Public Housing Failure

Public Housing in the United States has by many been considered to be a major failure. It has generally failed to provide its residents with a safe environment to live, and outside of the buildings often plagued with violence, segregation, lack of upward mobility, the failure to maintain the buildings for its residents, and unemployment have led to failure in the public housing system. While changes are being made to improve public housing and root out problems such as racism, and corruption within the housing authority, overwhelmingly the history of what was supposed to be a revolutionary way of living for urban poor, has been a failure. Due to the decline of the city at the time public housing arose, racism, and the failure of the federal …show more content…
Traditionally, white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods were highly segregated, as banks through processes such as redlining would decrease the value of homes, if black people were to move into the neighborhood. This practice perpetrated existing stereotypes of blacks being inferior to whites and contributed to a large systematic culture of racism, that made whites strongly denounce and reject efforts to integrate and left black people stuck in poverty. So when, as in Chicago in 1946 the “Chicago housing authority (CHA) tried to move a few families of African American veterans into a public housing project” (Judd, Swanstorm 178) angry white people formed violent mobs in an effort to keep black people out of their neighborhood. This phenomenon occurred in cities across the country as white people refused to integrate with black people. Resulting in cities, such as Chicago giving up on integrating public housing, essentially creating all white and all black public housing. Moreover, in addition to the segregation of public housing black peoples’ poor economic status at the time led to many blacks being crowded into segregated urban slums, due to a combination of economics, migration patterns from the south, and racist practices like redlining. When these slums began to be cleared black residents were displaced at high rates, leaving many with few options in terms of housing. Ultimately “they had the choice of either moving into public housing projects or to other slum areas, where they paid higher rents because the overall supply of low rent housing units was rapidly dwindling,” (Judd, Swanstorm 184) leaving the black community segregated, poor, and unaccepted by society. Even after the failure to integrate public housing, and the relocation of many black people into public housing, racism and stereotyping of black people continued to be pushed on by Republican administrations.