The housing market's collapse has produced a glut of cheap houses on the market and record numbers of empty, foreclosed dwellings all over the country. Rather than just let these buildings sit empty, it could be a good move to get people living in substandard public housing into decent homes at a reasonable cost. Some people have already started doing this on their own. But HUD could make this a program that would help to move families out of projects and into suburban homes. The reduction in risk to children of living in concentrated pockets of poverty has been widely documented. The Federal government could start buying up foreclosed homes to use the current housing collapse as a way to change the nature and effect of public housing. Here's how I see it unfolding in my state.
Banks in California are sitting on hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes. But if you look at the statistics just for LA County, you see that the total number of units of county housing is around 9000. It's actually kind of difficult to get an accurate picture of exactly how many families live in public housing in California because of the number of agencies involved. But I suspect that the ratio of the total number of foreclosed houses to the number of families (at least one parent and one child living together) in public housing must be pretty large.
Children who grow up in places like Richmond, CA, in the Bay Area are growing up in a world of drugs, gangs, violence, and low achievement. We know that the biggest influences on a child are peer pressure and a stable home. It seems to me that we now have a golden opportunity to get families out of generational poverty by doing two things:
- Have HUD start buying foreclosed houses and condos. Give families in public housing a stake in these properties. Upon occupancy, the new occupant will own 50% of the dwelling. After 5 years of trouble-free occupancy and clear maintenance of the property, HUD hands over the other half and the owner gets to live in the house that they now own and can will to their heirs.
- Families who move into a property under these circumstances would be eligible for further financial support. For example, a single mother with 2 kids ought to be able to get a stipend to help her stay home and take care of the kids until they finish high school.
I am sure that other conditions could be added in to the program to reassure neighbors and the community that crime problems would not be exported from public housing to a suburb. But I am a big believer in the idea that treating people better generally makes them act better, and that the surrounding environment is a key player in the kind of person you become. Live in a middle-class neighborhood and you start acting like a middle-class person with concomitant expectations.
Seems like a golden opportunity to me. Call it the National Homesteading Act of 2009.