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Issue of the Week

Fed Up With The Joneses

by Amanda Bell

The Working Families Preference (WFP), passed by Congress as part of a 1998 bill to reform public housing, will compel housing authorities all over the country to reserve 50% of all vacancies in public housing for families earning incomes two to three times the poverty line -- a process known as "deconcentration" of poverty. This policy seems likely to fail. In New York, the WFP has already been criticized for slashing in half the chances for public housing of 105,451 under-$16,000-a-year families -- or 84% of the entire eight year-long wait list.

Beyond its unfairness to long-time wait listers, the preference also looks unpromising because there is no evidence that moving higher-income people into large older projects has the same the positive results of other forms of income mixing. Additionally, current tenants have indicated they will resent neighbors who are supposed to be their betters.

The philosophy behind income mixing assumes that if poor, non-working people live near higher-income working neighbors, they will soon pick up the industrious habits of the worthy citizens next door. As New York City Housing Authority spokesman Howard Marder put it, "You see people going and coming from work. It's a great example for everyone in the building."

Income mixing has proven successful in several small experimental public housing projects. A classic mixed-income program is the Chicago-area Gautreaux program, which since 1976 has moved thousands of very poor public housing tenants out to suburbia. Follow-up studies of Gautreaux and programs like it found that low-income families in mixed situations are more likely to find employment and see their children finish school. All of these success stories happened either in Gautreaux-style situations in which poor public housing tenants moved to well-to-do suburbs, or in new garden apartments built expressly to attract a majority of higher-income tenants. In every case, the poorer families constituted a minority surrounded by better-off neighbors. Peter Marris, Yale lecturer in sociology and professor emeritus with UCLA's urban planning program, said that a critical mass of middle-class neighbors may be necessary for income mixing to work. "Gautreaux was probably successful because it was quite isolating," he said.

Congress' grand experiment in forcing the WFP on every housing authority in the nation will not replicate the successful mixed-income projects. The preference will not move a few poor families out to a total-immersion program in Scarsdale. Instead, higher-income working families will very gradually move into buildings already inhabited by poorer people who have their own established social networks and habits. No attempt has ever shown that moving a few working people into a project populated by a majority of poorer people affects the habits of the established tenants. In New York, 65% of public housing projects contain 50 units or more. Ten percent contain over 200. In settings like these, it's hard for everyone to meet -- let alone be improved by -- their new neighbors. In most New York public housing buildings, the new tenants' improving influence will surely be lost in the crowd.

Worse than that, the freshly arrived higher-income families will likely encounter resentment from their new neighbors. The families' privileged status on the notoriously long waiting lists already make them seem like teacher's pets of the housing authority. Judging by comments from some public housing tenants at the September 29 hearing on the WFP, rumors are already afoot among residents that rents will rise or old tenants will be kicked out due to the new preference.

Given the lack of evidence to suggest it can be effective in New York-style public housing, plus tenants' irritation with the plan, it seems unlikely that the WFP will cause current tenants to rush to emulate their preferred new neighbors any time soon.

Amanda Bell covers the housing beat for the Gotham Gazette.

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