After thirty-five years of well-funded efforts to privatize most public services, it is harder than ever to get collective solutions onto the political agenda. Take the case of public housing. Like so many other programs that were designed to address social needs, public housing has been under-funded, poorly managed and generally set up for failure. Public housing residents have been stigmatized and marginalized. The stereotypes are so powerful that even many liberal and progressive advocates for expanding affordable housing have given up on public housing. For an illustration of this, check out Sunday’s New York Times article about the demolition of public housing in Atlanta.

Public housing has many strengths, starting with the fact that it still is the most secure form of affordable housing. And, in these tough economic times, it represents a crucial set of public assets that should be protected, as well as an opportunity to reinvest in and rebuild distressed communities as part of economic stimulus. But for ten years, HUD and local housing authorities have been demolishing public housing without having a viable plan to replace lost units one-for-one, like-for-like. Instead, housing authorities have been funneling public funds into private developments that may or may not be sustained as affordable housing in the long-run.

The Power of Big Ideas
How did we get here? The answer has to do with power and worldview. Starting in the late 1960s, corporate and conservative forces formed a powerful alliance that set big, long-term goals. They were determined to reverse Great Society and civil rights gains that benefited the poor, working people, African Americans, women, and others who historically had been left out of economic and political decision-making. Conservatives were very clear about power relations: they wanted power to rest with corporations and the wealthy elite. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the corporate-conservative alliance had gained the power to shape the governing agenda, with deregulation and privatization as centerpieces. More significantly, conservatives had won over significant segments of the white working class, along with suburban professionals, who embraced low taxes, less government, law and order, etc. — with race as a driving force behind the popular appeal of these policies.

The corporate conservative alliance had big ideas about individual responsibility, the primacy of markets and a limited role for government in social and economic policy. They were not afraid to invest real resources into promoting those ideas, and in finding ways to link their ideas to issues and values that people care about --- family, community, prosperity, faith, etc. They understood they were in a worldview contest, and they geared up to win it; it is hard to find anybody on our side who understood the stakes in this contest, and who were equally determined to fight it out.

During the Reagan years, corporate-conservatives were able to shift the role of government from promoting the needs of the people toward promoting privatized, corporatized and commodified solutions to every social need, including housing. Their worldview justified policy shifts that served the interests of corporations and the wealthy at the expense of workers, communities and the poor. Conservatives argued that concentrating wealth into the hands of corporate elites was good for workers and the poor. A government that redistributes wealth to the people, through social programs, progressive taxation and wage demands is taking away too much capital from those who generate wealth. If government steps back, unfettered markets can generate more wealth that will trickle down and benefit everyone. Instead of being ‘welfare recipients,’ citizens should become ‘entrepreneurs.’

Conservatives redefined the bargain with the working class from ‘government is on your side’ to ‘government will stay out of your way as you go-it-alone.’ And so for more than thirty years, instead of supporting social solutions, working families have tended to seek individual paths to financial security. As their wages stagnated and social benefits declined, workers looked to the market for answers: they bought homes, invested in pensions, borrowed against their mortgages, took out more loans, etc. At the end of the day, their homes lost value and their pension funds were raided. The bargain they made with private markets broke down. While people are open to re-thinking this bargain, the forces on our side haven’t really sorted out the alternatives that we should be putting forward, organizing around and fighting for.

What This Has Meant for Housing
Over the past ten years, Atlanta has bulldozed 15,000 public housing units. By this time next year, if local officials have their way, Atlanta will be the first major city to have torn down all of its public housing facilities. The Times article repeats officials’ claims that Atlanta is not abandoning public housing. The Housing Authority pays more for residents’ housing these days than it did in the 1990s. Public money is going toward vouchers that residents can use to find private rentals, and it is going into public/private agreements with developers, contractors and landlords to create mixed income facilities with a certain percentage of affordable units, or to make more affordable rentals available in private developments.

Well-meaning officials have embraced demolition and disposition. Renée L. Glover, the executive director of the Atlanta Housing Authority, sounds very reasonable as she argues for the demolition of large, poorly-constructed housing projects that have concentrated families into segregated and impoverished areas with limited services and amenities, bad schools and few economic opportunities. She favors moving public housing residents out to mixed income neighborhoods around the city.

The article does not go into detail about how well the 'decentralization' plan is working. How many residents are falling through the cracks? How many landlords are refusing to accept vouchers? How long are the waiting lists? How many developments end up reducing the number of affordable units or opting out of participation in subsidized housing programs? To measure the programs’ successes, we need answers to these kinds of questions.

We do know that not every family finds better housing in other neighborhoods. Some simply cannot get vouchers. Others cannot afford available rentals even with vouchers. Many developments that started out with affordable units convert to market rentals. In some cases, residents end up resettled into other impoverished areas, but without the neighbors and extended family members that they had in their old neighborhood. As the executive director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, Anita Beaty is in a position to see what happens to displaced residents who fall through the cracks. In the Times article, she expresses her frustration with demolition: “Until you have alternative housing that is affordable, available and appropriate, you have no business going into these communities and destroying them.”

Urban sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh notes how Atlanta’s approach represents a fundamental change in the social contract that cities have with the poor: “We’ve decided that the market can function to create housing and the role of government should be to move people into the market.” But our faith in the power of the private market to address all our housing needs is misplaced; it took the current housing crisis to make this clear to many people. Thanks in part to our over-reliance on unregulated financial markets, we are in the midst of a colossal housing crisis: high foreclosure rates are wiping out moderate-income neighborhoods, hitting communities of color especially hard. The number of affordable rentals is shrinking, in spite of the subsidies that private developers have received over the past thirty years. We have an over-burdened voucher system with long waiting lists. And yet, demolition of public housing moves forward as if we had a real, viable plan to house every family in America (we don’t).

What Alternatives Do We Have?
We’ve been told ‘there are no alternatives’ for so long that it is hard to even think about creating and expanding a healthy and dynamic public housing sector. It should come as no surprise that many public housing residents support Atlanta’s demolition plans. Residents, like the public officials who are pursuing demolition, are struggling for answers in a climate where too many options have been taken off the table. Right now, improving their existing neighborhoods and housing facilities is not an option, so why wouldn’t they opt for the only alternative they are being offered?

Let’s talk about the alternatives that we want to see on the table. As a society, we can invest in collective forms of housing that are stable, sustainable, democratically and competently managed, welcoming and well-funded. Social forms of housing open up possibilities that are harder to come by when each of us is struggling on our own. Social housing can build community as people work together to improve their quality of life. It provides opportunities for democratic governance in management and decision-making. In order to get these other options on the table, we must use the power of good organization as well as good ideas. This is what the Housing Justice Movement (HJM) is trying to do.

For HJM and their allies in groups like the Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights, housing is a human right that should be guaranteed through social policy. Making sure every family has secure housing of good quality is a collective responsibility, one that is too great to leave entirely up to the whims of the speculative housing market. Government plays a role in seeing that we are meeting this responsibility. A robust housing policy must employ both private and collective options, including public forms of housing. Check out the HJM vision statement about the future of public housing for more details.

As a step toward getting support for public housing back on the agenda, HJM is calling for a temporary moratorium on the demolition and disposition of public housing units. On June 15, Representatives Barney Frank and Maxine Waters gave housing justice a boost by sending a letter to HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan. In their letter, Frank and Waters make two key arguments: 1) Public housing facilities are vital public assets that represent an ongoing commitment to affordable housing. While other forms of subsidized housing also are important and vital, they do not represent the same kind of permanent investment in ‘hard’ housing units (subsidized units can too easily be taken out of the affordable housing pool). As we demolish ‘hard’ units, we risk losing the crucial investments and assets that these units represent. And 2) It makes no sense to demolish existing public housing unless and until all housing authorities “are required to replace demolished or dispossessed units on a one-for-one basis.”

Winning a moratorium would be a significant victory for housing justice, but it is only one small step. HJM and their allies have much work to do in order to make their vision for a secure public housing sector a reality. To do this, we need to build the kind of power the corporate-conservatives set out to build over thirty-five years ago --- through good organizing, strong alliances and by winning the battle of the big ideas.

--Sandra Hinson