This deserves much much more conversation than I'm going to give it at this moment, but hopefully I'll get back to it.
It's common practice to raze low-income public housing and replace it with "mixed-income housing," where some of the units are reserved for subsidized-rent units for low-income families. (The number of units reserved for low-income families is significantly smaller than the number of low-income units razed.) The idea here is to "deconcentrate poverty." The thing is, this is actually about destabilizing poor people.
Assuming that this will alleviate poverty (or help poor people) requires considering poor people as toxic. If you spread out a toxin, it gets watered down and is less potent. But poor people aren't toxins, damnit. Poor people are people, and if you put poor people in a nicer place, that's super, because poor people deserve to live in nice places too. But if there still aren't jobs, education, and childcare, as well as food stamps, welfare income, enough housing units, and sustainable community structures, you aren't helping anything! You're making the poor invisible, which makes non-poor people feel better. And that's not public policy, that's bullshit.
Fuck that noise.
The first step to solving this issue (numbers wise) is to produce a dense enough redevelopment that you have as many or more low income restricted units as before. But density is also a "great evil" and so it never happens.
ReplyDeleteI assume this came to your attention though the magic of the Maddow, right?
I'm arguing that there isn't an issue to begin with. If the quality of the housing is poor, it should be fixed or replaced. But "mixed income housing" is a way of saying "poor people are dangerous." There are less shitty ways of making the same mistake, but it's still a mistake.
ReplyDeleteIt's pissing me off right now because of Maddow, but it's been on my mind for about four years. When I first started my job, we knew that Atlanta had razed public housing and sold the property to private developers. What we didn't know until a few months later was that although they were required to leave 10% of the units income-restricted, they weren't required to actually build a building there. If they built 10 condos, only one had to be income-restricted. If they built a parking lot, they didn't have to do anything for the people who were kicked out.