The vacant shells of the thirteen-story buildings had been laced with 500 pounds of gelatin-based dynamite called Excel, stuffed into 2,100 holes. A big banner on the facade read “T. Fiore Demolition, Inc.” Promptly at nine o’clock it began: the deep rapid-fire cannonade of twenty-one hundred dynamite explosions. A dust plume formed along the base of the buildings, and then the hulking structures contorted and collapsed. The short woman was overcome with excitement. That’s her waving arm blocking my best photo of the demolition. It was all over in less than a minute.
The collapse of the Stella Wright Homes was just a fragment of the great collapsing liberal Utopian fantasy of how best to house the urban poor. The 1,206-unit Stella Wright Homes opened in December 1959, but long before its closure in August 2001 they had become a national symbol for what’s wrong with public housing.
In 1987 Newark’s crime-ridden Scudder Homes high-rises were also blasted to the ground. Two years later demolition of the eight Columbus Homes high-rises began. Then the Hayes Homes and the Walsh Homes had to go. “We are close to demolishing all public family high-rise developments in Newark,” said Robert Graham, executive director of Newark’s housing authority. It took ten years to demolish the Scudder Homes and three years each to demolish the Columbus and Hayes Homes. Tenants’ groups went to court to delay demolition, claiming that public housing was not being rebuilt in accordance with HUD one-for-one replacement guidelines.
One former Stella Wright tenant, Laquanda Washpon, 25, watched the implosion with her 8-year-old daughter Suhaylah. “It was rough,” she recalled. “A lot of drugs, a lot of crime and an unsanitary place to live. It was very stressful to live there.” Newark Mayor Sharpe James called the last of the city’s high-rise complexes “a failed American dream of trying to put 13 stories of poor people on top of each other.”
Good point. Federal housing has been a disaster. Since 1962 the feds have squandered $384 billion of our earnings on a housing system so awful that the only sensible solution is gel-based dynamite. The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development is the closest thing to a mindless perpetual motion machine that the Second Law of Thermodynamics will allow, and we, the taxpayers, are powerless to shut it down. The bureaucratic structure and the propelling ethos of the Department of Housing and Urban Development guaranteed that it would become a honey pot for unscrupulous politicians and an engine for the production of tenth-rate housing projects that would only deepen the suffering of those who became trapped inside them. The dopey Marxist optimism that makes bureaucrats think they know what’s best for us is alive and well at HUD. The same high-rise warehouses for humanity that blight Czechoslovakia and Havana also cast a shadow over St. Louis, Chicago and Newark. At least the communists needed the housing. In America, folks of all races and ethnicities were flocking to the suburbs. The hard-luck cases who were left behind in the cities rushed into the new taxpayer-financed high-rises, transforming them into instant slums.
When paying renters abandoned the old neighborhoods, rentals fell below maintenance costs and many landlords resorted to arson to recover their investments. The results were Hellscapes such as the South Bronx. Government intervention guaranteed that the old neighborhoods would never rebound and prosper.
The federal government got into the housing business during the Great Depression. Congress established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA, now part of HUD) to insure mortgages in the hope of encouraging timid bankers to lend money to home builders. By 1937 the government was subsidizing low-rent public housing projects. So far, so good. But in 1968 Congress passed the Housing and Urban Development Act, with the goal of creating 26 million new and rehabilitated housing units in only ten years. To speed things along, Washington told the local HUD bosses to relax their standards for mortgage guarantees. The gold rush was on. By 1976 HUD was holding $3.3 billion in mortgages on 2,071 projects from Maine to California. More than half of these mortgages were in default or foreclosed. Many of the projects were so shoddily built that HUD had to sell them for whatever it could get. By 1976 the HUD boys had been forced to dump 1,379 multi-family projects at a loss of $257 million in 1976 dollars. By 1989 fewer than 10 percent of housing-project families with children were headed by married couples; the feds were now in the business of providing taxpayer-funded housing so that the poor could cultivate families without any marriage commitments. The voters were never consulted; the bureaucrats were in charge.
In 1964 Congress passed legislation allowing investors in large real-estate projects to depreciate their properties at an accelerated rate. Consequently, speculators lost all interest in making a profit. By operating in the red they could write off losses against their personal income taxes. The accelerated depreciation allowed them to greatly reduce their personal tax liability. One investor in the failed Mansion House complex in St. Louis saved himself more than $1,180,000 in taxes on an investment of $596,000.
A year after the completion of Tucson House, in Tucson, Arizona, it was completely broke and in default. Senator Carl Hayden (D., Ariz.) had intervened on behalf of Raymond S. Shiff to ensure that the government would award him a $5.8 million mortgage guarantee. When the government tried to foreclose, Rep. Morris K. Udall (D., Ariz.), who later had his own rental arrangement in the building, intervened on behalf of his friend Mr. Shiff to stave off foreclosure. After eleven years and more meddling by Morris Udall, the government finally secured title to Tucson House. Millions of our tax dollars were squandered.
For sheer screw-the-taxpayer extravagance nothing surpasses the HUD project proposed for low-income families in New York City called Taino Towers: four 35-story glass towers in East Harlem. Taino Towers would thrill the whole ghetto community with social services and recreation facilities. There were plans for a gymnasium and an Olympic-size swimming pool, there would be indoor and outdoor theaters, and a greenhouse, and vocational-training shops, and a day-care center, and an underground garage. The 656 apartments, some of them duplexes with eleven-foot-high ceilings and twenty-foot-wide balconies, would be air-conditioned. Attendants would be on duty 24 hours a day. It was conceived as a sort of heaven-on-earth for people without talent or motivation. Forty percent of the people expected to live in such splendor would be on welfare and not expected to pay a penny in rent; their rent would be paid by the struggling taxpayers. Most of the other tenants would receive HUD rental subsidies. What is amazing is that the liberal Utopians who promote such projects do not see how their extravagant visions fuel racial and class animosity. Fortunately for the taxpaying wage slaves, Taino Towers was out of money before it opened its doors. Construction stopped, vandals shattered the windows, tore out the lighting fixtures and made off with the kitchen appliances. The project sponsors defaulted on all mortgages and the taxpayers got socked for tens of millions. In Eastern Europe, Marxist economists are facing lifetime unemployment: everyone there is now aware that Marx was full of crap. Only in the West do the victims of educational malpractice continue to hope that Marxism can be made to work.
Stupidity is built into the HUD system; it’s part of the HUD structure. HUD financed the construction of Hembry Manor in Lewisville, Texas. After only four years many of the poor black families who lived there had to be evacuated. The place was breaking apart and unsafe. HUD hadn’t bothered to do a simple soil-mechanics test before construction began. The building began to break apart as its foundation shifted. In the end, HUD used your tax money to bulldoze Hembry Manor to the ground.
The bungling at HUD is compounded by the sloth at the Justice Department, which refuses to prosecute cases of housing fraud. After a Los Angeles HUD official spent months collecting evidence of fraud against two contractors who had defrauded FHA of $200,000, the defendants were allowed to plead to a minor charge, were fined $500 apiece and given a year on probation. Who says crime doesn’t pay?
Two things make HUD an especially burdensome load on the taxpayers: political influence and the afore-mentioned stupidity. One top-ranking HUD official conceded that political influence plays a decisive role in at least ten percent of mortgage guarantees. An Assistant Secretary of HUD for Housing Management, H.R. Crawford, told a Congressional committee: “We have managers who can’t count. We have managers who can’t read. Yet they are running multi-million-dollar projects.”
Some of those demolished high-rises were difficult to tear down. They were built to higher standards than most buildings of their time. What doomed these projects was the brainless Utopian idea that a nice building would cultivate civil behavior. The income guidelines set by HUD made certain that these buildings would be crammed with the poor. Not a blend of the poor and working people, as in the neighborhoods that these projects helped to destroy, but only the untalented, unmotivated, living-on-welfare poor. In the aggregate, the long-term poor are poor for a reason and their behavior can be very hard on even the best-built building. A high-rise built for the exclusive use of the elderly can easily last for three decades, but a building crammed with a younger population of poor tenants can be rendered almost unlivable within five years. Broken windows, vandalized telephones, useless entry locks, trashed elevators, hoodlums in the halls, the stink of urine in the air, garbage everywhere, drug bazaars, gang rapes, drive-by assassinations, comatose drunks, crackheads and crack whores were the everyday reality of HUD’s high-rise utopias gone wrong.
When firemen responded to alarms they were showered with rocks and bottles. According to Dave Giordano, president of the Newark Firefighters Union: “We got hit with rocks, golf balls. I’d like to say that they threw everything but the kitchen sink, but once they hit the fire truck with a kitchen sink.” Firemen were instructed to keep silent about the nasty habits of Newark’s high-rise slum dwellers. The firemen were ordered to refer to the shower of rocks, bricks, bottles, trash cans, iron sinks, etc as “falling debris.”
At the dawn of the Twenty-first Century, the untalented, the uneducated, the illiterate, the unimaginative, the unmotivated, the delusional and the stupid still have one thing going for them: they can vote. They are a constituency. They are, in fact, the ideal constituency of the gang of Democratic charlatans who are America’s big-city mayors. This constituency can be soothed indefinitely with infusions of cash extracted from other communities by the overbearing agents of government. All the untalented poor have to do is keep voting for the guy who keeps showering them with other people’s earnings.
That’s how Newark’s gym-teacher-turned-black power-politician Sharpe James has held onto City Hall for far too long. Any representative of the public who truly cared about the social and financial well-being of his community would take every opportunity to expand his community’s tax base. That way more services could be provided to his community without increasing his community’s tax burden. Mayor Sharpe James cares most about the well-being of Mayor Sharpe James; he has grown rich and happy as mayor and he likes things just the way they are.
After the demolition of some of Newark’s hideous high-rise slums, Mayor James could have sold the land to industrious people of vision who would have created businesses and job opportunities that would have increased Newark’s wealth, but he did not. In the words of Sharpe James: “We said no to gentrification.” In the mouths of the James gang, the word gentrification is a frightening code word. To the mayor’s impoverished constituents it means middle-class people; it means capable people of any race. At its most frightening it means white people. The mayor’s constituents don’t want rents to increase; they don’t want to have to explain to their children why they are not as successful as those folks down the block, especially those accomplished black folks. Sharpe James is perfectly happy to have prosperous people visit the Newark Performing Arts Center, or to commute to downtown Newark, but a permanent resident population of prosperous people would pose a threat to boss man Mr. James. The recent challenge to the mayor’s position as potentate of Newark by the bright, educated and vigorous Cory Booker sent an electric buzz through the cozy, complacent kleptocracy that suckles on City Hall. The King James version of business as usual may now be in its sunset years.
To replace the failed federal housing project that was torn down, the mayor chose yet another federal housing project. The mayor has once again chosen housing for those who can’t get jobs. He’s building another slum, his personal plantation of captive constituents; he’s cultivating a constituency the way farmers cultivate cotton or tobacco. The federal housing program will generate contracts and campaign contributions from hopeful contractors. The Democrats will be well greased. The consumers of other people’s earnings who will occupy this new federal housing will vote predictably for the Democrats. Both Sharpe James and his unproductive constituents will be shielded from the unsettling higher moral standards of the educated middle class. Middle class people also do other threatening things, such as vote for Republicans. That would be bad.
If the mayor of Newark had chosen to sell city land to private developers, if the land had been filled with offices and stores, if the mayor had encouraged the growth of normal neighborhoods, then Newark might have prospered; tax ratables would have blossomed. Because Newark is just a short commute from the golden opportunities of New York City, working commuters would have brought their wealth home to Newark. It’s a sure-fire formula for success. But the well-heeled snappy dressers who hold the destiny of Newark in their hands don’t want a successful Newark; they don’t want revolutionary improvement. The appearance of an educated, energetic and influential middle class in Newark would threaten their positions as all-powerful rulers. Kings are most comfortable when dealing with the peasantry. The emergence of a wealthy class that stands between the peasants and the king always makes a monarch uncomfortable. We Americans enjoy the rights of Englishmen that have descended to us from Magna Carta because King John couldn’t slap the newly-united barons around the way he had abused the peasants. Newark’s King James declares: “We said no to gentrification,” by which he means that he doesn’t want to be challenged by a prosperous, politically-savvy middle class. King James wants only peasants on his vast plantation, so he has entered into an alliance with the federal government to build more buildings to warehouse his captive cohort of taxpayer-supported Democrat voters.
For those of us who live on the edge of Newark, this blighted city looks like a sprawling political petting zoo. The prosperous zoo keeper arrives at meetings in his polished limousine and denounces his political rival, Cory Booker, as insufficiently black to replace him as mayor. He lets the voters know in coded language that if Mr. James is replaced, then their secure positions as life-long government-subsidized welfare parasites will be endangered. It’s dirty, but it works. The incumbent Democrat mayor was reelected.
As for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, they will continue to promote long-term social decay by constructing cosmetically pleasing warehouses for people with disabling moral and psychological pathologies. The tax money the government steals from us pays for these projects. It’s time to demolish HUD. Please pass the gel-based dynamite.
Copyright 2002
Thomas Clough