On this episode of “Hardly Working,” I am joined by Howard Husock to discuss his new book, “The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It.” The book lays out a history of American housing policy and a thesis on how low-income housing that allows for private ownership can serve as a gateway to upward mobility, rather than becoming the source of concentrated and intergenerational poverty that characterizes much low-income housing today. We discuss the history of low-income neighborhoods in America, the loss of social capital in low-income neighborhoods, how well-intended public policy interventions help create and sustain the problems of public housing, and solutions to rethink housing policy. You can find Howard’s book on the AEI website.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. You can find a full transcript of the episode here.

Orrell: So, let’s talk about you first. How did a nice guy like you wind up as an expert on urban housing policy, municipal government, civil society, and philanthropy? What’s that professional trajectory look like?

Husock: I’m fundamentally a journalist. I’ve had the privilege of conducting a lot of my education in public as journalists do. I’ve moved from the hardcore ‘60s left to the center-right at AEI. I was a small-town newspaper reporter. I became a TV news reporter, a documentary filmmaker for public television, and later served on the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I had the very good fortune of getting a fellowship to the Princeton School of Public International Affairs that launched me in a more rigorous public policy direction.

As far as housing, it was a lot of personal observation in the Boston area where I lived for almost 40 years, moving between alternative journalism at WGBH and the Kennedy School of Government. I got involved in rent control debates at the local level and began to observe the built environment which really fascinated me. In Boston, there were these wooden three-family houses that are just ubiquitous and I got really curious about when they were built and why. What was the sociology associated with them? Who lived in them, then and now? And I think that as much as anything, that curiosity about the built environment, and its sociology, and demography, kicked me off toward this book.

You’ve had a varied background with a lot of different
professional experiences. What’s the virtue of being a generalist in a society
that values expertise the way that ours does?

Well, I think it’s a struggle to a
certain extent. I am a generalist, and I just have a wide range of interests. The
papers I’ve published coming to AEI range from municipal recycling to donor-advised
funds. I’ve written about music. I think we are at some pains to demonstrate
that even when one is a generalist, one has developed sufficient expertise to
be taken seriously. In the time I spent in the academy, if you’re a
popularizer, you’re not well regarded.

Let’s move on to your book, “The Poor Side of Town: And Why We
Need It.” What’s the history of US public housing and the major trends that
have informed it?

The book takes a very expansive
view of the origins of public housing, which, of course, started to be built in
the ‘30s and then took off with a vengeance in the ‘40s and ‘50s. I do try to
look more deeply at the intellectual currents that led to this idea that the
private sector fails to house the poor and must be replaced. I go back to Jacob
Riis as one of a series of key figures. Riis, of course, wrote the really quite
legendary book “How the Other Half Lives,” which was his exposé of living
conditions on the immigrant Lower East Side in the 1890s. The book was
published in 1894. And I see Riis as having laid the groundwork with this idea
of market failure when it comes to housing the poor. I take issue with his
critique and with the whole public and subsidized housing movement, which
continues today. Riis was not a sociologist. There wasn’t really such a thing.
He was the most successful police reporter in New York. He specialized in dead
body found, kidnap ransom note received. And he understood how to sell
newspapers.

So he was the originator of the “if it bleeds, it leads” kind of
thing?

Absolutely. And he tied that to flash
photography. He took actual physical chances going out with these flash powders
to take photographs. He put that all together in “How the Other Half Lives”:
children in dark alleys, families without private baths, or adequate windows
and sunlight. His aim was to shock, and he did shock. But in the process, he
muckraked and convinced a lot of people that these kinds of neighborhoods were
an environment that would breed immorality and ongoing poverty. He inspired
zoning reformers and the early public housing intellectuals like Catherine
Bauer.

Catherine Bauer took this idea
that government needed to replace two-thirds of the housing market and wrote a
book called “Modern Housing” in 1936. Modern housing was government housing, it
was block towers in a park. It had rotogravure pictures of housing projects in
Moscow. I’m not even making that up. She became one of the founding officials
in the Federal Housing Administration in the New Deal, and wrote the National
Housing Act of 1937. It was her being convinced of this market failure idea
that led to the earliest public housing projects. That impulse got married to
urban renewal, the belief among urban leaders that the decline of certain
neighborhoods because they became low-income, and they weren’t as well maintained
as others might have wanted, or just because they were extremely modest,
densely populated meant they were slums that embarrass the city. The response
to this view of these poorer neighborhoods was that we need to clear them and
build housing projects, plan communities of various kinds. These lower-income
neighborhoods of all ethnic groups, minority African American groups, who were,
I asserted in my book, robbed of wealth
in ways that we continue to live with today.

What were they so embarrassed about? Was it the age of the
neighborhoods? Was it the architecture? Was it too crowded?

I think Riis had laid the groundwork for this idea that density per se is a bad thing. And I think if you ask the average American, “Is high density and overcrowding a bad condition that we should ameliorate?” They would still say yes. And I think that the city leaders in cities like Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Chicago, New York were averse to the hustle and bustle, the dynamism and dirt, the litter, the helter-skelteredness of unplanned urban life that we know. That’s what makes cities the pinnacle of the human ecosystem. But there was an anti-urban impulse. This was the rise of the suburban era in America in 1950. They wanted to make the cities look like the suburbs. They thought that would help cities compete with suburbs.

Talk to us about zoning.

Zoning is the intellectual progeny
of Jacob Riis. Riis was concerned about density, even when we have private
construction. He wanted to separate the commercial, the retail, the industrial
from the residential and single family from denser forms of housing. That laid
the groundwork for Lawrence Veiller, who started the National Housing
Betterment Association. He became the executive director of a special
commission at the federal level created by Herbert Hoover, to lay out a model
zoning code and sell it to local communities. That became incredibly powerful
along with this other stream of subsidizing public housing, even more widespread,
single-family zoning became the norm. That was the death of the poor side of
town. The smaller homes on smaller lots that create natural affordability got
outlawed.

This fetish for planning, it lives on, right? We’ve created
problems with planning in the housing market, and we continue to deepen those
problems with planning. Is that your take?

Right. And inherent in that
insight is the fact that some people think they know better than others about
how everybody should live, and are willing to promulgate regulations that
enforce their views.

Jane Jacobs is a hero of mine and yours. Talk about her role in
this debate.

Jacobs was a high school graduate and
was self-taught. She was a journalist. Her key insight vis-a-vis planning was
the fact that plans of planners will trump the plans of individuals and
families.

She got very interested in this
whole urban renewal situation and observed it firsthand. She went to
Philadelphia to write an article about Edwin Bacon, who was the Robert Moses of
Philadelphia, the chief planning honcho. He took her to the poor side of town.
Then he took her to his gleaming new projects, “See how we’ve improved.” And
she said, “Just one thing, Ed, where are all the people?” They were sterile. He
had created sterility.

Jacobs then went on to a brilliant
career, not only to critiquing urban renewal, but wrote some brilliant books
called “The Economy of Cities,” and “Cities and the Wealth of Nations,” which I
recommend to anybody who’s interested in how cities and humankind thrive. She
understood that planning by “We’ll recruit the next big industry to our town
and then we’ll be prosperous” didn’t work. No, Seattle didn’t think that a
coffee shop was going be the next big thing, but Starbucks took over the world,
right? So cities, through their housing, through the interplay between the
commercial and the residential, to the mix of people types, they hatch new
ideas. “New ideas need old buildings,” she said, for cheap rent and for that
collegiality that gives rise to innovation.

Those books are all pointing back to Adam Smith, who tells us that
it’s the organic nature of human exchange that generates social value and
financial-economic value. When we interfere with that exchange, we are
interfering with the very essence of how human beings generate prosperity and opportunity
for themselves.

I wouldn’t want to assert that
public projects, or highways, or transit should never be built because they
would take parts of old cities away. Things change and public needs do surface.
But the idea that you could save money, and ultimately buy the building that
your landlord is in, that owning the building is even a thing was so important,
and it’s the lesson of owner presence. That’s what was wiped out by government
ownership of housing.

You talk in your book about the concept of mutual aid. What is it
and what role did it play in the development of cities?

When immigrants, and this includes
Black migrants from the South coming to the north, gathered in so-called ethnic
enclaves in the pre–safety net era, they created community institutions to fund
such basic needs as the cost of burial, to fund free loan associations to help
each other start businesses, to provide for charitable needs of a whole range
of people. Too many White conservatives lambaste Black culture for lacking
these kinds of things. Well, it had them and to certain degrees still has them
and it needs to be appreciated for that.

Social Security and unemployment
compensation came along, and I think those are important developments that are
worth defending. I don’t think everybody should be thrown on their own
resources. At the same time, when it comes to lending in a mutual aid context, we
have to understand that the very process or even other nonprofit groups like park
conservancies, or library associations, or PTAs, they’re forms of mutual aid.
We have to understand it is not only what they accomplish, their very process
of being, of fostering interaction amongst people, that is an accomplishment. It
creates social trust and that creates safe neighborhoods. So, mutual aid is not
only what it does, it’s a process, which is important to appreciate, and
understand, and to see as a good in community.

I think we have a hard time conceptualizing today the importance
of place. Sometimes, a good idea organizes a bunch of people to do something
for themselves and on behalf of the other people in their community. If you
disrupt the geography, you’re disrupting these social networks that inhabit
those neighborhoods. We think we’ve been liberated from geography, when it’s
not important to our existence, we can live anywhere. We can work anywhere. We
can do what we want where we want. To a certain degree, that’s true for some of
us, but geography really mattered, especially for these immigrant groups,
African American migrants, and so on.

Americans still have a strong
sense of place. I think that that’s one of the unique features of American
exceptionalism is that we are so decentralized in governance, and that
encourages community institutions. We shouldn’t throw that out by making
everything a federal program that has to be evidence-based.

Let’s talk a little bit about home ownership. What role does ownership
play in community stability?

I think that ownership is a signal
to your neighbors that you have something profound in common. You’re in a
positive conspiracy of shared values. We all put a down payment on these
structures to at least hold their value and maybe increase. We’re all willing
to work together to keep the streets clean and the schools good is part of this
virtuous circle. Home ownership is one of the key links in that virtuous circle
because it gives you skin in the game.

There has been some discussion of late that we’re too invested in
this idea of homeownership. If people can do perfectly well renting, why should
everybody own their own property? Is there a downside to homeownership?

First of all, I’m not a big fan of
the mortgage interest deduction. I’m not a big fan of the deduction for state
and local taxes. I’m not in favor of these kinds of distortions in the housing
markets. I’m a kind of a free marketer in that regard. If you say, “Well, yeah,
houses don’t always appreciate. Look what happened in the financial crisis,”
That’s true. Some people may be at stages of their life when it makes sense for
them to rent. That’s true. But when you put down roots in a place, I think
owning is an important aspect of that, and historically, it has been a key
means of wealth accumulation. I think putting down roots and working with your
neighbors is a high-value proposition for America. 62 percent of Americans
appear to agree with that.

Back in the Reagan administration under Jack Kemp, there was a
push to get people to own their public housing. How did that work out from your
perspective?

Well, I admired Jack Kemp, and the
Kemp-Roth tax bill was an important watershed in American history. He was an
inspiring personal figure, but he was wrong about converting public housing
projects into private ownership. The Kenilworth houses in Washington were his
signal project. Here’s why he’s wrong: These were aging structures with high
maintenance, needs to be “owned cooperatively,” rather than owning the
individual units. I call it lemon capitalism. “We’re gonna let you own
something that has outrun its useful life.”

I personally would like to see us
disengage from public housing, and to get out of the business rather than
continue to chase utopian dreams, which I fear Secretary Kemp was doing. I
proposed this in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee to buy out
public housing tenants. Senator Toomey said, “Are you saying reparations?” I
said, “Yeah, kind of.”

I’ll own up to that in the
following way. I think we’ve robbed those tenants of the chance to accumulate
wealth through these artificially low rents, long tenures. Ten percent of New
York public housing tenants have lived there for 40 years or more. I’d buy them
out, based on how long they’ve lived there, let them take the money, and move
somewhere. Then, let’s sell that land and put it to a non-frozen new purpose,
see who wants to use it for what, and get out of this business altogether.

Is this part of your thinking around the policy gridlock that
needs to be broken?

I have a phrase I use in the book
called “the frozen city.” What freezes a city is when particular uses are mandated
in a place. Public housing is a frozen city, and zoning is quite frozen. Robert
Ellickson at the Yale Law School has documented that 90 percent of the
single-family homes in year one were still single-family home lots. So, that’s
a form of gridlock. People say, “Well, what will happen to the people in public
housing? Where will they go?” I said, “I don’t know. Give them some money, and
they’ll figure it out.” Because people can figure things out. “Well, what about
what might be built there? Maybe it’s gonna be just for rich people.” I said,
“There aren’t an infinite supply of rich people. Not only that, but maybe it’s
gonna be put to some new commercial or industrial use that provides new jobs
for a whole range of people.” That’s what cities when they’re unfrozen do. They
throw up all kinds of new and unexpected uses.

You have expressed some skepticism about Raj Chetty and his studies. How is the Moving to Opportunity program different than what you have described?

Raj Chetty is a superstar
economist at Harvard. And he re-analyzed a program called Moving to Opportunity
that HUD sponsored in the early 2000s. There had been a study done by Jeff
Liebman at Harvard, which found that this idea of moving poor people to
wealthier neighborhoods hadn’t really made much difference in the lives of the
poor. Chetty said, “No. I looked more closely, and there’s a subset of poor
families who did better. And their psychological health was better. Those with
children under 12, those children had better outcomes. And therefore, we should
think more positively about the program.” This study was widely taken up by those
who were chasing the utopian version of housing policy. If we helped move poor
families to what are being called high-opportunity zip codes or high-opportunity
neighborhoods, we can address the problems of poverty and underachievement. My
problem as somebody who tries to keep his eye in the real world is this is
highly impractical and ill-advised, and I’ll tell you why.

First of all, how many low-income
families are we going to move to Scarsdale or Chevy Chase? Until those places
are the same as the neighborhoods they left? Is every neighborhood that’s above
a certain income threshold going to be asked by the federal government to
accept a certain amount of extremely low-income households? How would this work
on a grand scale? Seems to me it’s highly impractical and likely to create a
backlash, because of the fact that most neighborhoods are based in
socio-economic commonality. The census tells us this is true. It reflects
Americans’ preferences at all levels, not just the highest levels, but at all levels
of income. And the idea that the only way poor people will prosper is by being
moved to high opportunity neighborhoods gives up on the idea that poor
neighborhoods can also be good neighborhoods. Why should that be a
contradiction in terms? The lower eastside that Jacob Riis thought he was shining
his muckraker spotlight on had public baths because there weren’t enough inside
bathrooms. That was a good outcome at the time, a public good. It had public
parks funded by the philanthropist Jacob Schiff. It had good public schools that
produced a whole lot of Nobel Prize winners. So the combination of safe
streets, good schools, clean parks, and other public goods, that’s what we need
to be concentrating on, rather than giving up on the idea that we can only help
poor people if we move them. Then they get to be guinea pigs in this experiment
where they enter neighborhoods through the poor door. Who wants to be that
person and be patronized that way?

Let’s distinguish between what you talked about earlier in terms
of buying people out of public housing. Is the distinguishing factor between
Moving Opportunity and what you’re proposing just choice in terms of where
people move themselves?

That’s certainly part of it. My
idea of this buyout is partly to get us out from under public housing and
looking for a practical way to do that. But yes, I think that people having the
choice of where they want to move is a good thing. And I also think in terms of
high opportunity zip codes. And I think this will relate to work that you’ve
done yourself at the Labor Department and elsewhere. We have to recognize that
the process, the life choices, the personal choices, the personal
responsibilities that allow you to move to a “better neighborhood” are
important in and of themselves in leading to better life outcomes. Well, if you
have two incomes in your family, if you discourage your children from dropping
out of school, if you follow the famous success sequence and defer
childbearing, don’t drop out of high school, you are preparing yourself . . . if
you’re thrifty, you’re preparing yourself to move to opportunity because you’re
creating opportunity for yourself. The idea that you have to move to get
opportunity to me is offensive.

You can’t develop personal agency without community. That’s the
paradox is that individuals need communities in order to develop their own
sense of agency. They need models of agency. They need relationships that
encourage agency that set standards for personal agency.

Right. I am de-emphasizing
individualism, or at least balancing that against these other values.

Every person has another person that kind of delivers the idea of
agency, that recognizes the individual gifts and encourages the application of
those gifts. Who are those people for you? Who said, “Howard, you can do this.
I see this in you”?

First of all, my father, Bernard Husock, with whom I talked about everything, who read so widely and exposed me to so many great writers, including Arthur Koestler and Will Durant. I mean, I can’t begin to tell you the books that were in my house. And this was a modest subdivision in suburban Cleveland, I write about it in the book. My grandmother who set the example of being very involved in charitable causes. She was the leader of the Pioneer Women of America chapter in Cleveland, Ohio. It was a labor Zionist group. And she was the president. She went to school in Cleveland with Langston Hughes. And then my 11th grade English teacher in public high school in the South Euclid — Lyndhurst, Ohio public school system, Helen Gregutt. She told me, “You can write and you should.”

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