A severe shortage of affordable housing. Blacks primarily impacted. Politicians, social scientists search franticly for solutions but find none. Middle class Whites flee Black neighborhoods. A description of present reality? Yes. But also the situation in America for the last seventy years, extending right up to the present day.
In other words, there’s nothing particularly new about the housing crisis.
Fourteen years ago (2011) a scholarly article published in The Journal of Social Issues, entitled “Psychologists, Race and Housing in Postwar America,” provided an eerie fore glimpse into our current situation. It explained how the housing crisis, which at first was merely a structural problem, became so politicized. By the 1960s social scientists began “using the housing problem as a lens through which to examine race, discrimination, and the reduction of prejudice.” This was at the same time that the American Civil Rights movement was picking up steam. Indeed, the two currents were part of the same phenomenon.
You have to go back decades to trace the beginnings of government’s instinct to provide low cost or free housing to poor people. As millions of people (often Black southerners) flocked to big cities like Oakland during and following WWII, “the shift in population heightened the housing problem…especially the changing demographics of cities with…racial and ethnic minorities.” So-called “White Flight” was one aspect of this change. I remember, in the early 1950s, one of my Aunts had moved with her family out of The Bronx to an upper-middle class suburb of New York. When a Black family moved down the block, she insisted on moving yet again, to an all-White neighborhood. As “Psychologists, Race and Housing” points out, “The question of where ‘Negroes’ could live invoked power struggles and engendered intense conflict in this era.”
The federal Housing Act of 1949 was a direct response to this crisis. Promoted by a cadre of housing activists who were largely “social workers, intellectuals, religious leaders and politicians” (remarkably similar to today’s progressive housing advocates), the Act (which was fiercely resisted by conservatives) provided funding for new construction of public housing, the “projects” which eventually became notorious. The legislation, intended for “poor African-Americans,” had an unintended consequence: “the creation of an American apartheid.” “By the end of the 1950s,” a 2000 study revealed, “90% of all families [displaced by urban renewal] forced to move into public housing were non-White.”
All this led to an intense investigation on the part of left-leaning academics in the social sciences to understand why the issue of housing became so hard to resolve, and so often was dragged into debates about race. “Housing research,” the “Psychologists, Race and Housing article contends, “became a research area divorced from action.” There were journals to be read, conferences to attend, status to be gained (including academic advancement), with the result that “there was a shift to emphasizing the research and not its policy implications.” This statement is truer than ever today, when housing advocates cite study after study, statistic after statistic, but are unable to come up with workable solutions, and overlook the negative ramifications of their proposals.
It’s worthwhile to take this little detour into history to understand both the roots of the current controversy over housing and racial issues, and the abject failure of government attempts to solve the homelessness crisis. Eighty years of government intervention have done nothing, except to throw billions of dollars down a rat hole of failed “solutions” that have benefited progressive politicians like Nikki Bas, who fundraise on them, but no one else. Now, we’re told by housing activists that this failure is due, not to mistaken policies with disastrous consequences, but to the fact that we haven’t invested enough money in government-assisted housing. This contention would be laughable if it weren’t so widespread.
Much of the national conversation lately has been on why the Democrats are so tone-deaf to the thinking of the majority of Americans. Every time a progressive, such as Barbara Lee, vows to throw yet more tax money at the homeless, and give them a “universal basic income,” more Democrats leave the party. The rational conclusion—which Republicans have realized but Democrats haven’t—is that government cannot resolve issues like homelessness by throwing money at it. Only a moral upheaval in America, and particularly by the poor, can. But Democrats are resisting this revolution, with only a few—including Gavin Newsom—occasionally daring to challenge the conventional progressive wisdom.
Steve Heimoff