Philadelphia Mayoral Race

The Philadelphia Mayoral Race is in full effect. The mayoral candidates campaigns are reaching a high point with this upcoming May elections. One of the candidates in the upcoming election is Nelson Diaz. Nelson Diaz has a lot of experience dealing with public housing. In the early 1990s Diaz was appointed general counsel for HUD. When crime and drug rates in public housing communities where at an all time high Diaz laid the groundwork for reform for how public housing communities were built and financed. Diaz revolutionized public housing at a time when it looked like it would cease to exist. Diaz proposed that public housing communities could be managed by private developers. This idea provided public housing communities with mixed income rather than only low income. Diaz's idea provided this because private developers could make public housing units and regular market price houses in one community. This made the public housing system more of an entrepreneur system and not so much a complete government funded program. This new reform lead to the demolition to many high rise projects which were highly ineffective in providing adequate housing to residents. These high rise projects were also the most vulnerable to high crime and drug rates.









http://planphilly.com/articles/2015/03/03/at-hud-diaz-opinion-marked-shift-in-public-housing-development  

Harsh Reality

Redlining is the practice of denying or charging more for services such as banking or insurance. Usually redlining targeted minority groups specifically blacks. Redlining began when the National Housing Act of 1934 created the Federal Housing Association (FHA). Redlining policies where legal at the time and the maps were used by investors to determine which areas to invest in. Blacks could not secure mortgage loans at the time and bankers would not invest in black neighborhoods. These factors led to a large increase in racial residential segregation and inner city decay. White people would leave these areas in a process known as white flight.This redlining crippled the housing market and lowered property values in some areas. This led to an increase in landlord abandonment which left many buildings unoccupied. These abandoned buildings gave safe haven to drug dealing and other illegal activity which caused social problems and a greater decline in investment. Since the areas had no investors they couldn't get redevelopment or updating which further contributed to the decay of these areas. With these areas getting worse the wealth gap continued to widen. There are still many types of redlining that still go on today. Small businesses in blacks communities have difficulty getting loans even after meeting all the necessary criteria. Many redlining policies have been outlawed despite this fact. Investors are forced to use criteria that is less racially biased in nature.
http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Redlining.html
http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1050.html

Housing Choice Vouchers Program

The Housing Choice Vouchers Program is a federally funded program for public housing. The program is in place to provide a good standard of living to low income families, the elderly, and people with disabilities. This program provides a housing subsidy paid for by the federal government for these families to find a private house. In this program residents are not restricted to the public housing communities provided by their Public Housing Authority. If residents find an owner willing to accept the voucher than they can live in any apartment or house of their choice. This program helps these low income families live in a better community or a community with more wealth. HUD has reported, however, that this program is being underfunded. HUD has cited that funding problems for this program make it difficult for the program to be implemented at a high performing and efficient manner. HUD has requested a budget increase for the 2016 fiscal year in order to correctly implement this program. This would be a $490 million increase from the 2015 fiscal year. The main financial problem with this program is covering administrative costs.

Mistakes Made

There have been lots of mistakes made regarding public housing. Most of these mistakes can be attributed to the real estate industry and government mismanagement. Public housing was once very popular and provided cheaper and sometimes nicer alternatives to private housing. This proved to be a great threat to the real estate industry. The government with influence from the real estate industry then made public housing only available to the very poor by passing the 1949 Housing Act. This made public housing less popular and the stocks in public housing plummeted as a result. It also further isolated the poor keeping them in one area. When stocks declined government neglect of public housing began to rise. The concentration of poor people in public housing began to rise along with mismanagement and further neglect of maintenance. By 1988 the average income of a public housing household was one fifth of the national average. This shows that the changes made in public housing had a very detrimental effect. Public housing areas became areas of deep poverty and became more concentrated with minorities. In these public housing areas experiencing deep poverty crime rates and illegal activity increased dramatically. Concentration of poor, crime rates, and a discrepancy for funding public housing is why public housing is in such a miserable state today.
http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/77/pubhsg.html

The History Behind It

During the 1930s there was a high demand for affordable housing. Public housing provided the for low income families. The state of public housing has changed over the years and the situation has become more pressing. At the time the African Americans need for public housing was great because of redlining policies that excluded blacks from the suburbs. Despite this fact the earliest public housing units were in white neighborhoods reserved for white tenets. By the 1950s when the city's black population was on the rise public housing units for blacks where made in North and South Philadelphia. With more and more blacks living in these public housing projects less whites were willing to live in them creating more segregation in the city. Public housing projects took a turn for the worst during the 1960s. Traditionally rent from residents would be enough to cover management and maintenance costs but this changed when an amendment was passed limiting the rent to exceed no more than 25 percent of the residents income. At the same time, however, management and maintenance costs rose which led to a discrepancy on how to fund these housing units. This led to the deterioration of public housing in Philadelphia. Lately federal funding has supported public housing in Philadelphia allowing for new and rejuvenated houses to be built but a bigger problem still remains.
http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/public-housing/