Housing Disinterest Has Damaging Impact on Life (Michael Parenti)

Housing Disinterest Has Damaging Impact on Life
Author	Michael Parenti
Publisher	The Burlington Free Press
First published	1978-06-18
Type	Newspaper article
Source	https://www.newspapers.com/image/199965237/

Housing Disinterest Has Damaging Impact on Life is an article written by Michael Parenti, published in The Burlington Free Press on 18 June 1978.

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The federal government is massive but it doesn't pursue a central national interest in housing. Moreover, most of the government's involvement in the housing business has not helped those most in need. When money is spent on housing, the dollars go through a leaky pump. You can spend billions, but no matter how many billions you send out, they don't reach the people who need housing. Richard Nixon was right when he said, "We throw billions to solve these problems and we haven't solved them." But his conclusion is wrong: therefore, we should do nothing and trust the market because people really enjoy living in substandard housing!

Still, Nixon was basically right. We are throwing billions of dollars away to solve housing problems and nothing is happening. The question then is not: Why aren't we making better effort in housing? The question is: Why, after making such an incredible effort in housing over the last 20 years, people who need housing haven't received it? With such an expenditure, such a burden on the taxpayer, such a profit to land speculators, banks, private developers, and big corporations, why is it that nothing has happened?

The housing problem is still so bad that one out of every four Americans are living in substandard housing. The federal housing programme is designed to address housing problems through the private profit system. The function of most public housing laws is not to build houses for the poor but to make profits for those who provide the services. Some of them don't provide much service, but they make tremendous profit. In fact, the Urban Renewal programme has created less, rather than more, low-income housing, Not only have slums been torn down, but also solid low-income houses such as in Boston's West End.

The Federal Housing Administration shows another instance of the government role in housing. The FHA programme is geared to subsidise, pay costs, and pick up the tab of the private speculator. Large corporations are buying up at a small sum poor, run-down houses which are worth nothing on the market. Then the new owners make minor repairs, and resell the houses to FHA recipients at two or sometimes four times the original value! The FHA, believe it or not, conducts no field investigation of these houses. They simply underwrite the mortgage; and banks are eager to give mortgages that are guaranteed against default by the federal government. The mortgage recipient is usually a low-income person who moves into a house, and within a month or less, finds it uninhabitable. These people are often unable to make or pay for repairs and they skip out on the house. The FHA must then pick up the mortgage from the bank. This is the housing of urban development; and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is the nations' biggest slum lord. It owns thousands of these abandoned houses which were used to make fortunes off of poverty. The reason is not bureaucracy; rather there is too little centralised power. More police power could be used to come down very hard on people who are not only stealing our money but are producing bad housing and destroying lives.

For example, some landlords are renting buildings that are literally falling apart. The tenant then comes in with a set of demands, but the landlord has a legally established right to his rent and his right is enforced. The tenants, of course, do begin to act and feel like they are living in a slum, which indeed they are. Then the landlord slips out on them; drops the whole house because he has already made three or four times his initial investment on the house. These landlords are impossible to find; they work through a web of front groups. You can't even find out who owns those abandoned houses! If you go through the South Bronx, it looks like a devastated area — Warsaw 1944. That is a monument to the private profit system.

Instead of saying "Let's get the State off our backs," let's get the State on the backs of those people who are destroying this country. Let's get some real enforcement. But the reason you can't get enforcement is because political power follows economic power. You would find that the slum landlord is making contributions to the New York Democratic Party!

Housing is expensive; there is a lot of material, labour, and money involved. Organising a construction company depends on market conditions, it depends on finding people who will buy those homes and it is a wonderful thing for that income level. But for people who don't have the money to buy those houses, there is a need for federal funds. The housing problem is a problem of billions, not the $39,000 FHA recipients can get. We have to get away from the idea that the federal government is a bad, humbling bureaucracy. People must mobilise to get the government to serve the needy, not the greedy.