Better Living Among the Better Off
Hearings begin today in Baltimore to decide whether some 3,000 poor residents of the Maryland city would be better off in the suburbs—and the better-off burbs at that. Federal judge Marvin J. Garbis will be parsing not just housing law but assumptions about the modern suburbs, and what living in them can do for you.
The sessions, expected to run a couple of weeks, aim to resolve an 11-year-old case brought by the ACLU against the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The ACLU that claims the department’s public housing policy creates ghettoes by building low-income units only in urban areas. "We're asking HUD to not do business as usual," ACLU executive Susan Goering told The Washington Post, but instead "to let families go where the jobs and the safe streets and the good schools are."
Logically, that means the posh towns closest to the city. The ACLU proposal specifically excludes working-class suburbs that have their own poor, the Post report says. And one assumes that the distant suburbs would take city transplants too far from their jobs, families and places of worship.
Experiments with regional approaches to public housing have shown positive results in Minneapolis, Chicago and elsewhere. But the burden of welcoming city transplants will likely fall not directly on country-club communities (whose high lawyers-per-capita rate yield high rates of success in fighting off intrustions), but on county governments that already have their hands full. “I have thousands of people on waiting list for affordable housing of all kinds," says the executive of Anne Arundel County, adjacent to Baltimore County. Other kinds include affordable housing for middle-income workers, like firefighters and teachers.
Baltimore has greatly improved its public housing since the lawsuit began, tearing down 1960s-era high-rises and replacing them with garden apartments, which, according Mayor Martin O’Malley, shows things can get better in the city. The ACLU proposal, he told the Baltimore Sun recently, represents the "old bigotry that the city is by its nature a bad place."
In the end, how low-income residents are placed is usually more important than where. As John Cassidy point out in this week’s New Yorker, thousands of Chicago inner-city residents relocated to housing in middle-class suburbs in the ‘80s and ‘90s were more likely to find and keep jobs and see their children graduate from high school, than those they left behind. But when participants in a federal housing voucher program huddled together in the suburbs, their lives showed little improvement.
The sessions, expected to run a couple of weeks, aim to resolve an 11-year-old case brought by the ACLU against the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The ACLU that claims the department’s public housing policy creates ghettoes by building low-income units only in urban areas. "We're asking HUD to not do business as usual," ACLU executive Susan Goering told The Washington Post, but instead "to let families go where the jobs and the safe streets and the good schools are."
Logically, that means the posh towns closest to the city. The ACLU proposal specifically excludes working-class suburbs that have their own poor, the Post report says. And one assumes that the distant suburbs would take city transplants too far from their jobs, families and places of worship.
Experiments with regional approaches to public housing have shown positive results in Minneapolis, Chicago and elsewhere. But the burden of welcoming city transplants will likely fall not directly on country-club communities (whose high lawyers-per-capita rate yield high rates of success in fighting off intrustions), but on county governments that already have their hands full. “I have thousands of people on waiting list for affordable housing of all kinds," says the executive of Anne Arundel County, adjacent to Baltimore County. Other kinds include affordable housing for middle-income workers, like firefighters and teachers.
Baltimore has greatly improved its public housing since the lawsuit began, tearing down 1960s-era high-rises and replacing them with garden apartments, which, according Mayor Martin O’Malley, shows things can get better in the city. The ACLU proposal, he told the Baltimore Sun recently, represents the "old bigotry that the city is by its nature a bad place."
In the end, how low-income residents are placed is usually more important than where. As John Cassidy point out in this week’s New Yorker, thousands of Chicago inner-city residents relocated to housing in middle-class suburbs in the ‘80s and ‘90s were more likely to find and keep jobs and see their children graduate from high school, than those they left behind. But when participants in a federal housing voucher program huddled together in the suburbs, their lives showed little improvement.
posted by burb at 3:27 PM
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