The final end of Public Housing
1st July 2024 · 0 Comments
By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer
The closure of Jefferson Parish’s Acre Road Complex in Marrero effectively sunsets the concept of U.S. government-owned housing in the metro area. The federal government’s transition to public-private “Hope VI” style partnerships or Section 8 private vouchers stands as nearly complete, not just in New Orleans, but across the nation.
Just over three decades ago, the federal government held a portfolio of more than one million publicly-owned apartments. By November 13, 2018, just 105,000 public units remained. At that point, the directors of the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development’s Office of Public and Indian Housing stated their desire to “reposition” those lingering properties by September 30, 2019. Today, with a few limited exceptions, those units stand mostly empty or demolished. In fact, the announcement of the closure of Acre Road in early 2020 constituted part of that draw-down, a process that finally ended with its remaining buildings in Marrero being boarded up in the last two weeks.
The exit of the U.S. government from the ownership of housing of the poor ostensibly stemmed from over $70 billion in delayed capital needs prior to the pandemic, a figure that just skyrocketed amidst recent inflationary pressures on building materials and labor. However, it was built upon a quiet, bipartisan agreement in the 1990s that public housing had descended into a cycle of poverty and despair which was irreversible.
That cross-party perspective was not always the case. When funding for “projects” commenced in the early New Deal budgets and was greatly expanded by the 1937 Wagner-Steagall Housing Act, the idea that the government could directly and quickly alleviate the national housing shortage enjoyed wide support. Replacing “shanty-towns” and “slum-lords” accelerated development of the public complexes, even at the expense of many historic neighborhoods. During this epoch, for example, developments like Iberville in New Orleans would wipe away much of Treme’ (and former areas of Storyville), yet for the families who moved in, often the public housing apartments proved the first time that many had reliable indoor plumbing and safe gas heating and cooking facilities.
For its first four decades, public housing in the United States typically was racially segregated. That kept the money flowing to government housing from powerful Southern Democratic Congressional Committee Chairmen who otherwise supported “Jim Crow.” By the late 1960’s, however, under the Johnson and Nixon administrations, the construction of “projects” in previously red-lined neighborhoods proved a key tool in desegregating major urban areas. Support on the Right began to dwindle, as ‘white-flight’ took hold.
By the 1980s, “the projects” had transformed in public perceptions from a respite from poverty to “cesspools of crime,” as one Reagan administration official put it. More serious academic studies did observe that the early public complexes enjoyed a certain cross-section of professions and backgrounds, which provided children with varied examples of eventual economic achievement. This no longer proved true thanks to tighter financial limits to qualify for publicly subsidized apartments. By 1988, a series of studies concluded that the poor conditions of the residents of “projects’ merely projected endemic poverty to those growing up within them. Citing data accumulated, social scientists at the time speculated that children who could not see successful middle-class families in their apartment complex would have no one to emulate – and to whose economic success, they could aspire. A theory developed that those impoverished should no longer constitute the majority of any subsidized building’s residents.
Beginning under HUD Secretary Jack Kemp in 1989, wholesale redevelopment of public housing began to be contemplated. At first, Kemp believed tenant ownership might prove the pathway to improving the conditions of the “projects.” A voluntary program began to transfer the title of the various apartments to the occupants, emulating Margaret Thatcher’s Councilhouse ownership program in the UK. HUD had some early successes, yet, in many cases, tenants did not have the educational or experiential background to deal with the challenges of building maintenance and management. High profile public relations disasters as building failed suggested another course.
The concept of the Hope VI program was based on three pillars: rebuild the projects to more architecturally integrate with the surrounding neighborhoods; as much as possible embrace a “townhouse” footprint where families felt like they lived in homes; and limit subsidized apartments to (generally) no more than a third of all residences, so as to prevent concentrations of poverty. Critics who warned that the redevelopments cut subsidized apartment availability by 2/3 enjoyed little influence, as their complaints were used as the justification to promise the expansion of Section 8 to make up the difference in lost residences.
The conversion of the St. Thomas Housing Project in New Orleans’ Lower Garden District drew national attention as one of the test cases of the new HOPE VI program, and the redubbed “RiverGarden” development was subsequently used as a national example of how a neighborhood could transform under the mixed-use development model. Orleans’ troubled Desire Housing Project rated next on the list. At the time, though, many noted (including the author in an appearance on WYES’ Informed Sources upon the ribbon-cutting a RiverGarden), how much of a bipartisan program the redevelopment of the projects had become.
The new Clinton administration, and particularly its new HUD Director Henry Cisneros, had embraced Kemp’s vision as their own. In fact, Cisneros joined Kemp for a joint television appearance on C-Span in the mid-1990s to talk about the bipartisan nature of public housing redevelopment – and the successes of the Hope VI program. In particular and unusually for a national interview, Cisneros pointed the importance of demolishing New Orleans’ Desire Housing Project, which the Democratic HUD Secretary verbally rated “as the worst housing project in America.” Kemp emphasized his support for Cisneros’ work, at a time when looming GOP takeover of Congress made such bipartisan comments impolitic. His praise did not seem to affect Kemp’s intra-party reputation, as he went on to serve as the 1996 GOP vice presidential candidate. Perhaps the reason for the lack of partisan blowback came late in that joint TV interview with his Democratic successor. Kemp admitted that he hoped his proposals would lead to the end of government-owned housing in America. Cisneros disagreed that was the end goal, yet 30 years later, it seems Kemp’s perspective prevailed.
The 1998 Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act opened a wealth of funds for private developers to enter into public/private partnerships with HUD, both to redevelop the “projects” and construct new housing, where just 1/3 of the apartments were reserved for Section 8 vouchers. It and subsequent legislation, though, contained a provision that in many cases (though not always) in exchange for federal loans, the subsided housing requirements of private properties would last just 30 years – at which point the owners could choose to end subsidized housing. That infamously occurred at the American Can building in Mid-City, where the new owners took the expiration date of the original government loans to end the acceptance of Section 8 vouchers, effectively kicking out the poorer tenants. (In fairness, the original developers, Pres Kabacoff’s HRI decried the move, yet they had sold the complex years before – and enjoyed little power to stop the effective economic evictions.)
At HUD’s behest, the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) actively redeveloped all of its public housing communities since 2004 with private partners, transforming them into the new mixed- income, mixed-use model, where only 1/3 of the residents enjoy rental subsidies. Through the HOPE IV program HANO has fully redeveloped River Garden, Harmony Oaks, Columbia Parc, B. W. Cooper, and Lafitte. In particular, its transformation of Iberville drew national attention as a “HUD Choice Neighborhoods Initiative.”
The Housing Authorities of Jefferson and the surrounding suburban parishes followed a similar model, effectively ending publicly-owned housing in the metro area, just 28 years after the first St. Thomas apartment building was demolished in 1996.
This article originally published in the July 1, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
