Public housing can work: small is better.

The level of crime and violence in Chicago's public housing projects is an ongoing scandal, and Chicagoans are desperately seeking answers. Many people wonder if boarding up and ultimately tearing down the high rises is the only solution. Currently, massive police sweeps of the projects are being implemented by the Chicago Housing Authority. Unfortunately, sweeps of the projects do not provide permanent answers. At Rockwell Gardens, a principal target of the "sweep" efforts, murders and crimes continue. Criminals in general continue to treat the projects as "the greatest permanent floating crap game in town." Short of turning the projects into veritable police states, police action can have only limited effect. So why not admit defeat and just tear down the high rises? Or why not sell the buildings to the tenants? Many facts militate against these proposals.

As a professional who has spent most of his adult life working with public housing in Chicago, I'd like to offer some more constructive suggestions. Closing down the high rises would only exacerbate the present housing shortage.

More important, however, is the fact that the high rises are not themselves the villains, as Philip Klutznick, a former director of the department of Housing and Urban Development and a leading real estate developer in Chicago, has pointed out. More than fifty privately operated high-rise developments in Chicago currently provide satisfactory living arrangements for many low- and moderate-income families on a subsidized basis and do not have problems comparable to those in the Housing Authority projects. This is also true in New York, Toronto, and in London. With the right mixture of tenants the projects can still work.

Should tenants become owners? Perhaps--if they really want to. Of course, during President George Bush's administration HUD Secretary Jack Kemp advocated the conversion of municipal projects to tenant ownership and/or management. HUD made a number of forays into tenant ownership, and accompanied all these experiments with many millions of dollars in rehabilitation money. They have been, to quote Sam Goldwyn, "colossal in a small way." Nevertheless, there is no groundswell of demand for such conversion among tenants themselves, especially not from those in the massive high rises. The reluctance of welfare and low-income tenants to embrace Kemp's "empowerment" schemes mirrors the experience of Britain, where for many years Margaret Thatcher's government tried to push home ownership in council housing. For a variety of reasons, poor tenants just don't bite. However, a huge demand for real tenant participation in management decisions does exist, and can be used by imaginative housing managers to dramatically improve the living conditions of their tenants.

What then needs to be done is no mystery. First, the present public housing must be emptied of seriously disruptive tenants. That means that those guilty of pervasive housekeeping problems, antisocial actions, or drug-related activities must go. This has been a rallying cry for many tenants for years, but the courts, the government, and the media as well as the civil rights organizations have presented intractable obstacles to carrying out this common-sense policy. Admittedly, sorting out families who are "untreatable" or "unreconstructable" is no easy task. But some control over who lives in the buildings is crucial if the housing authorities are to provide decent and safe shelter for the bulk of low- and moderate-income families.

Second, most of the problems seem to lie in the high rises. These problems, however, lie more in the size of the units and in the selection of tenants than in the high-rise buildings themselves. In Chicago, the public high rises have an inordinate proportion of three-, four-, and five-bedroom apartments serving female-headed families with many children. It is worth noting that private landlords have recognized for years that in both market-rate high-rise buildings and in their subsidized housing only a very small portion, say 10 to 15 percent, should be three-bedroom or larger units. This suggests that while the present public high rises, with their huge number of multiroom apartments, do not have to be torn down, they do need to be rehabilitated into smaller apartments for smaller families. This is imperative if the units are not to be vacated and vandalized.

Leaders of public housing, such as Vincent Lane, chairman of CHA, and Sally Pinero Hernandez, New York City Housing Authority chairman, insist that low- and moderate-income projects cannot be the housing of last resort for the poor. Instead, each building should house only a limited number of multiproblem families, while the rest of the units are filled with more acceptable tenants as well as tenants from other socioeconomic groups. In Chicago some lake front sites of about 300 units have been rehabilitated under Vincent Lane. Welfare clients are mixed in with a much larger population of low- and moderate-income working families. Only a heterogeneous population can create the kind of social atmosphere that deters crime and disorder.

Perhaps even more shameful than filling the projects with multiproblem families has been the treatment accorded to the homeless. Instead of acting to provide appropriate housing for them, such as single-room occupancy "hotels," HUD has insisted on placing the homeless in vacant public housing units. This, of course, adds large numbers of unstable and troubled people to already fragile communities. Placing the "homeless" in existing public housing will only intensify the plight of the projects, and such actions routinely call forth loud protests from already besieged tenants.

In my opinion, subsidized housing is the best solution to the larger housing problem. Some public housing will always be needed, but rental housing operated by private real estate firms is the proven way to go. Government subsidy programs like the "236" program or the "221D 3," both of which were initiated in the sixties, are still capable of providing exemplary housing. Section 8 housing, under which rental developments are operated with 80 percent market rate tenants and 20 percent subsidized tenants, is another proven winner. It is also true, however, that these privately built government-subsidized developments have been used as unnecessarily large tax shelters. In any revitalized program such tax shelters should be reduced, and the current provisions for the return of the buildings to the private market after twenty years should be changed.

Admittedly, this does leave open the vital question of what to do with large families, who all over the world seem to constitute the greatest problems for public housing. A substantial proportion of these families, it seems to me, could be handled in a home-ownership program of single-family units similar to a successful Federal Housing Administration "235" program which operated from 1968-73. True, a number of these units had to be foreclosed because of the abuses of real estate firms, mortgage bankers, and the FHA. Still, some 400,000 single-family homes were built or made available to low- and moderate-income families through this initiative. At this time, many single-family or two-family houses can be obtained from FHA foreclosed or other tax foreclosed properties and can be rehabilitated.

In cities like Chicago and New York there is a vast amount of deteriorated housing--some vacant and some not--that is readily available for conversion. Acquisition must be done in the public interest and at reasonable prices. This should cost the taxpayers less than half of what new public housing costs today. Still, substantial amounts of federal, and perhaps state and city, funds will be required to adequately house America's poor. If the problems of our inner cities are to find any sort of solution, however, such an allocation of funds is necessary.

J.S. Fuerst teaches social work at Loyola University of Chicago.