I'm not sure but I think the original idea behind public housing was slum clearance and provision of better housing (than slums) to lower-income groups.  The early projects that i know about (from the 1930s/40s ), in Louisville and Chicago, were in slum areas that were cleared for housing.  They also didn't necessarily have all totally poor/welfare people, but lower income "working poor"...people with jobs but lower income jobs,  sort of like public housing in Germany and maybe the UK.

 

 

Tear down all public housing.

Tear it down now.  The worst thing you can do for someone is make them not be responsible for themselves.  Have emergency shelters, of course.  Also create anti-wharehousing laws and make it possible/easier for working people to become homeowners.  I understand the current need for low income housing but it should only be temporary.  Generations upon generations living in the same projects, that is societies fault and it has to stop for a free market to function.     

What happens to all the people that are currently in the Public housing, the ones that have been there forever (Yes it has has been allowed to become their culture and shouldnt have).

Face it, we've fostered a public housing culture/generation.

 

"make it possible/easier for working people to become homeowners."

 

This concept hasnt worked out so well (current foreclosure crisis?).  Not everyone is capable or qualified to be a homeowner. 

I think most people agree that public housing in the US, in its current state, doesn't work. Poor people, whether genuinely hard working class or negligent welfare addicts, have to go somewhere. The obvious question here is where. While I do believe that dispersing these residents over a large area without any sort of solid concentration is a good thing, I think it would be a mistake to place these types of dwellings in affluent neighborhoods and contrary to market principles. Part of the reason areas become affluent is because they are able retain and increase property values, amidst other things. These values are often affected by the condition of neighboring properties. Lower income residents tend to have a poor record of maintenance on their dwellings. Some simply don't care but I would wager its because most simply can't afford it, at least not the standards held up by those who live in areas like Hyde Park. The best solution is to widely disperse these residents into already established working class neighborhoods and on parcels whose location are not ideal for more affluent development. Realistically, not every neighborhood is going to be poster child of vibrancy. Every major city in the world has pockets of neighborhoods that tend to be more poor or working class. What has to be a realized is that there is difference between unacceptable decaying slums and honest, working poor, neighborhoods.

I don't think that people living in section 8 or public housing are actually responsible for the maintenance of the property.  I imagine that would fall to the landlord just like in any other rental situation.  One aspect that you don't address is that many people in this situation simply don't know how to take care of their property because they've never been in a position where they needed to.

I think most people agree that public housing in the US, in its current state, doesn't work. Poor people, whether genuinely hard working class or negligent welfare addicts, have to go somewhere. The obvious question here is where. While I do believe that dispersing these residents over a large area without any sort of solid concentration is a good thing, I think it would be a mistake to place these types of dwellings in affluent neighborhoods and contrary to market principles. Part of the reason areas become affluent is because they are able retain and increase property values, amidst other things. These values are often affected by the condition of neighboring properties. Lower income residents tend to have a poor record of maintenance on their dwellings. Some simply don't care but I would wager its because most simply can't afford it, at least not the standards held up by those who live in areas like Hyde Park. The best solution is to widely disperse these residents into already established working class neighborhoods and on parcels whose location are not ideal for more affluent development. Realistically, not every neighborhood is going to be poster child of vibrancy. Every major city in the world has pockets of neighborhoods that tend to be more poor or working class. What has to be a realized is that there is difference between unacceptable decaying slums and honest, working poor, neighborhoods.

I don't think that people living in section 8 or public housing are actually responsible for the maintenance of the property. I imagine that would fall to the landlord just like in any other rental situation. One aspect that you don't address is that many people in this situation simply don't know how to take care of their property because they've never been in a position where they needed to.

That's the responsibility issue which is reinforced by the ownership issue.  They have never 'needed to' because they've never come out from under the thumb of their overlords in the public or the private sector.

One of the problems with the current state of low-income/public housing in this country is that we keep rebuilding it new and in large blocks.  As unfair as it may sound, we simply can't build new housing for low-income people, it's too expensive and requires too much subsidy to make it viable.  Buildings go through a life-cycle, and generally become lower income as they age.  This isn't a bad thing, it happens with office buildings too, it's just the natural progression.  If they get too cheap and run down, they get renovated or replaced and the cycle starts over.

 

Along with that, you need a good mix of buildings of different ages and income levels to allow the system to work properly.  If everything is new, the neighborhood is too expensive and homogeneous and the poor can't live there unless the government forces subsidies of some sort to compensate the owners for their loss of market rents.  It also means that the area will go into steady decline over time, since the buildings are all the same age.  This is the big problem with projects, whether high-rise or low-rise.  I fear City West could go down this path over time, since so much of it was rebuilt at once. 

 

There's another component to all this that's been missed in the discussion so far.  Instead of "forcing" low-income housing into affluent neighborhoods, what about "allowing" it?  What kind of craziness is this you say?  Well, to start with, government subsidized low-income housing is a new phenomenon, starting in the 1930s really.  Before that, many of the poor lived in massive tenements and other squalid apartments and shacks, but not all of them.  The housing projects were developed to clear out those neighborhoods for what they thought would be a better built environment.  Unfortunately, they also stripped away the better accommodations for the poor at the same time they removed the bad ones.  This has been severely compounded by the implementation of land use zoning regulations.

 

So what were these better accommodations that have been outlawed and torn down?  First is the residential/commercial buildings.  The "Main Street" storefront with apartments above has been mostly outlawed by single-use zoning restrictions.  Over-the-Rhine still has a huge number of these kinds of buildings, but in many cases the storefront has been boarded up.  Without the commercial tenant subsidizing the residential ones (and vice-versa), the apartments become more expensive to try to make up for the cost.  Renovation of such buildings can be difficult because of minimum parking requirements, which may require buying and demolishing other buildings, or constructing a parking garage or something else that makes the project financially unfeasible.  Without the parking requirements in the zoning code, and with meaningful public transportation, many of these buildings can be fixed up so that both the apartments and the storefronts are rented out and they subsidize each other without the need for government vouchers.

 

Another great way to "allow" low-income housing in more affluent neighborhoods is to remove the zoning restrictions on garage and basement apartments.  Currently, Cincinnati has an 800 square foot limit on accessory buildings like a detached garage.  That gets you a tight but doable 3-car garage, but with a 15 foot height limit, you can't get more than a little attic storage, and there's no room for stairs unless you make it a 2-car garage with a little workshop area.  Garage apartments were a big source of low-income housing in the past, and to a lesser extent basement or mother-in-law apartments as part of the main house.  The homeowner benefits from the extra income, and the renter benefits from low rents, since the apartments are usually pretty small.  On the other hand, they get to live in a nicer area with the potential to make better networking connections than if they were living in a ghetto somewhere.  Since the landlord lives on the premises, they keep the place up and will kick the tenants out of they misbehave.  It's self-policing, and win-win, also without government vouchers.  It would be a tough situation in a place like Indian Hill, but still doable.  It would be a lot more useful in the nicer city neighborhoods, many of which still have some large garage/stable buildings in the back, but which can't currently be renovated for apartments due to zoning restrictions.

I think most people agree that public housing in the US, in its current state, doesn't work. Poor people, whether genuinely hard working class or negligent welfare addicts, have to go somewhere. The obvious question here is where. While I do believe that dispersing these residents over a large area without any sort of solid concentration is a good thing, I think it would be a mistake to place these types of dwellings in affluent neighborhoods and contrary to market principles. Part of the reason areas become affluent is because they are able retain and increase property values, amidst other things. These values are often affected by the condition of neighboring properties. Lower income residents tend to have a poor record of maintenance on their dwellings. Some simply don't care but I would wager its because most simply can't afford it, at least not the standards held up by those who live in areas like Hyde Park. The best solution is to widely disperse these residents into already established working class neighborhoods and on parcels whose location are not ideal for more affluent development. Realistically, not every neighborhood is going to be poster child of vibrancy. Every major city in the world has pockets of neighborhoods that tend to be more poor or working class. What has to be a realized is that there is difference between unacceptable decaying slums and honest, working poor, neighborhoods.

I don't think that people living in section 8 or public housing are actually responsible for the maintenance of the property. I imagine that would fall to the landlord just like in any other rental situation. One aspect that you don't address is that many people in this situation simply don't know how to take care of their property because they've never been in a position where they needed to.

That's the responsibility issue which is reinforced by the ownership issue. They have never 'needed to' because they've never come out from under the thumb of their overlords in the public or the private sector.

 

It goes both ways though.  People who don't know how to maintain their residence, or who haven't had to, can be very damaging to it.  Buildings don't get run down by themselves very quickly, but an aggressive tenant can make it a lot worse.  For instance, I could drag a heavy box or piece of furniture across my wood floor and severely scratch up the polyurethane finish.  My whole security deposit would only cover about half the cost of refinishing the floor again. 

What happens to all the people that are currently in the Public housing, the ones that have been there forever (Yes it has has been allowed to become their culture and shouldnt have).

Face it, we've fostered a public housing culture/generation.

 

"make it possible/easier for working people to become homeowners."

 

This concept hasnt worked out so well (current foreclosure crisis?).  Not everyone is capable or qualified to be a homeowner. 

 

Couldn't agree more.  Owning and caring for property is a skill like any other, and one that I freely admit that I neither have already nor have significant amounts of time to learn, given the demands of my job.  I have no problem renting and letting someone else handle the maintenance, building code issues, etc.

 

That doesn't mean I think we should continue operating public housing as a country--I don't--but I don't think the solution is to find ways to get everyone into an ownership situation, either.