Walls That Tumbled Down

By Susan Tifft

Deficits, disrepair and disarray plague public housing

The 13 monolithic high-rises that make up New York City's St. Nicholas public housing project sprawl over an area roughly the size of Rockefeller Center. But there the comparison ends. The hallways are easels for spray-painted graffiti. The stairwells reek of urine and ammonia.

Elevators rarely work. Despite this winter's bone-chilling temperatures, the project's 4,000 residents have had heat only intermittently. Several days before Christmas, one shivering tenant accidentally set her apartment on fire with an electric space heater. She had to wait 31 1/2 weeks for the public housing authority to make repairs. She still is without regular heat. More than a decade ago, dynamite and wrecking balls claimed St. Louis' Pruitt-Igoe, the nation's high-rise symbol of all that was wrong with public housing.

But today many big-city projects remain blighted. According to audits released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development last November, nearly a quarter of the country's 134 major public housing authorities are foundering financially. The cause: local mismanagement and shoddy or nonexistent maintenance that has left many of the units so dilapidated that they can no longer be rented. In Providence more than 1,000 of the city's 3,473 original public housing units have been torn down or classified as uninhabitable, at a loss of nearly $1.1 million in annual rental income. In Indianapolis maintenance crews could not document two-thirds of their repairs. With good reason:

when HUD auditors did a spot check, they found one repairman catnapping and another washing his car. The price of such neglect is staggering. When the public housing program began in 1937, it was envisioned as a pay-as-you-go system.

The Federal Government would build the units, and local authorities would pay for their operation and upkeep, mostly through rents. But rising energy costs, inflation, aging buildings and legal limits on the percentage of income that tenants can be required to pay have gradually forced Washington to underwrite more than half of the operating budgets in many cities. Operating subsidies for the nation's 1.2 million public housing units have ballooned from $28 million in 1970 to $1.2 billion in 1983. Overall in fiscal 1984 HUD will spend a whopping $4.4 billion on building, maintaining and repairing public housing. In Detroit nearly 25% of the city's 10,271 public housing units are vacant. Herman Gardens once housed nearly 10,000 people.

Now fewer than half of the 2,100 town-house-style apartments are ^ occupied. Many of the rest have been vandalized by outside gangs. In an attempt to "shrink its $11 million deficit, the public housing authority laid off a quarter of its maintenance staff. The result: a backlog of 9,500 uncompleted work orders. The funds that do get allocated for upkeep have been poorly used. The local authority spent $16 million in federal money over the past two years to install new roofs and windows at Herman Gardens. But at least 320 of these newly repaired units are slated for demolition. Conditions at Chicago's Cabrini-Green have sunk to new depths since former Mayor Jane Byrne spent three highly publicized weeks living there. Soon after Mayor Harold Washington took office, he appointed Renault Robinson, founder of Chicago's Afro-American Patrolmen's League, to run the Chicago housing authority.

Robinson promptly fired 259 repairmen for loafing. But he failed to replace them in time for this winter's subzero cold wave. As a result, boilers shut down and many tenants huddled around space heaters or kitchen stoves. At the nearby ABLA Homes project, a broken sprinkler system flooded the decrepit entrance halls. Many big-city officials feel that the Reagan Administration deserves much of the blame for the persistence of the nation's public housing mess.

"With this Administration, there is always the threat of substantial cuts," says Carl Williams, executive director of San Francisco's housing authority. "You never know from one year to the next how to plan your budget."

Housing officials complain that HUD's operating subsidies are unrealistically low, especially for the bigger projects that consume large amounts of energy. Mayors are miffed at the Administration's refusal to continue President Carter's policy of transferring financially troubled projects to federal authority. In New York City, which took advantage of the federal bail-out during the city's fiscal crisis in the 1970s, the change in policy has translated into an unanticipated $100 million addition to the municipal budget. Tenants are feeling the pinch as well. Under housing legislation passed in 1981, the Administration raised the amount tenants must pay in rent from 25% of income to an eventual ceiling of 30%. But the Administration simultaneously slashed funds for the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) and other social-service programs on which many public housing tenants rely for income. These cuts and high unemployment rates left some tenants and authorities worse off than before. Says Sam Hider, executive director of Atlanta's housing authority: "The tenants lose their jobs and have no money, and you can't get it from them." Behind the finger pointing lurks a larger issue:

the proper role of Government in public housing. "The Federal Government has an obligation to see poor people housed," declares San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein.

The Reagan Administration, however, has a hands-off philosophy. "Throwing money at the problem is not the solution," says Warren Lindquist, HUD's Assistant Secretary for Public Housing. "The troubled authorities need better management and more community control."

Since taking office, the Administration has virtually eliminated HUD's function as a builder of low-cost housing, choosing instead to spend $5.8 billion on modernizing existing units. Reagan has proposed a private-sector substitute: a housing voucher program, whereby poor families could shop for housing in the private rental market with federally subsidized cash vouchers. The Administration argues that the program will save the Government money and give people more control over their choice of dwellings. Critics charge, however, that the supply of private, low-cost housing is too small, and the opportunities for landlord price gouging and client abuse too great, for the system to succeed. The fiscal squeeze has spurred creative thinking on the local level. San Francisco has arranged for a local commercial developer to renovate, rent and manage 82 units in the Hunter's Point housing project. The developer sets the rents, with housing authority approval, but the apartments must go to low-income tenants. The city strictly enforces an innovative construction policy. Before a developer can get a permit to build a new downtown office building, he must agree to put up new housing or pay a fee that is earmarked for that purpose. Of the $20 million collected since 1981, when the program started, $3 million has been used to renovate two public housing projects. To reduce vandalism and rapid turn over, New York City's housing authority has quietly implemented a policy of "economic integration":

the placement of more middle-income and working tenants in public housing projects. Welfare families fear the change will push them out. But other public housing tenants welcome the prospect of more responsible neighbors. "When you work for your money and you pay your own rent, you appreciate things more," contends Martha Henry, who has lived for 30 years in Manhattan's Dyckman project.

"That's why welfare apartments are different."

Originally designed in the wake of the Depression as a way station for the temporarily unemployed and the working poor, public housing projects are nowadays looked upon as permanent homes for a growing number of very low-income people, most of whom are black, Hispanic or elderly. Nearly 10% of Boston's population lives in public housing. In New York there are 175,000 families on the waiting list. An increase in the number of urban homeless threatens to pressure the system even further. The need for improved programs for funding and managing low-income housing is critical, but until they are developed, existing projects will need to be maintained. HUD estimates it would take $67 billion to replace them. Without public housing or low-cost alternatives, says Carrie Copeland, president of Capitol Homes Tenant Association in Atlanta, "there's nowhere else to go."

With reporting by Patricia Delaney, THOMAS McCARROLL