Keeping them on the plantation.

IN TRYING to think of new ways to approach some of the country's problems, one of the main obstacles is habit. It is deeply engrained in almost all of us to believe that if people are to be helped, "the government" must "do more." Not that people must do more to help people. An abstract thing called "the government" must do it instead. (Then we don't have to think about doing something ourselves. Someone else-some thing else-is taking care of it for us.) There is a temptation for us all, politicians, journalists, and citizens, conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, to be locked into this way of thinking. Nonetheless, we must make an effort to escape from it. If we are to succeed in finding solutions that work, we must first of all recover the perspective of common sense. And we must be willing to discard the approaches that have been tried and failed.

Common sense suggests that, if people need to be helped, perhaps people rather than bureaucracies should be encouraged to help them. But such people-to-people help, without the intervention of bureaucracies, is today frequently illegal. Consider the case of public-housing projects, often little more than crime-ridden slums. Until recently the people who lived in them were not allowed to initiate needed reforms. The Housing and Community Development Act of 1987 now permits the formation of resident management corporations, so that the people who live in these dangerous places may take some degree of control over their lives.

Unfortunately, further changes in the law are needed. Dick Armey, a Republican congressman from Texas, points out that, at the moment, the resident management corporations that do exist are bound by union contracts entered into by the public-housing authorities. Public-housing tenants, Armey says, should be permitted to fix up their own apartments, "to put their own sweat equity into their own homes, just as you and I do. Most of us could not afford to own our homes if we couldn't go in and fix our own leaky faucets or replace light switches." When housing is privately owned, he said, "owners become part electrician, part plumber, part painter." But in the case of public-housing tenants, the law says that union labor must do the job.

This provision was put into the law by Congressman Bruce Morrison of Connecticut (now running for governor of that state), and it is interesting to go back over what happened on the floor of the House of Representatives when Mr. Armey tried to remove the provision. Morrison argued that public-housing tenants should not have any new rights or restrictions" imposed on them. He admitted in open debate that he wanted to deny these people "new rights."

Congressman Jim Kolbe of Arizona replied, These restrictions are going to prohibit resident management corporations from hiring low-income, hardcore unemployed inner-city residents [to] perform on-site maintenance in their own housing projects." He added that this was anti-poor" and lanti-minority."

Congressman Bruce Vento of Minnesota then chimed in on Morrison's side, with this revealing argument: We have plumbing problems. We have electrical problems. We have carpentry problems that need to be addressed. Are the tenants that are living in assisted housing, are they the skilled mechanics that can take on these tasks of doing the electrical rewiring of a multi-complex housing unit? Are they the glaziers that will hang out there and put a piece of glass into a window? I think on its face it is obvious that they cannot do that."

Protect Them from Themselves

BUT MORE bluntly, Bruce Vento was saying that the poor are really not capable of helping themselves. And therefore (notice this) they should not be permitted even to try. The unions will do the work for them. Liberal politicians often claim to be acting in the name of 'compassion." But what is compassionate about this attitude? Condescending" would be a better word for it. Is it not clear that what Morrison and Vento are doing is putting the interests of the poor in whose name they act beneath those of organized labor?

Furthermore, as we know, a high percentage of public-housing residents happen to be black. But what was the reaction of the Black Congressional Caucus when the motion to overturn the Morrison provision came to a vote on the floor? A deputation of black public-housing residents actually showed up on the steps of the House of Representatives and urged Caucus members to vote against Morrison. Congressman Ron Dellums of California seemed to be sympathetic at first, but inside the building the trade-union lobbyists surrounded him and presented their case. Along with most of the Black Caucus (including Representatives Conyers, Crockett, Dixon, Dymally, Savage, and Stokes), Mr. Dellums voted with labor rather than with the low-income blacks. And so the Morrison provision remains the law today.

We should always be suspicious of the rhetoric of helping the poor." The truth is, those who support a bureaucratic welfare state have a lot invested in keeping poor blacks together in housing projects, and keeping them dependent on the welfare state. Among other things, bunching them together makes it easier to bus them to the polls on election day. For this reason Kimi Gray, the chairman of the Resident Management Corporation of KenilworthParkside, a 464-unit public-housing project in Washington, D.C., has called these projects "the new plantations."

Kimi Gray, along with Bertha Gilkey of St. Louis, Mildred Bailey of Boston, and Irene Johnson of Chicago, has been one of the best-known leaders of the tenant management movement, consisting of public-housing tenants who decided that they had the right to take control of their lives, and who found, when they got together, that they had the political clout to do something about it. The law has already been changed so as to permit some residents to buy the public-housing units they live in. Jack Kemp, President Bush's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has been a staunch ally. Others have not been so enthusiastic, however. "This romantic notion of home-ownership is a cruel hoax on the poor," said Bob McKay, executive director of the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities.

"Interesting, isn't it?" says Kemp, speaking in his office on the tenth floor of the HUD building in Washington. "They say it's a 'cruel hoax on the poor.' And you know why? Because it takes power away from the publichousing authorities and puts it where it belongs-among the residents themselves." Kemp adds that the philosophy of many welfare-state supporters was something like this: 'These people are perpetually poor.' They believe in the perpetuity of the condition.... Whereas we believe that there are ways to release their deeply embedded, hidden talents."

The irony was not lost on David Osborne, a journalist who wrote a long article on Kimi Gray for the Washington Post. "Empowerment of poor people was a theme close to the heart of the New Left, carried forward into populist citizens' organizations with fanciful acronyms: ACORN, COPS, BUILD," he wrote. "But in Washington, conservatives like Jack Kemp and Stuart Butler, director of domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, led the charge for tenant management and ownership-and they convinced Ronald Reagan and George Bush to come along. Low-income housing activists have supported tenant management for two decades. But when Reagan and then Kemp picked up the cause-and added the wrinkle of selling public housing to its tenants-red flags went up throughout the liberal community."

A Long Way to Go

DESPITE the tenant management movement and some changes in the law, there are still problems that need to be overcome. For each unit of public housing sold to a resident management corporation, a replacement unit must be provided. This year Congressman Armey is co-sponsoring, with Delegate Walter Fauntroy of Washington, D.C., the 1990 Urban Homestead Act, which will permit the use of housing vouchers to meet the replacement requirement.

In other words, if a five-hundred unit public-housing project is sold to its tenants, the local housing authority would not have to build or renovate five hundred more units, but would be permitted to issue five hundred vouchers, which can then be used by low-income people to defray the cost of housing in the private sector.

According to a minority staffer on the House Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development, the congressman most adamantly opposed to this measure is Henry Gonzalez of Texas, the chairman of the committee, who believes that each unit sold must be replaced by a "hard" unit (a physical structure). In other words, tenants are permitted to improve their lot only if the domain of public-housing authorities is first protected. Mr. Fauntroy, although a co-sponsor of the legislation, was not enthusiastic about voucher replacement when I asked him about it. That is something that Mr. Armey wanted," he said. "I am not sure that it can stand up to the scrutiny of the committee."

In short, the powerful congressmen who are the late-twentieth-century equivalent of the plantation owners of the early nineteenth century are not ready yet to give up their holdings and their dependents. We still have quite a struggle ahead of us to achieve the emancipation of those currently on welfare.

There are striking similarities between the struggle to permit the use of vouchers to grant low-income people choice in housing, and the parallel struggle to permit the use of vouchers to grant the same people choice in education. Here it is Annette Polly Williams, a state representative in Wisconsin, who has most conspicuously been fighting the good fight recently. In March of this year she persuaded the Wisconsin legislature to pass the nation's first experiment in school vouchers. Under the Williams proposal, which the Republican governor, Tommy Thompson, has signed into law, about one thousand low-income students will be allowed to attend private, non-sectarian schools in the area next year. To qualify, a family of four can earn no more than $12,000 a year. The state will pay up to $2,500 in tuition for each student, and (here is the unexpected part) subtract the money from the public school system's bud .

Polly Williams told the Wall Street Journal's editors that parents and their children will now finally have the leverage of competition to force change in the public schools. "They waste $5,000 a year per student, and all they do is treat low-income people like pawns in some game," she added. "Parents deserve a better choice on where they can send their tax money."

For years, the residents of the inner-city Milwaukee district Polly Williams represents had tried to find a way to let their children attend schools other than the local public school system, which they consider beyond repair. Addressing a meeting of the Milwaukee chapter of Black and White Men Together in February, Mrs. Williams said that there were good teachers in the Milwaukee school system but "they are hampered by bureaucracy." The system was bankrupt," she said.

Mrs. Williams is a former welfare recipient who raised four children on her own. Then she went back to college and was elected to the state assembly in 1980. In 1984 and 1988 she was state chairman of Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns. She points out that, in the course of her struggle to win acceptance for vouchers, many of her fellow liberals put the interests of the education lobby above that of inner-city children. White, liberal Democrats refused to join Republicans and black Democrats. They say they're liberal, but when it comes to empowering black people, they stab us in the back," she told the Journal.

THE FACT that this system is now defended by people called "liberal" and criticized people called "conservative" should tell us that the old labels are merely confusing and that we should be thinking from basic principles rather than preconceptions.

The irony earlier noted by the Washington Post journalist who wrote about Kimi Gray was also recognized by the (black) editor of the Milwaukee Community Journal, Mikel Holt. Holt compared opponents of choice to "missionaries," whose ideology" (he said) was as follows: "Control people of color with a smile, keep them impoverished, enslaved by welfare programs (which are run by other missionaries), and unwilling or unable to make a decision without our approval."

Strong stuff. Such thoughts are potentially subversive of the current system. Of course, the supporters of the current system don't think of themselves as encouraging dependency and the control of others. They really think that they are doing good for those people who are in their charge. But then the old plantation owners thought so too, and they too thought that the slaves wouldn't be able to survive without them.