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Problem, research strategy, and findings: American public housing since 1937 is often viewed as a single failed experiment of architecture, management, and policy. This view masks a much more highly differentiated experience for residents and housing authorities, rooted in a long-term moral and ideological struggle over the place of the poorest residents in American cities. This article reframes public housing history as a succession of informal social experiments: initial public efforts to clear out slum-dwellers and instead accommodate barely poor working-class tenants or the worthy elderly; a 30-year interlude, where public housing authorities consolidated the poorest into welfare housing while gradually shifting responsibility for low-income housing to private landlords, private developers, and private investors; and a series of partnerships since 1990 that reserve more of this public-private housing for a less-poor constituency. Empirically, this article provides an unprecedented graphic glimpse into the ways that the overall mode-share of public housing has shifted and diversified. Ultimately, this article reveals that the reduced role of the public sector has curtailed the growth of deeply subsidized housing provision to the lowest-income Americans.
Takeaway for practice: As various initiatives continue to redevelop conventional public housing, this article asks practitioners to consider larger historical and policy questions about which of America's poorest citizens should be served, and to rethink the naming and definitional boundaries of what constitutes public housing.
Research support: Research assistant support provided by the authors’ university.
Notes
It might also be appropriate to use the phrase “social engineering” to describe this process, although the negativity associated with that term suggests caution. Informal experimentation, rather than formal experiments, seems to be the more accurate descriptor. In the few cases where the federal government has commissioned experimental or at least quasi-experimental research designs in the realm of low-income housing, such as in the landmark, $175 million Experimental Housing Allowance Program (EHAP) during the 1970s, policy decisions have often preceded the findings instead of following them (Winnick, 1995). Moreover, as economist Harvey Rosen (1985) put it when analyzing the EHAP, “Experimental data offer no particular advantages. Fundamentally, this is because housing behavior is so complex and the policy environment so uncertain that simple comparisons of experimental and control groups are unlikely to be of much interest” (p. 72).
Although, using this definition, public housing can be considered the first deep subsidy program, it is worth noting that most public housing did not actually employ this precise kind of income-calibrated rents until passage of the first Brooke amendment, in 1969, which set rent for a particular apartment at 25% of its tenant's income (raised to 30% of income in 1981). The Housing Act of 1937 had required that household incomes be no more than five or six times the rent charged for an apartment (depending on family size), but rents were linked to apartments and did not vary with tenant income. By 1940, the U.S. Housing Authority slightly altered this so that income limits gave way to a maximum rent standard in which rent could not exceed 20% of tenant income. Starting in the early 1940s, however, some public housing providers, such as the Chicago Housing Authority, introduced apartment unit rents that did vary by income.
Fair market rents vary according to the jurisdictional location and the number of bedrooms in the unit. Rent setting varies according to several factors such as family size and depends on whether utility costs are included. For shallow subsidies, rents may be set at 30–40% of the maximum tenant income associated with that unit. For tenants earning less than that maximum income, this means that they may be asked to pay more than 30–40% of their income in rent, thereby making it less affordable.
This is in addition to a separate program for senior housing, Section 202 of the Housing Act of 1959, not part of the conventional public housing program itself. That program, although still smaller than the number of public housing apartments devoted to seniors, gradually grew to encompass about 300,000 units, reaching about 11% of the eligible population of low-income seniors (Schwartz, 2010).
Housing vouchers were then being studied by the Experimental Housing Allowance Program being run by HUD, but “the fact is, Congress enacted the housing allowance's basic legislation before EHAP was launched and was still supplementing the legislation even as EHAP's first raw data trickled in” (Winnick, 1995, p. 96). Formal experiments continued to be outfl anked by informal policy experimentation.
Voucher programs continue to reach those with the lowest incomes. Of the nation's Section 8 tenant-based voucher recipients in 2012, 76% have an extremely low income (below 30% of area median income), more than is true for public housing residents (61%). An additional 21% of Section 8 voucher holders, compared to 26% of public housing residents, have very low incomes (between 30% and 50% of area median income). Nationwide, 28% of Section 8 voucher households include at least one nonelderly disabled family member and 19% are elderly, compared to 21% and 31%, respectively, of public housing families (HUD, 2012).
As of 2012, 81% of current inhabitants in project-based Section 8 housing are extremely low-income. Average monthly rental payments of households were just $265 in 2012, less than the $294 for Section 8 voucher recipients or $318 for public housing inhabitants. In addition, project- based Section 8 units are oriented toward the elderly (36% of units) and the non-elderly disabled (28% of units; HUD, 2012). It is worth noting, however, that these projects are less likely than conventional public housing to serve families. In 1981, 80% of the program's units were designated for the elderly; in 2012, nearly two-thirds of residents were elderly or non-elderly disabled (HUD, 2012; President's Commission on Housing, 1982).