Deficits, disrepair and disarray plague public housing
The 13 monolithic high-rises that make up New York City's St. Nicholas public housing project sprawl over an area roughly the size of Rockefeller Center. But there the comparison ends. The hallways are easels for spray-painted graffiti. The stairwells reek of urine and ammonia.
Elevators rarely work. Despite this winter's bone-chilling temperatures, the project's 4,000 residents have had heat only intermittently. Several days before Christmas, one shivering tenant accidentally set her apartment on fire with an electric space heater. She had to wait 31½ weeks for the public housing authority to make repairs. She still is without regular heat. More than a decade ago, dynamite and wrecking balls claimed St. Louis' Pruitt-Igoe, the nation's high-rise symbol of all that was wrong with public housing.
But today many big-city projects remain blighted. According to audits released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development last November, nearly a quarter of the country's 134 major public housing authorities are foundering financially. The cause: local mismanagement and shoddy or nonexistent maintenance that has left many of the units so dilapidated that they can no longer be rented. In Providence more than 1,000 of the city's 3,473 original public housing units have been torn down or classified as uninhabitable, at a loss of nearly $1.1 million in annual rental income. In Indianapolis maintenance crews could not document two-thirds of their repairs. With good reason:
when HUD auditors did a spot check, they found one repairman catnapping and another washing his car. The price of such neglect is staggering. When the public housing program began in 1937, it was envisioned as a pay-as-you-go system.
The Federal Government would build the units, and local authorities would pay for their operation and upkeep, mostly through rents. But rising energy costs, inflation, aging buildings and legal limits on the percentage of income that tenants can be required to pay have gradually forced Washington to underwrite more than half of the operating budgets in many cities. Operating subsidies for the nation's 1.2 million public housing units have ballooned from $28 million in 1970 to $1.2 billion in 1983. Overall in fiscal 1984 HUD will spend a whopping $4.4 billion on building, maintaining and repairing public housing. In Detroit nearly 25% of the city's 10,271 public housing units are vacant. Herman Gardens once housed nearly 10,000 people.