing tenants are black, as are 42 percent of voucher recipients.

All this makes what Renee Glover is doing in Atlanta so important. Since 1994, Glover, a child of Jim Crow–era Jacksonville, Florida, has led the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA)—the nation’s fifth-largest public-housing system, with 50,000 tenants and voucher recipients, 99 percent of them, like her, African-American. She has drawn national recognition for the fact that during her tenure, Atlanta became the first city in the United States to tear down virtually all its projects. But Glover’s plan is far more ambitious than demolition: she has set out to transform the dysfunctional behavior that condemns people to languish for years in public housing. Her approach is the most dramatic change in any city’s public-housing system since Franklin Roosevelt created the program in 1937.

Glover’s tool kit includes much more than demolition, construction, and the work requirement, as complex and unusual as they are. Her least-known but most ambitious effort is what she unabashedly calls “human transformation,” an effort to instill in the public-housing poor the habits needed to join the social and economic mainstream. Glover’s memory of her childhood in the segregated South inspires the program. “We had a very strong and very strongly knitted community,” she recalls. “There was never a day that passed that we didn’t hear that we were being prepared to be the next leaders of the country.”

To re-create that culture of ambition and discipline, the AHA has invested nearly $27 million in what amounts to intensive counseling for public-housing tenants. The counselors—twenty-first-century versions of the Victorian “friendly visitors” who sought to encourage independence among the poor—follow the relocated tenants to their new homes and check up on them there, verifying that they’re employed or in school. They try to teach them the things that most Americans learn from their families: how to get a job and then get a better one; why it’s important to meet your children’s teachers and go to PTA meetings; how to live frugally and save for the future. It’s a striking example of what political scientist Lawrence Mead calls “the new paternalism.”

20 comments:

Missing Foundation said...

Come on now - no one cares about the underclass - or the middle class for that matter - unless you are standing in line waiting for a job or simply a mark for some merchandising shrill.

They want to break up the public housing - particularly the housing along the waterfront - in their desperate gamble to feed the voracous developer scum.

velvethead said...

As the article says, 99% in the projects are Black.
Watch yourself, Renee. Don't make too many waves. There are numerous politicians and civic leaders who derive their power and line their pockets from this ongoing dependency. They will not take kindly to you upsetting their apple cart.

Anonymous said...

If they kick all these people out of the projects, the developers can make tons of money. Lots of these projects in Astoria and the Rockaways have water-front views. Bloomies pals will make a fortune.

Nanny Bloomberg said...

Let's not forget it's also the governments business what these people eat.

We can "help" them by giving them random feces tests to make sure they eat what we tell them to.

Anonymous said...

For years they have been telling us public housing creates a culture of dependency resulting in multiple generations of people stuck in the projects.

Yet here they reveal the average stay is only 8 years in the projects and 6 years on vouchers.

Sounds like they've been dramatizing.

8 years is not even 1/3 of a single generation last time I checked.

Anonymous said...

This will never happen. Projects are federally funded. They have nothing to do with local private interest, overdevelopment lobbying. They are here to stay and will grow as the population ages and get less wealthy and dependent on social security.

Bloomberg's cocksuckers all know this.

Anonymous said...

Can't we burn down the projects? Or at least sterilize the people that dwell in them, so they don't breed & continue this stupid cycle of generational poverty? GET A JOB LOSERS!!

Big Hairy Balls said...

Free housing, food stamps, free transportation, free medical care & so on. We all know that it's not really free & I personally resent the situation as it stands. Giving someone everything they need will destroy their work incentive. These programs come out the middle classe's pocket. Job training, good school grades & some pride can sure go a long way. Get off your dead asses & get a job.

Anonymous said...

"Big Hairy Balls said...Free housing, food stamps, free transportation, free medical care & so on. We all know that it's not really free & I personally resent the situation as it stands."

Well, that is just TFB, isn't it.

"These programs come out the middle classe's pocket."

Did it ever occur to you that voting for people who deliberately shield the wealthy from paying their fair share of taxes is why the middle class gets so disproportionally stuck with the tab?

No, of-course not. Just another dumb con-servative.

"Job training, good school grades & some pride can sure go a long way."

Well that is at least something I can agree with.

Anonymous said...

"Did it ever occur to you that voting for people who deliberately shield the wealthy from paying their fair share of taxes is why the middle class gets so disproportionally stuck with the tab?"

Yeah? Well we had a Dem "tax the rich" gov for the past 4 years and a Dem Senate and Assembly for 2 the past 2 and that didn't help.

Anonymous said...

Congress has been Dem for 10!

Anonymous said...

"They try to teach them the things that most Americans learn from their families: how to get a job and then get a better one; why it’s important to meet your children’s teachers and go to PTA meetings; how to live frugally and save for the future"
----------------------

In other words, trying to teach animals to be human.

Anonymous said...

" Anonymous said...

Congress has been Dem for 10!"

Flunked math eh?

Congress went Democratic in 2006.

Now use your fingers and subtract six from ten (2010)

How many are left?

Answer below...but don't cheat.












4

Anonymous said...

Actually, it was 2007.

And the point is? It's been in Dem control for years, and they've done nothing.

Anonymous said...

"Anonymous said...

Actually, it was 2007.

And the point is? It's been in Dem control for years, and they've done nothing."

Ha! You really are an ignorant, propagandized buffoon.

here are some of what Obama/Democrats have accomplished even with a solid wall of republican obstructionism:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_Barack_Obama%27s_accomplishments_as_president

-they left out his Wallstreet reform package.

Whatever unfortunate offspring you have spawned will eventually be grateful for this administration's taking the first steps toward dismantling our sickly private medical/industrial complex. Hopefully before it eats us all alive.

Queens Crapper said...

Oh how cute. I've seen the libs posting this all over Facebook lately. makes them real proud. The problem with all you guys is you forget what you're talking about and stray. Let me bring you back. We're talking about handouts. Taxing the rich. Etc. No reduction in handouts under Dems. Plenty of taxing of the rich and all we've gotten is a bigger economic collapse. None of that is in your handy accomplishment list. I wonder why?

Anonymous said...

Queens Crapper said.

"Plenty of taxing of the rich and all we've gotten is a bigger economic collapse. None of that is in your handy accomplishment list. I wonder why?"

You have been hanging around your blog too much.

This economic collapse was the direct result of repiblican deregulation of the financial services sector. They, with Clinton's acquiescence allowed a 70 year old law that had been enacted during the 1930's to be repealed. They also specifically prohibited government oversight of these new, highly complex financial instruments.

They left a huge segment of our economy on the "honor system" -you see where that got us.

As for "Plenty of taxing of the rich..." Please, do tell me how successful the "dem" have been at repealing the repub's tax giveaways for them.

BTW: Breaking tonight is a story of yet another insider trading scheme. This one on a truly massive scale. Good republicans no doubt.

I know that I am a fool for trying to interject some facts into a blog called "Crap" (great way to regard the borough) but you often complain of the low level of discourse here....then come back with the same "lib-dem" stuff.

Anonymous said...

"As for "Plenty of taxing of the rich..." Please, do tell me how successful the "dem" have been at repealing the repub's tax giveaways for them."

So then you agree that the Dems have not done anything. Nothing they promised in this regard.

Queens Crapper said...

Congress has passed 27 tax increases so far

Let me guess - these are taxes on the poor?

Anonymous said...

Queens Crapper said...

Congress has passed 27 tax increases so far

Let me guess - these are taxes on the poor?

--Your concern for the wealthy is most touching.

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