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Rhyming CatastrophesThe Continuous Problem of Affordable HousingBy: Abdulgader S. Naseer

“Affordable” in contemporary times means different things to different people, especially when combined with “housing”. There are two definitions for affordable housing: the common understanding versus the one this paper centers on. The first is the notion that affordability in housing means cheap materials, unpleasant aesthetics, and slums: the economic understanding of affordability. The second defines it as housing that is affordable to a segment of the population: the humanistic understanding. The first is widely held and has encouraged unscrupulous developers to settle on poor standards of construction, knowing they will not get much opposition. As a result, this has led the housing industry to construct housing that stigmatizes and penalizes its residents by denying their humanity. But housing is not merely shelter; it also must bestow on

its inhabitants a sense of dignity.

The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the governmental authority tasked with creating and implementing solutions for the housing needs of Americans, stipulates that any given household should pay no more than 30 percent of its annual income on housing. Families or individuals that pay more than that are considered “cost burdened”, which for HUD means “they may have difficulty affording necessities such as food, clothing, transportation, and medical care”. However, that is not the case. According to HUD, there are an estimated 12 million renters and homeowner households in the United States currently paying more than 50 percent of their annual incomes for housing. These statistics suggest that HUD has failed to meet the large

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demands for affordable housing. This is a national and global concern with issues that exist in all local levels, including the city of Miami.

The issues of affordable housing are a growing national problem that needs to be addressed in a proper manner. However, projects across the United States are in dire need of attention. A study done by the Washington Post in May 2011 shows that there are nearly 700 housing projects that already have been awarded $400 million but are idle today and have been for years. Approximately one in seven projects that HUD sponsors show signs of significant delay, and the prospective tenants are forced to wait for a place they could finally settle in. This is due to HUD not keeping track of the pace of construction in projects they sponsor. Instead of following through with developments until completed, HUD trusts local agencies to oversee the completion, while imposing little to no requirements. This pattern can be seen coast to coast and has extreme consequences. The evidence from this report reveals that more care needs to be taken in order to avoid the pitfalls of neglected developments that we have seen throughout history. Take for instance Pruitt-Igoe, which illustrates the negative impact these developments could have.

Pruitt-Igoe, a project built under the United States Housing Act of 1949, was located in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1950, the city of St. Louis commissioned the firm of Leinweber, Yamasaki & Hellmuth to design the 57-acre complex comprised of 33 identical buildings of 11 stories each. Architectural Forum, then a magazine that covered architecture and

the homebuilding industry, acclaimed the Modernist design as “vertical neighborhoods for poor people.” Four years later the project was completed, and had 2,870 apartments ready to house low-income families. At the time, Pruitt-Igoe was titled a solution to cure the disease of poverty.

It took only eight years for conditions to deteriorate. By 1958, the occupancy rate started declining. Over time the project had become increasingly

segregated, heavily vandalized, and it began to resemble the slums it replaced. Crime rate climbed, fear grew, outsiders stayed away, and Pruitt-Igoe had become notorious. In the 2011 documentary “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth”, Brian King, one of the former residents, helps visualize the environment that he had been living in. He states, “It seemed more like a prison environment that you had to escape from.” According to the documentary, the majority of the residents felt neglected, and some had the urge to make a statement about how unhappy they were in the projects. They saw the authority officials as an opportunity to voice their opinions, and they did so through violent actions. After a while, the police and ambulances stopped responding to calls from within, resulting in drug lords feeling comfortable to set up an empire within the projects. Gangs took over the streets. The project was so big, and eventually

“It seemed more like a prison environment that you had to escape from.”

- Brian King, former resident

PREVIOUS PAGE: The first Pruitt-Igoe implosion. St Louis, MO. Photo Courtesy of The Pruitt-Igoe MythBOTTOM RIGHT: A Police Officer takes cover. St Louis, MO. Photo Courtesy of Spainhower/Post-Dispatch

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so unmonitored, that criminal activity flourished.

In December of 1971, after three years of the Federal Department of Housing encouraging the remaining residents to leave, state and federal authorities agreed to demolish three of the thirty-three buildings with the goal of eventually taking them all down. In the process, all the remaining residents were moved to eleven buildings. In March 1972, following months of preparation, the first building was demolished by implosion at 3 p.m. The event was nationally televised. That same year, two more buildings were imploded. Two years later, the St. Louis housing authority received approval to close and completely demolish the Pruitt-Igoe homes. By 1976, the site was cleared, and fifty-seven acres of the north side neighborhood again stood vacant, as it had less than three decades earlier. Hundreds of people were forced back to the only places they could afford: the slums.

Pruitt-Igoe has become a textbook case of how affordable housing can go wrong. There are many theories on what went wrong with the project and what caused it to fail. According to the documentary, some critics blame the economic decline of the city of St. Louis, and believe that any public housing project would not have been able to survive under those conditions. Others believe the residents were too poor and caused their own problems. However, some of the leading architects, such as Oscar Newman and Charles Jencks, do not attribute the failure of Pruitt-Igoe to political-economic and social factors. In the late 90’s, Newman wrote a paper titled “Creating Defensible

Space” where he discusses the failures of P r u i t t - I g o e , and believed

that the problem was due to architectural failure, that design dictates whether an affordable housing development succeeds or fails. While I agree with Newman that design played a major role in the demise of the project, it was not merely due to the planning principles of Le Corbusier and Modernism. I argue that the lack of a mixed-income community, and the remote location of the development, are two other dominant reasons that led to the misery.

The first and most important reason this project failed is that the project was not designed to be mixed-income. While the government paid for constructing the buildings, the maintenance costs were left to the tenants. However, because only the poorest of the poor lived there, the tenants could not afford such a responsibility, and therefore maintenance and cleaning gradually went down almost instantly. Jacquelyn Williams, another former resident, believes that “Pruitt-Igoe would be here today had it been maintained like it was when they first opened it up.”

Prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, public housing was often used as a segregation tool between whites and blacks. Today, it is being used as segregation between the upper and lower income class. Placing affordable housing in an area that is not mixed-income means that no matter how it evolves, the community will always perceive it as negatively impacting the value of property, and that will restrict

TOP RIGHT: Zachary, 3, in a vacant apartment used as a playroom. St Louis, MO. Photo Courtesy of Nicholas Sapieha/Post-DispatchBOTTOM LEFT: Acts of vandalism by children. St Louis, MO. Photo Courtesy of The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

the evolution of the neighborhood. Diversifying different incomes in a neighborhood brings many advantages, starting with benefitting the economy. There is a better chance that businesses will come into more communities knowing that there is money to be spent. Mixed-use neighborhoods will also reduce divisions across society, benefitting the social aspects of civilization.

The second reason for failure was that the site chosen for Pruitt-Igoe was in a remote location. By 1949, the middle and upper classes were leaving the inner cities. During the years Pruitt-Igoe was built, the government focused on making suburbs more affordable for the middle class. The suburbs became places where people could find more services, jobs, better schools, better hospitals, and the value of their properties rising every year. It was a national pro-suburban policy. While there was a middle class exodus away from the cities, the lower class remained behind, and Pruitt-Igoe was built in an alienated location. In the documentary, King also says, “it [Pruitt-Igoe] seemed to be strategically planned to create an environment that people felt isolated, that people felt restricted, that people felt inhuman almost.” According to the documentary, the economy of St. Louis still flourished at the time, but it did so outside the city. This created a mismatch between where the jobs were, and where the people who needed the jobs were forced to live. As a result, there was a high unemployment rate amongst the residents of Pruitt-Igoe, and the domino effect of not being able to pay for the maintenance of the project began.

Sites for future affordable housing

projects must be integrated into existing neighborhoods a n d communi t ies , not become the castaways of cities. Housing is a needed ingredient in community building. Clusters of low-income projects that are socially, economically, and architecturally detached force their inhabitants to feel alienated and stigmatized. The tendency for some affordable housing projects to be located in isolated locations has resulted in problems of higher social and infrastructure costs. Affordable housing should be in locations that provide residents with better access to existing urban infrastructure, where they are near public transportation methods and

near employment opportunities. It is not just a question of the size of housing, but whether it replicates normal city conditions. That is something Pruitt-Igoe failed to do. We need to recognize

that these dwellings are longstanding homes, not way stations or warehouses.

King, when referring to the implosion of Pruitt-Igoe, said, “They should have left one of them as a monument to how never to treat people.” Here in Miami, we could use such a reminder because we are neglecting the same constructive principles Pruitt-Igoe ignored.

The 2009 US Census Bureau survey reports that 46.7 percent of the population in Miami is paying more than the accepted

“They should have left one of them as a monument to how never to treat people”

- Brian King, former resident

TOP RIGHT: A typical corridor. St Louis, MO. Photo Courtesy of unknownBOTTOM RIGHT: A broken doll amidst the rubble. St Louis, MO. Photo Courtesy of Bill Kesler/Post-Dispatch

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maximum of 30 percent of their annual household income. In addition to the lack of affordable housing in the city, the developed projects are often located in the poor neighborhoods such as Liberty City, Brownsville, and Allapattah, not in downtown Miami, as they should. This is due to a market-driven philosophy that the real estate market should be the only determining factor for prime lots recipients in the city. This philosophy revolves around the idea that these lands are too valuable to allot to affordable housing. Many believe that constructing tall buildings and selling them for multi-million dollars will grow the economy. What those people are not thinking of is the fact that if affordable housing was put in the downtowns, it reduces the transportation costs for residents. Doing that will enable people living in affordable housing to stabilize themselves socially, culturally, and economically. By placing them in downtowns, there could also be a chance that they become better active members of society. These things are what will ultimately benefit the economy and help grow it. In the long run, it is worth it if the government and states spend more money to place these projects in the downtowns.

Miami could look at other cities that have executed effective programs to improve their affordable housing developments. New York City, for example, has a program sponsored by the New York State Housing Finance Agency (HFA), the New York City Housing Development

Corporation (HDC), and the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) called the “80/20 Housing Program”. This program uses tax-exempt bonds to create affordable housing for low-income tenants in generally desirable locations throughout the city. In exchange for the low-cost financing, 20 percent of the units must be reserved for low-income tenants with incomes at 50 percent or less of the local Area Median Income (AMI). The other units can be rented at market rates. HFA’s Regulatory Agreement ensures that the maximum rent on the units cannot exceed 30 percent of the applicable income limits. Miami has not taken this route in any form.

Such regulations have resulted in affordable housing developments for the city of New York that prove the misconceptions on the subject of affordability false. For example, Via Verde, located in the South Bronx area of New York City, is a project that HUD promotes in its website as a model for affordable housing projects (http://www.huduser.org/portal/bestpractices/study_10012012_1.html). The building, located with access to mass transit and other urban amenities, is a new construction of 151 rental apartments affordable to low-income households, 71 co-ops affordable to middle-income households, 7,500 square feet of retail and community facility space, and 40,000 square feet of green roofs and open space for residents. The building is LEED Gold-certified, the second most prestigious award given by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) for “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design” (LEED). HUD states, “Via Verde is an incubator of sustainable design features that promote resource efficiency and a healthy, active lifestyle for residents.” This comes as no surprise given the many innovations

TOP LEFT: Children’s play area. Bronx, NY. Photo Courtesy of Via Verde Homes

in design and construction technology they have incorporated in the design. Via Verde utilizes low-tech strategies including, but not limited to, cross ventilation, solar shading, smart material choices, photovoltaic panels, and energy-conserving appliances. In addition, the buildings’ connected rooftops are used to harvest rainwater, grow fruits and vegetables, and provide an open space for residents designed to promote physical activity. The building’s sustainable design helped maintain housing affordability while providing immediate savings in utility costs. According to HUD, the total savings in Via Verde are expected to exceed $115,000 annually, representing a 27 percent reduction compared with a traditional building.

While there are numerous projects in New York that can be used as examples of successful developments, affordable housing cannot simply be produced in a single location and distributed around the country. This type of residence is built to meet the needs of its inhabitants. Those needs vary from one city to another. In addition, codes, customs, and climates differ as well. The needs of vastly different communities make it impossible to rely on centralized production models. However, the principles that make an affordable housing program successful, such as dispersion and integration with the community, ease of transportation, sustainability, low cost of maintenance, and availability of all services, can, and should, be adopted everywhere.

The growing population and the widening gap between the minimum wage and living wage in the United States means that this country will always have a need for affordable housing units; therefore, it cannot be a temporary solution. In a 2012 interview conducted with Benji Power, then Director of Community Building & Organizing at Neighborhood Housing

Services of South Florida (NHSSF), he states: “Humanity is complex enough that there will always be inequalities, there will always be mistakes. I think we are built to make mistakes, so I think there is always going to be [economic] segregation in countries and cities, and that is okay. It is a human mistake; it is forgivable, and I think natural.” His comment suggests that there will always be a group of people needing affordable housing. That is not to say that they will always be living in them. Power believes that if all the right programs existed, including the right education and job creation programs in addition to affordable housing, an individual or family can eventually figure out a way to buy their own house, or ensure that their children could. However, once a group moves out of an affordable housing development and into a more upscale living condition, a new group of people will be needing affordable housing, and thus creating a repeating cycle.

Mark Twain once said, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Pruitt-Igoe focused on the economic affordability of the construction and overlooked other critical issues that impact the human aspect of a successful development. The inevitable result is that it developed not into a living neighborhood, but into a concentration camp that was doomed to fail from the start. We need to learn from the mistakes of the past so that we could avoid the “rhyming” catastrophes that could happen in our world today. It is time to view affordable housing as a type of housing that will always be needed for some segments of the population, so that it becomes a stabilizing aspect of the community.

BOTTOM RIGHT: Brooke Avenue facade. Bronx, NY. Photo Courtesy of Via Verde Homes