The Heartless Math of 'Carsonomics'
Ben Carson, now the secretary of housing and urban development, in 2015
during his run for the GOP nomination for president. (John Locker / AP)
I lived in one of Londons first council housing projects after World War
II. That experience showed me how a country (the United Kingdom, in this
case) could create affordable housing and maintain a nice aesthetic, using
social architecture to benefit both society and building inhabitants.
In 1952, the architects Chamberlin, Powell & Bon built the Golden Lane
Estate in London on top of a bombed-out site. They sought to imbue the city
with an architectural model of social housing that was utilitarian,
functional and beautiful. Influenced by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe,
Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Hilberseimer, the modernism of this structure
is to London what Unité dhabitation is to Marseille in France.
These estates in the U.K. have nothing in common with the American model of
social housingoften called projectswhich are, if anything, the
nightmarish antithesis to the British ideal of social housing. The American
model of social housing is related to the gentrification of cities. This
keeps certain types of people outside of certain parts of town and makes
land accessible/affordable for an elite class.
But this practice is not new. With the establishment of the National Housing
Act of 1934, both the Federal Housing Administration and the Federal Home
Loan Bank Board were created in the same year, and the abuse known as
redlining was born. Redlining is the way key services (e.g., home loans,
insurance) are denied or when costs are raised for residents of a specific
geographical area. These actions resulted in black neighborhoods being
deemed unsafe and unwise investments. Hence, it was next to impossible for
African-Americans to get loans. This helped to concentrate poverty in
certain neighborhoods. When social housing was constructed, these projects
became pockets of poverty, segregation and forced underdevelopment. Growing
impoverishment and large social housing blocks brought problems such as
crime, degraded public education and decrepiteven nonexistentpublic
services.
While the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was meant to tackle these problems of
concentrated poverty and underdevelopment, there was little enforcement of
this law, as Nikole Hannah-Jones documented for ProPublica. In essence, a
law was created and purposefully allowed to be unenforcedto suit those who
benefited from social and economic segregation at the time.
In this manner, the legacy of the American model of public housing, compared
with countries like Austria, is an embarrassment. The Department of Housing
and Urban Development (HUD) has 5 million low-income households (accounting
for 10 million individuals) within HUD-subsidized housing in the U.S. And
although America has been home to some architecturally beautiful housing
projects, this is not the rule in the public housing history of the country.
Most people in U.S. government-subsidized housing are not enjoying scenic
views like the ones from Barbican or living in posh areas such as Hampstead.
Now, with the rising cost of living and increasing problems of employment in
the U.S., the housing market is slowing down. This trendand regulations
that have been designed to inform consumers of their rights, while enforcing
fairness with the Truth in Lending Act (TILA) and the grass-roots bill S.
2155makes getting home loans more difficult. With more Americans renting
today than at any time over the past 50 years, the pressure on the public
sector is mounting and is not aided by our own government officials. Even
the National Low-Income Housing Coalition has stated that there are 7.2
million fewer affordable and available homes than needed for extremely
low-income households.
If anything, the current administrations interest in lower-income housing
can be summed up with the recent proposal of U.S. Housing and Urban
Development Secretary Ben Carson, who has created the Make Affordable
Housing Work Act.
Sit down for this one.
Carsons plan would raise the rent of those in public housing to 35 percent
of household income (from the current 30 percent) while eliminating all
deductions that could in any way lower this rental contribution. This
proposed bill would force low-income households to pay morenot lessof
their earnings in rent, basically tripling the rent for the poorest. So the
affordable part of this act must refer to the affordability for the state,
not the individual or family.
Carson claims that these changes would require adults who are able to work
to shoulder more of their housing costs and provide an incentive to increase
their earnings. Not only does this kind of thinking contradict actual
research which demonstrates that affordable housing improves economic
self-sufficiency while increasing childrens future earnings, but such an
approach flies in the face of basic mathematics, where paying more does not
mean having more. It clearly means having less for the basic necessities of
survival. Along with education and health care, housing is a human right,
with many viable options for the government to implement.
Last month, Peter Gowan and Ryan Cooper of the think tank Peoples Policy
Project (3P) suggested that municipal governments across the United States
build millions of units of social housing. With their proposal,
municipalities would use municipal bond markets, loans from the federal
government and federal grants that replicated already existing grants (i.e.,
the low-income housing tax credit program) to finance the construction of
new housing.
This plan proves to be advantageous from various perspectives. First, the
costs would be kept to a minimum since the interest rates on government debt
are lower than on any other type of financing. Second, this model of
construction would be built with greater social cooperation and thus would
be more efficiently undertaken. The consensus among those who support the
anti-gentrification model of urban development is that short-term
construction models would be better used if they focus on the middle, rather
than the high end, of the market, where housing units can be constructed
with smaller square footage per unit even if sacrificing certain amenities.
The 3P plan suggests that the newly built housing units be managed through a
public authority or a local property management company.
However, missing from 3Ps project is a green architecture perspective that
is typically found in social housing units in other countries. Such
considerations are necessary in an era where resources are limited and the
means for processing energy can be easily integrated into building structure
and planning. For example, Vo Trong Nghia introduced the S House and S House
3 for low-income residents in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, a social housing
project that adapts to the landscape and in which the dwellings can be
assembled in only three hours. The Astrolarbre in Paris is a 12-unit housing
project designed around a single oak tree with rainwater harvesting and
gardens incorporated into the architecture. The Poljane Community Housing in
Maribor, Slovenia, incorporates roof gardens into its structure, while the
housing project in Mieres, Spain, relies on solar power and passive solar
energy. And, as architecture has changed to accommodate climate change, so
have materials, with many architects returning to wood or mixtures of steel
and wood.
What we can learn from social housing models in other countries is that
housing can be made affordably and without being ugly. Embracing an
ecological and aesthetic approach to social housing in the future will rely
upon getting politicians like Ben Carson on board with basic mathand a
pinch of humanity.
Julian Vigo
Julian Vigo is an independent scholar, filmmaker and activist who
specializes in ethnography, cultural studies, political philosophy and
postcolonial theory...
