I liked this piece from The Real News Network about the rising homelessness, & decreasing numbers of affordable public housing, in US. Here, they are discussing homelessness in one of the American cities, Baltimore, Maryland.
As Mr. Singer explains in the piece that American government has been privatizing public housing since 1974 & now, under the Obama administration, "60,000 public housing units around the country are being sold to private developers, most of them for-profit developers, & we the taxpayers are subsidizing their profits." All this is happening when "homelessness is at the highest peak it's been since the Great Depression of the '30s." Is this democracy when the public taxes are subsidizing the rich, & those same poor public are becoming homeless?
Some 40,000 people are homeless in Baltimore. That's just 1 American city & it's not even considered a large American city by any measure. Homelessness has increased multiple folds in large American cities; New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta etc. & this is all happened within the last decade.
Poverty among Baltimore kids are almost 35%; that's almost 1 poor child in 3 children. Poverty is constantly increasing in US. The young generation is moving down south to have some sense of accumulation of wealth through cheaper real estate & taxes. But, the taxes are going up, & wages are going down, overall, & those taxes are not helping the poor public, but the rich keeps getting richer through tax cuts, subsidized public assets being turned private assets, & hence, the inequality keeps increasing.
Where's the democracy in the largest self-anointed "democratic" country in the world where poor can't even get a decent place to call it a home, & keeps becoming poor everyday, while the rich elites become rich at the expense of the poor public?
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JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: In part one of this story, we looked at Baltimore's plans to sell about 40% of its public housing stock to private developers & why some residents, workers, & advocates oppose these plans. But due to declining federal contributions to public housing, many cities face a shortfall in funding. The Department of Housing & Urban Development, HUD, puts the shortfall at $27 billion USD.
Baltimore says it can raise $300 million USD of the $800 million USD it needs by selling some of its properties to private developers.
To understand how America's public housing crisis got so bad in the first place, we spoke to Jeff Singer. He's an instructor at the University of Maryland & a longtime Baltimore public housing advocate.
NOOR: So there's a public housing crisis around the country. How did it get to that point? And start under Bill Clinton to give people a little background in how things got so bad.
JEFF SINGER, CITY ADVOCATES IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE HOMELESS: Well, we can go back even a little farther to 1974, when Richard Nixon created the first privatization of public housing, what we call the Section 8 certificates. And the more money that went to Section 8 certificates, the less money that went to public housing. Section 8 was a way to give private landlords money to house people who were poor. So from 74 until now, we've seen a decline in the amount of federal funds directed toward public housing & an increase in--a small increase in the amount that's directed toward profits.
The program we're talking about here tonight is the efflorescence of that. It's actually privatizing the housing that we built for ourselves & making sure that people can make profits from it. And they don't mix well together. Affordable housing & profits are antithetical.
NOOR: And so what happened starting under the Clinton administration?
SINGER: What happened out of the Clinton administration was a couple of programs & policy changes that are very important. One policy change was that it is now illegal to build additional public housing with federal funds. Can you imagine that? In 1949, Congress declared that it is the goal of the US to make sure that every resident here has safe, decent, affordable housing. But under Bill Clinton, that language was stricken from the law & the number of public housing units was capped by law. So that was one very important issue. Another was that he continued the defunding of public housing. There was a law that required that whenever a public housing unit was demolished, a new unit had to be created. He eliminated that as well. So this has accelerated the demise of public housing.
NOOR: RAD program is happening under the Obama administration, a Democratic administration.
SINGER: Yes. Well, as Huey Long said, they may be Democratic waiters or they may be Republican waiters, but they're serving food from the same Wall Street kitchen. This RAD program was created actually in 2003 by the Bush administration, but they couldn't get it implemented. So now the Obama administration is implementing it with a vengeance, & 60,000 public housing units around the country are being sold to private developers, most of them for-profit developers, & we the taxpayers are subsidizing their profits. At the same time, homelessness is at the highest peak it's been since the Great Depression of the '30s, & the secretary of the federal Department of Housing & Urban Development himself says we're in the worst rental housing crisis in our history.
NOOR: How bad is it here in Baltimore?
SINGER: Well, we don't know how many people experience homelessness every night in Baltimore, but we counted over 4,000 people two years ago per night. Over the course of a year, that's probably 40,000 people. So we know it's pretty bad. There are encampments all around the city, the shelters are full every night, & people have nowhere to go.
NOOR: And there's a lot of people in risk of losing their housing as well.
SINGER: Well, they are. And one of the aspects of this new RAD program is that it's going to use federal tax credits to create profits for these developers in public housing. But that means that those federal tax credits will no longer be available to build new affordable housing. ...
NOOR: Baltimore is a pilot city for the RAD program. Why will it be important for people to be engaged here? What kind of impact will what happens here have on the rest of the country, especially when it comes to tenants & the union workers that are being affected by this being mobilized & getting their voices out?
SINGER: I think we have an opportunity here to do something very important, & that is to combine the forces & the interests of the tenants with the forces & interests of the workers. It is outrageous that the federal government has approved a plan that's going to fire 200 workers, workers who had decent wages, job protections, & benefits. The middle class that--the president is talking about growing the middle class; well, now we're destroying part of the middle class. So by combining the interests of the tenants & the workers & the advocates & the neighborhood folks, we can create a really important force, & that force is devoted toward affordable & fair development policies.
NOOR: And so part of the drive for this you can kind of say comes from the perception that public housing is failing. And so why is it important to talk about the mismanagement & the underfunding of public housing to contextualize that?
SINGER: ... The federal budget for the Department of Housing & Urban Development was the equivalent of $90 billion in 1980, & it is now $42 billion. It's less than half of what it was. So they have purposefully for 40 years underfunded public housing, both the capital costs ... & the operating costs. Now the City of Baltimore gets only about 75% of what they need to run public housing, & they get a hundredth of what they need to maintain it.
NOOR: What else is important for people to know about the future of public housing in America, in Baltimore today?
SINGER: Well, public housing is the sector of housing that keeps housing permanently affordable for the very large number of folks whose income is low. And we have a poverty rate in the US of about 15%. In the City of Baltimore, it's over 20%. Among children in Baltimore it's 35%. None of those folks can afford housing through the market. Public housing is the best way to keep them safe and secure.
In other civilized countries, public housing is a very large part of their housing sector. In most European countries, it's 20% of all the housing. In the city of Vienna it's 60% of all the housing is public housing, meaning it's owned by all the people & it's available to people who need it. In the US, it's 1% of our housing, & that's diminishing.
As Mr. Singer explains in the piece that American government has been privatizing public housing since 1974 & now, under the Obama administration, "60,000 public housing units around the country are being sold to private developers, most of them for-profit developers, & we the taxpayers are subsidizing their profits." All this is happening when "homelessness is at the highest peak it's been since the Great Depression of the '30s." Is this democracy when the public taxes are subsidizing the rich, & those same poor public are becoming homeless?
Some 40,000 people are homeless in Baltimore. That's just 1 American city & it's not even considered a large American city by any measure. Homelessness has increased multiple folds in large American cities; New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta etc. & this is all happened within the last decade.
Poverty among Baltimore kids are almost 35%; that's almost 1 poor child in 3 children. Poverty is constantly increasing in US. The young generation is moving down south to have some sense of accumulation of wealth through cheaper real estate & taxes. But, the taxes are going up, & wages are going down, overall, & those taxes are not helping the poor public, but the rich keeps getting richer through tax cuts, subsidized public assets being turned private assets, & hence, the inequality keeps increasing.
Where's the democracy in the largest self-anointed "democratic" country in the world where poor can't even get a decent place to call it a home, & keeps becoming poor everyday, while the rich elites become rich at the expense of the poor public?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: In part one of this story, we looked at Baltimore's plans to sell about 40% of its public housing stock to private developers & why some residents, workers, & advocates oppose these plans. But due to declining federal contributions to public housing, many cities face a shortfall in funding. The Department of Housing & Urban Development, HUD, puts the shortfall at $27 billion USD.
Baltimore says it can raise $300 million USD of the $800 million USD it needs by selling some of its properties to private developers.
To understand how America's public housing crisis got so bad in the first place, we spoke to Jeff Singer. He's an instructor at the University of Maryland & a longtime Baltimore public housing advocate.
NOOR: So there's a public housing crisis around the country. How did it get to that point? And start under Bill Clinton to give people a little background in how things got so bad.
JEFF SINGER, CITY ADVOCATES IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE HOMELESS: Well, we can go back even a little farther to 1974, when Richard Nixon created the first privatization of public housing, what we call the Section 8 certificates. And the more money that went to Section 8 certificates, the less money that went to public housing. Section 8 was a way to give private landlords money to house people who were poor. So from 74 until now, we've seen a decline in the amount of federal funds directed toward public housing & an increase in--a small increase in the amount that's directed toward profits.
The program we're talking about here tonight is the efflorescence of that. It's actually privatizing the housing that we built for ourselves & making sure that people can make profits from it. And they don't mix well together. Affordable housing & profits are antithetical.
NOOR: And so what happened starting under the Clinton administration?
SINGER: What happened out of the Clinton administration was a couple of programs & policy changes that are very important. One policy change was that it is now illegal to build additional public housing with federal funds. Can you imagine that? In 1949, Congress declared that it is the goal of the US to make sure that every resident here has safe, decent, affordable housing. But under Bill Clinton, that language was stricken from the law & the number of public housing units was capped by law. So that was one very important issue. Another was that he continued the defunding of public housing. There was a law that required that whenever a public housing unit was demolished, a new unit had to be created. He eliminated that as well. So this has accelerated the demise of public housing.
NOOR: RAD program is happening under the Obama administration, a Democratic administration.
SINGER: Yes. Well, as Huey Long said, they may be Democratic waiters or they may be Republican waiters, but they're serving food from the same Wall Street kitchen. This RAD program was created actually in 2003 by the Bush administration, but they couldn't get it implemented. So now the Obama administration is implementing it with a vengeance, & 60,000 public housing units around the country are being sold to private developers, most of them for-profit developers, & we the taxpayers are subsidizing their profits. At the same time, homelessness is at the highest peak it's been since the Great Depression of the '30s, & the secretary of the federal Department of Housing & Urban Development himself says we're in the worst rental housing crisis in our history.
NOOR: How bad is it here in Baltimore?
SINGER: Well, we don't know how many people experience homelessness every night in Baltimore, but we counted over 4,000 people two years ago per night. Over the course of a year, that's probably 40,000 people. So we know it's pretty bad. There are encampments all around the city, the shelters are full every night, & people have nowhere to go.
NOOR: And there's a lot of people in risk of losing their housing as well.
SINGER: Well, they are. And one of the aspects of this new RAD program is that it's going to use federal tax credits to create profits for these developers in public housing. But that means that those federal tax credits will no longer be available to build new affordable housing. ...
NOOR: Baltimore is a pilot city for the RAD program. Why will it be important for people to be engaged here? What kind of impact will what happens here have on the rest of the country, especially when it comes to tenants & the union workers that are being affected by this being mobilized & getting their voices out?
SINGER: I think we have an opportunity here to do something very important, & that is to combine the forces & the interests of the tenants with the forces & interests of the workers. It is outrageous that the federal government has approved a plan that's going to fire 200 workers, workers who had decent wages, job protections, & benefits. The middle class that--the president is talking about growing the middle class; well, now we're destroying part of the middle class. So by combining the interests of the tenants & the workers & the advocates & the neighborhood folks, we can create a really important force, & that force is devoted toward affordable & fair development policies.
NOOR: And so part of the drive for this you can kind of say comes from the perception that public housing is failing. And so why is it important to talk about the mismanagement & the underfunding of public housing to contextualize that?
SINGER: ... The federal budget for the Department of Housing & Urban Development was the equivalent of $90 billion in 1980, & it is now $42 billion. It's less than half of what it was. So they have purposefully for 40 years underfunded public housing, both the capital costs ... & the operating costs. Now the City of Baltimore gets only about 75% of what they need to run public housing, & they get a hundredth of what they need to maintain it.
NOOR: What else is important for people to know about the future of public housing in America, in Baltimore today?
SINGER: Well, public housing is the sector of housing that keeps housing permanently affordable for the very large number of folks whose income is low. And we have a poverty rate in the US of about 15%. In the City of Baltimore, it's over 20%. Among children in Baltimore it's 35%. None of those folks can afford housing through the market. Public housing is the best way to keep them safe and secure.
In other civilized countries, public housing is a very large part of their housing sector. In most European countries, it's 20% of all the housing. In the city of Vienna it's 60% of all the housing is public housing, meaning it's owned by all the people & it's available to people who need it. In the US, it's 1% of our housing, & that's diminishing.
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