Perhaps nothing so well evidences the blandly bourgeois aspect of American Catholicism over the last 20 years as its dismal record on the housing crisis. The dimensions of the present sad condition in the United States may be highlighted for the purposes of emphasis by the situation in New York City. Usually New York is not any different—it is only bigger. Some of the statistical realities are frightening. There are approximately a hundred thousand families each year possessing a handful of small card receipts, after having applied to the New York City Housing Authority every six months for years. For such hopefuls, a total of 7,000 new public housing apartments were made available in 1966 and 1967. But during the same period, some 9,000 dwelling units or apartments were made available with a variety of public aids in the so called middle-income range. The middle-class grab of public subsidy is possible in New York State because of its Limited Profit Housing Company Act. The Mitchell-Lama Law—called after the two legislators who got it passed, and whose legal and architectural firms then made money on sponsorships under the legislation, to little apparent public distaste or investigation—provides to a developer the incentive of up to 50 percent relief on the taxes of his new structure, as well as cheaper mortgage money than private resources can provide. In urbanrenewal areas, written-down land cost, under Title One of the slum clearance clause of the Federal Housing Act, provides a third subsidy.
The results are obvious. In the New York West Side Urban Renewal Area, some tenants are occupying cooperative quarters for $22 per room, which under conventionally financed development would have cost them about $75. In many Mitchell-Lamas, however, “middle-income” families making over $20,000 are accepted, since these developments are tenanted by several magic formulas of income and rent.
On the other hand, with the poorest whose need is the greatest, 75 percent of the families of five or more members making less than $6,000 a year could not find an apartment in the City of New York that they could afford. To make matters worse, the great liberal program of rent supplement (which took riots to convince Congress to fund even niggardly) is, when studied in the light of the needs of the poor, a bit of a federal fraud. For example, according to the rent supplement manual, a family is supposed to pay 25 per cent of its gross income, with little or no adjustment downward, and yet cannot be making more than $6,100. Hence a three-bedroom apartment would have to rent for $118 a month, while in traditional public housing in New York City the same flat could run as low as $75 a month, including utilities. The rent supplement program could, in effect, leave a family without money for food or other necessities! Over 30 years of experience finds the New York City Housing Authority housing poor families at close to 16 percent of adjusted net income. Even then, apart from full welfare and welfare supplement families, since incomes go higher than $8,000, it cannot boast too loudly of housing the really poor.
Those who speak with great feeling for the poor are deceived by rent supplement: it has much less pertinence to the housing needs of the poor in our urban slums than enlightened public housing. The apostolate needed is the promotion of justice through the proper administration of laws which are good at least in the lawmakers’ intentions. The basic human right to—and need for—decent shelter is not only cynically ignored by our society but it is even made more impossible of achievement by the quality of our public policies.
Urban renewal is not necessarily poor removal, nor is it necessarily immoral, as some have maintained. However, its implementation throughout the United States has only rarely been used to do anything to meet the housing needs of those it has caused to be displaced. The new term, of course, is “model cities,” which is merely a promise of what might be done in the next few years. It theoretically will combine local involvement and social renewal in ways that many have called for since the days of bulldozer renewal. But legislative tools are as good as their use. Public monies in the form of reduced land cost, cheap mortgages, and tax relief for developers—all of these have been and are being used to take care of the less needy. The moderate income program of the State of New York (which was a model for the federal program) is projecting housing that will cost over $40 a room though it was originally talked of as providing housing costing between $21 and $30 a room.
Now the churches and non-profit groups are invited by legislation, convention oratory and Urban America, Inc. to share in the great undertaking of providing such “moderate” or “middle-income” housing. It would seem to be using the moral force, and at times even the assistance of technicians paid by the religious dollar, to provide housing for those who have a need perhaps, but not those who might be considered poor. The whole question of the church-related sponsorship of housing might also be reconsidered in light of the thinking of a pilgrim church somewhat less burdened with material possessions, such as buildings and real estate. Why has not the self-help cooperative philosophy and formula for housing been endorsed and promoted in the United States by the Christian church? It has been for over 30 years virtually a Jewish trade union monopoly. Yet it was highly recommended as long ago as 1953 by Pope Pius XII on the fiftieth anniversary of the inauguration of public housing in the city of Rome. And it was endorsed by Pope John XXIII as a social form most consonant with Christian thinking.
The urban slum outbreaks of recent summers always result in “agonized reappraisals” of the ghetto problem. A furor of emergency repairs or of public relation gimmicks like instant rehabilitation of tenements results, but no great over-all assault on slum housing has yet been forthcoming. Proposals to clear the slums by making it profitable for private enterprise raise many questions. Private enterprise has had a chance under slum clearance and under urban renewal to cooperate with governmental programs to provide new housing. It has provided the new housing where the rental dollar was most available and most numerous. Title I slum clearance resulted in luxury housing, and after that urban renewal, Mitchell-Lama, or 221, d, 3, has been resulting in an ever-upward level of middle-income housing. Even under this last and least tried program, the church-affiliated Tompkins Square Neighbors in New York City is producing over $27-a-room housing, which can only be seen as the usual “institutional kick” to keep “our kind of people” in the neighborhood; similarly The Tri-Faith Development in New York’s Yorkville.
All of the socialistic aids of public monies have been given to private housing developers. Now it would seem time for some specifically concrete and poor-oriented controls to be imposed upon their activity to guarantee low rents.
So much still depends on public understanding, which regrettably confuses today’s poverty with its remembered kind. It is popular for those who have made their way out of the poverty of a generation or two ago to recall nostalgically the life of the slum. The tenement becomes almost romantic, as Jane Jacobs would have us believe a five-story walk-up can be. Some made-it-the-hard-way affluent Americans, for example, look upon public housing projects as not having improved the housing lot of their residents. They lament such living as having institutionalized the poor. Not many of them have ever asked the poor how they feel about public housing, nor have they visited the broadly diverse examples of such housing. Public housing, therefore, suffered a bad image (and defeat in three New York State referenda), just as it was improving its actual performance in terms of size, design and humane management.
The romanticizers of the past slums should remember that the very tenements they moved out of years ago are the homes of today’s more tightly mired poor. One big difference is that today most of the structures cannot even be insured against fire. It is from such rundown and worn-out dwelling places that the social fires that rage through our cities each summer are apt to come for many years more.
