Highly recommend reading the NYTimes Invisible Child
The last time I recall reading anything that incensed me as much was Randy Schilts’ And The Band Played On. The combination of institutional haplessness, to be charitable, and individual irresponsibility. Not that there weren’t/aren’t extraordinary people in both stories doing far more than their share of the heavy lifting with little support and not much hope that they can make a lasting positive difference. In this case it is the staff at the Susan S. McKinney Secondary School of the Arts, in particular the principal, Paula Holmes, and humanities teacher, Faith Hester. One of the many underfunded schools in this country that has seen its budget and space reduced to accommodate the publicly funded profiteers of charters schools, an effort near and dear to the hearts of the billionaire boys club, including NYC Mayor Bloomberg.
Bloomberg’s approach to housing in NYC is oriented the same way as his educational policy. Use a bunch of seemingly objective and measurable data, starve the public sector, reward the private sector that isn’t subjected to most of those measurements of what constitutes success and cost efficiency, and the intractable problems will magically disappear. They don’t. Some small number of those trapped in seemingly impossible situations do benefit from the change. Life for the larger number of those that don’t remains the same or worse and likely becomes even more intractable for them and the generations that follow them.
The NYC Housing Authority under Bloomberg got one thing right –
the Housing Authority in recent years, has selected more “working families” from applicants to diversify the income structure of occupants of its housing, as had been typical of residents who first occupied the facilities. NYCHA’s Conventional Public Housing Program has 181,581 apartments (as of July 20, 2005) in 345 developments throughout the city.
However, that all on its own is somewhat worthless. And leads to wasteful and cruel outcomes such as leaving A Quarter of Ingersoll/Whitman Apartments Vacant, that’s 823 units, while there are 130,000 families on public housing wait lists and over 100 families have been languishing in the dreadful 39 Auburn Place shelter that is a focal point of the Times story. Then there are the housing subsidy programs that are managed as if poor and low income families need but only short-term assistance instead of the reality that when the subsidy ends, the family becomes homeless again.
The major problem, however, is that the NYC housing stock is misaligned to the reality of its residents. The 8.3% of rental apartments in the public sector is too low to accommodate those with very low or no income much less those low income working families the NYCHA would like to attract. In addition to the shortage of public housing, NYC seems to have abandoned the model that made Penn South both affordable and sustainable. In Germany, the apartment rental stock is 12% public and 10% private housing authorities (similar to Penn South). (Not a mystery why Germany was far less vulnerable to the housing bubble.)
Based on this NYTimes article, it appears that there is a conscious effort to make 39 Auburn Place as horrendous (and dangerous and filthy) as possible to get the residents to leave. And this effort isn’t even cheap. It’s more how the money is spent than a shortage of money. It’s also about the residents:
…
Many sound like the parent in April 2012 who has spotted a dead mouse in the cafeteria and asks a janitor to remove it.
The next day, the mouse is still there. “A child could have touched it,” the parent recounts telling the janitor, to which the janitor laughs and responds, “Well then you should have cleaned it up.”
…
The shelter provides meals for the residents, but without a kitchen, it’s trucked in packaged crap. Residents can heat the crap in the two microwave ovens in the dining room. Two ovens for over a hundred families!
The average monthly operating costs per family at 39 Auburn Place is $3,000. Not bad considering that includes power and water, food, and security and maintenance (such as it is) and requires no contribution from the residents.
In the past decade almost $100,000 in repairs/upgrades per family has been spent on 39 Auburn Place. Brand new manufactured homes cost $41.24/sf. ($21,445 for 520 sf., what Dasani’s family was living in and included a single sink for plumbing.) That’s everything; interior and exterior excluding land and utility infrastructure. Yet somehow the NCYHA couldn’t rehab the interior of 39 Auburn Place with ten million dollars. (The exterior of the building is attractive enough that it’s easy to envision a renovation into condos for – well, more of this:
Fort Greene’s transformation came swiftly. Through aggressive rezoning and generous subsidies, the city drew developers who, in the span of three years, built 19 luxury buildings in the surrounding area that catered — across racial lines — to the educated elite.
And how many new public housing units has the Bloomberg administration built in the past twelve years?
I’m not enough of a bleeding heart liberal to say kind things about the parents in this story. Their “freedom” is on the public’s dime and that dime has averaged more than the median annual household income in this country and NYC. It’s stories like this one that make “conservatives” see red to which liberals respond in both emotional and rational kind without either side hearing the other. I’m also not the sort of humanitarian liberal or religious fundamentalist that criticizes the so-called draconian one-child policy in China.
I’m also informed enough to recognize that Dasani’s parents are far from being the worst. Enough so that when combined with the steadying influence of teachers, some of the children may not repeat their parents’ legacy of dropping out of school, unemployment, and addictions. Dasani is now at the precipice of when she will begin making those choices – mostly on an emotional and not a cognitive basis. As a parentified child, she’s particularly vulnerable to escape options and where she goes will exert a strong influence on her younger siblings.
Communities, large and small, bear some responsibility for families such as Dasani’s. This is one area where looking forward and not back is the better policy. The best possible things that the community can do for these eight children is to provide stability in housing and schooling. It not only didn’t save NYC any money by the starting and stopping housing assistance for this family but cost the city more money. Frequent forced moves aren’t healthy for children. As that comes with interruptions in their schooling, it makes it harmful.
People like Michael Bloomberg should stop blaming god for poor children:
“This kid was dealt a bad hand. I don’t know quite why. That’s just the way God works. Sometimes some of us are lucky and some of us are not,” he said.
How many decent apartments for kids “dealt a bad hand” could he have built with the $108 million he spent on his last mayoral race? Or how far would a mere ten percent of his wealth go in constructing housing? Answer: a long way if all greed and corruption are eliminated. But perhaps no further than correcting for all the mistakes he made on this issue during his twelve year tenure as mayor. Good thing he was lucky in business. Too bad for children such as Dasani that he’s selfish and not wise
