Policy Perspectives on Housing

To Demolish Or Rehabilitate?
by Alexander Polikoff

Fall 2002, Volume 24, Number 1

Housing policy finds itself between a rock and a hard place as, one after another, Robert Taylor Homes and other CHA projects are felled in yet another long-sought solution to the social pathologies of high-rise public housing.

Ten years ago, one could not demolish a public housing building without replacing it, unit for demolished unit. But outcry over the death of Dantrell Davis, a seven-year-old resident of Cabrini Green, shot and killed in October 1992 as he walked through the project with his mother on the way to school, and new national legislation enacted that same month, helped initiate a policy about-face. Today, high-rise demolition is actually mandated for buildings that fail a Congressionally prescribed financial test. Chicago, home to more high-rise public housing than any other U.S. city, is now experiencing the consequences of this profound policy change.

Here and elsewhere the wrecking balls have already begun to swing, with the promise of economically integrated replacement communities to come. The going formula for the latter is one-third public housing, one-third affordable housing, usually financed with a low-income housing tax credit, and one-third unsubsidized, market-rate housing. If 300 public housing apartments are torn down, they will be replaced by 100 public housing units, 100 affordable units, and 100 units commanding market rates. Some 200 public housing units are lost in the process, reducing — at a time of an excruciating shortage of housing for the very poor — our supply of affordable apartments.

In addition, from the dust of the 14,000 Chicago public housing apartments now being razed, a group of families is being forcibly relocated who face some of life’s most daunting obstacles: joblessness, education deficits, substance abuse, and mental illness, among them. For these families it is difficult or impossible to pass screening for entry to the diminished supply of public housing in replacement mixed-income communities, or — even with the rent subsidy housing vouchers they are offered — for entry to decent neighborhoods in the private market. Such “vulnerable” families are often relegated to other (low- or mid-rise) public housing projects, or to private market neighborhoods, nearly as bad as the ones they left. Some may be forced into homelessness.

It is argued that, at this time of great shortage of housing for the very poor, we should not be tearing down any affordable housing; instead, we should rehabilitate what we have and encourage self-sufficiency among vulnerable high-rise residents by providing jobs, training, child care, and other services. Unhappily, creating such well working communities “from within” is a pipe dream. History does not provide a single example of the successful redevelopment of an impoverished public housing high-rise community through improved social services.

The research of Harvard’s William Julius Wilson and other scholars has demonstrated conclusively that concentrated poverty environments blight the lives of most residents. It cannot be sound public policy to perpetuate through physical rehabilitation the gang-controlled, drug-infested conditions of our public housing high-rise enclaves. If as a society we are forced to choose between perpetuating such conditions through rehabilitation, or tearing down our high-rises at the cost of a reduction in available public housing units, I believe we are making the correct, albeit painful choice. It is a given that we should provide the social services that will ameliorate the hardships imposed on so many families and maximize their chances to improve their life circumstances. But even should we fail to do so effectively, I believe that, not just for the benefits that accrue to the larger society from their elimination, but for the long run benefit of the residents themselves, we should seize the moment and tear down the concentrated poverty enclaves of our public housing high-rises.

Alexander Polikoff, senior staff counsel and former executive director of Business and Professional People for the Public Interest, is an IPR Visiting Scholar. He is currently working on a book, Waiting for Gautreaux: Will the Door To Mainstream America Open for Black Americans? This article is based on a talk by Polikoff at a November 4, 2002, IPR Colloquium.