I grew up in the sticks, so bear with me.
I’ve been watching The Wire a lot lately and it’s got me wondering just how do the “projects” in the inner city work - namely who lives in them, what are the apartments like, what do you have to do to and what sort of processes you have to go through to get an apartment in one. Do all the tenants in them pay rent, and if so, how does it compare to rents in the surrounding area?
Also are these places really the hellholes that film and television shows make them out to be?
Another thing I’ve wondered about is whenever you see the “projects” in a movie or TV show, they’re populated almost entirely by African-Americans. Are there any inner city housing projects out there that have significant numbers of white tenants?
Well, I lived in one when I was very small, and visited relatives living in the same place until I was about ten. I suppose I can answer questions about postwar housing projects in Rustbelt industrial towns.
It was quite pleasant in my youth - frankly it is a hellhole now.
I found this book incredibly informative and moving. It was published some time ago, so I’d be very interested to know if anything has changed (for the better, I mean.)
Up until the 1960s there were white-only and black-only projects. After that they were officially integrated.
A lot of the need for housing projects was taken care of by housing subsidies for low-income families. More was eliminated by seniors-only programs, which can range from individual apartments to assisted-living (think nursing homes). What’s left tends to be inhabited by the poorest of the poor (who can’t afford even subsidized housing) and people who can’t find subsidized housing.
The apartments tend to be on the small side, poorly maintained and located in areas that were already bad. In some cases, with a strong tenants association, things are better. But since they’re really supposed to be transitional housing, until the tenants can afford something better, there’s not much cohesion among tenants.
Given the ingredients, it’s no surprise that the projects are associated with crime, drugs and poverty in most people’s minds.
I grew up in a suburban Section 8 housing project. Basically, you had to be on public assistance to live there. Rent was subsidized. I think we paid $300 for rent when a similar apartment at market rate would be more like $500.
My house was a regular townhouse apartment. It was not well maintained (roofs leaked, the carpet was unholy ugly, etc.) but nothing too crazy.
There was a pretty broad mix of people. A lot were immigrants- in my area it was mostly from Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. Some were drug addicts and alcoholics, many were regular working single moms, some had chronic health problems, and we had a section for elderly people. We had a very wide mix of races and cultures.
In my memory it was pretty idyllic. You pretty much had to have kids to live there, so the neighborhood was always swarming with kids. We had epic water fights, nightly soccer games, and I was always eating interesting ethnic food at my friend’s houses. There was a lot of crime- we saw police helicopters every night and now and then a neighbor would get busted for dealing or prostitution. But as kids a lot of that went over our heads.
In New York, some housing projects are actually for middle-income. The units are well-sized, not palatial nor tiny, and those located in Manhattan are quite desirable. Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village always had a decades-long waiting list. It’s located on 14th street, in a convenient (and today trendy) area. It covers 80 acres with over 8,000 apartments and originally did not permit non-white residents.
One of my first jobs, when I was 18, was doing data entry for the Chicago Housing Authority’s Occupancy Department. I can tell you that yes they are unequivocally massive hellholes. Or should I say they were, at least in Chicago.
The start of this decade saw the demolition of many of the CHA’s most notorious high-rise apartment buildings. These were a bad idea from the get go, they isolated the poor into massive blocks of neglected high rise buildings creating mega-ghettos within already blighted neighborhoods. It did however manage to answer the nagging question of what happens when you put a whole bunch of poor uneducated people together and wait to see what happens, crime went up, whodda thunk.
Many of the more notorious housing blocks were on the city’s south-side and were primarily black due mostly to the segregated nature of Chicago. There were a few location on the north and west sides which were more racially integrated, but it did seem that most white applicants were for Section 8 Vouchers which could be used to subsidize a regular apartment with a participating building owner.
Many of the applicants for CHA owned units, already came from CHA housing and the waiting list was very long. Today the CHA is developing mix-income housing units in mixed-income neighborhoods, and have stricter guidelines for qualification.
One of the reasons that the projects are considered unpleasant is because, since they’re public housing, it is the government’s responsibility to maintain them. Local governments are always strapped for cash, and so they’re always looking for ways to cut costs. Maintenance of public housing is one easy place to cut, as the populations tend not to be educated or politically powerful; at the same time, those who live in the projects don’t typically have the income to take up the slack. This got worse in the '80’s given the overhaul of the tax structure and IMHO the change in what society considered an appropriate amount of aid to give to those less fortunate. However, even today many projects can be quite nice.
What I have learned – both from The Wire and some cases I’ve worked – is that the homes on the outside of the neighborhoods are often good places to live. But interior units, where there’s little foot traffic and no quick means to get out of the neighborhood, are often taken over by criminal elements, making it a very difficult existence unless you join up.
–Cliffy
Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village are not “projects”. They were built, I believe, by an insurance company as an investment, and were intended to, and did, turn a profit. “Projects”, in New York, are generally understood to be city-owned buildings with *maximum *income ceilings (as opposed to the *minimum *income requirements in effect in private housing). Stuy Town and, say, the Queensbridge Houses (just over the Queensboro Bridge) or the Farragut Houses (just over the Manhattan Bridge) are worlds apart, despite their outward physical resemblance.
Although Stuy Town and Peter Cooper sort of look like projects (big brick buildings with lots of apartments), they’re entirely different.
There ARE income guidelines (or at least, there were, because the whole facility is being privatized) - and MetLife got the land from the city (plus a 25 year tax abatement), the project was a Robert Moses brainchild, AND the New York Times agrees that ST/PCV is a “middle income housing project”
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A06E2DA173FF93BA15752C0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2
Together the two developments are among the crown jewels of large-scale middle-income rental projects produced in the city by major insurance companies during the frenetic era of housing production just after World War II
Whatever you might think about Stuy Town, there’s no doubt that there are middle-income housing projects. The Mitchell-Lama Housing Program operates 101 buildings in the NYC area, some in Manhattan and desirable Brooklyn neighborhoods.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/hpd/html/apartment/mitchell-lama.shtml
OK, fair enough, but I still think Stuy Town isn’t what’s meant by “project”. It was (and is, I believe) privately owned, although it had the benefit of tax breaks.
Mitchell-Lama is a different ball game, don’t you think? Yes, government-sponsored, but still not “projects.” I’d love to get a Mitchell-Lama apartment. My wife and I live in a condo now, in Brooklyn Heights, and we’re having trouble with the mortgage because she just got laid off.
We have these in Ireland too, although they tend to be spread out geographically rather than purely “inner city”. I’ve been in a lot of them and they really run the gamut. Many of the older ones are in really shitty condition (I can think of one in particular that’s so bad you half expect to see flies on the children’s faces) while the newer ones tend to be better both in terms of quality of construction and design. Apart from the seniors’ flats, though, they’re meant to be transitory so obviously there’s a limit to how nice they’re ever going to be.
They’re also virtually 100% white and native Irish. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a foreign-born person in one of them. Unfortunately, I doubt such a person would last long.