Well Carl, I don't want to make you feel sad. This was the third article that I
found and posted in response to the fawning interview with Ben Carson that
Richard posted.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, May 13, 2018 5:56 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Heartless Math of 'Carsonomics'
At times I feel like a flat tire...and that's on a good day.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/13/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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 London’s 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 d’habitation is to
Marseille in France.
These estates in the U.K. have nothing in common with the American
model of social housing—often called “projects”—which 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 decrepit—even
nonexistent—public 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 unenforced—to 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
trend—and 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.
2155—makes 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 administration’s 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.
Carson’s 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 more—not less—of 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 children’s 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 People’s
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 3P’s 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
math—and 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...
