In this handout, George Rodrigue gives a variety of tips for covering public housing. The IRE Resource Center has several handouts and stories dealing with public housing. To order any of these files, call (573) 882-3364.
1. Look under your own nose.
Public Housing segregation in East Texas Everybody knew that public housing in rural East Texas was segregated.
Anyone could drive into pretty much any small town and see two projects: One white and well-tended, and the other black and decrepit.
What Craig Flournoy and I did, twelve years ago now, is stop and ask why.
Public housing authority directors said things like, "If you let black kids and white kids grow up together, they might like each other. And then you know what you'd have? Race mixing!"
The same pattern, in different guises, was equally obvious in other rural areas. Not to mention the big cities. Urban renewal had razed hundreds of inner-city neighborhoods, usually occupied by minorities but almost all of them poor.
The occupants were herded into high-rises and, quite often, denied chances to move to neighborhoods with lower poverty rates and more jobs.
Why?
Some public officials confessed that racism played a role, as did the convenience of politically connected developers.
In other words, "ghettos" didn't just happen. They were subsidized by the federal government.
2. Examine the files.
HUD had known about problems in East Texas, and elsewhere, for decades.
Next question: Discrimination had been illegal for 20 years. Why did HUD fail to intervene? We FOIA'd pretty much every HUD inspection file of East Texas public housing authorities.
The agency had known about the authorities' bigoted directors for decades. It had them on the record opposing "race mixing." Yet it had done nothing.
Privately owned but HUD-subsidized projects showed the same pattern.
Odd, because federal law required HUD to ensure that projects in non-minority residents. Time after time, we found HUD had approved marketing rules that specified a goal of "zero" recent minorities.
When we called the former HUD regional administrator for comment he said, "It looks like we didn't give a damn about those regulations, and we didn't."
Last piece of the record chase: When Housing and Urban Development delayed providing us with certain reports, The Dallas Morning News asked the agency to send us copies of the docket cards listing the name and phone number of every attorney who had filed suit against the agency for civil-rights violations.
That led to warehouses full of HUD documents those lawyers had obtained, including depositions with city officials around the country who'd taken federal funds designed to "free" poor people, and used the money to ghettoize them.
3. Reverse-engineer the bureaucracy.
Computer-aided inspection of Dallas Housing Authority waiting list drew quick confession.
Like most big cities, Dallas' public housing has long been segregated.
The Dallas Housing Authority's leaders, however, denied deliberately "steering" of applicants to particular projects.
By law, the authority must maintain a waiting list that tracks each applicant, noting that applicant's race and the projects that each applicant is offered.
We cross-tabulated the race of the applicant with the racial composition of the projects the tenants were offered.
Whites almost always got offered "white" projects; blacks almost always were offered "black" projects.
I called back the staff person who was responsible for making these offers and told her there was less than a one-in-ten-thousand chance of this being mere coincidence.
She confessed then and there that the agency was "trying to make people offers for places it knew they'd like." This was illegal, she knew, but she said her bosses required her to follow this policy. Other things to look for in waiting lists: People who jump ahead of others on the list, or never get called for apartments. That can be a sign of favoritism, or prejudice. Every agency has to keep certain records, whether by law, regulation, or common-sense necessity. Find those records and use them to reverse-engineer the agency's real operating patterns. Also with HUD, we created a national database of public housing occupancy by race. We applied HUD's own criteria for segregation within a public housing authority, and found that the overwhelming majority of housing authorities were segregated.
4. Huge, immensely promising projects bear especially close scrutiny.
Empowerment and Enterprise Zones
Years ago Dallas' Crow Companies got $4 million in Housing and Urban Development grants to create 2,000 jobs for Hispanics in the impoverished West Dallas area. Time passed, the project was built, the federal funds were disbursed.
Net result: 16 jobs for West Dallas Hispanics. Each with a federal subsidy of $250,000.
The history of even grander schemes, such as "empowerment zones" and "enterprise communities," contains many tales of more grandiose flops. HUD and the Congressional Republicans share an ideological bias toward these kinds of programs, however, so they never really die. Keep an eye on them, and compare participants' contractual promises to what they actually deliver.
Bear in mind, also, that previous studies have found these zones mostly shift development around a bit within a city, without fundamentally altering development dynamics in the region.
5. But then, so do routine business transactions.
Landlords with HUD Section 8 subsidized projects often take the money and run.
Here's a scandal so blatant HUD recently called a press conference to denounce it.
Too many landlords whose projects carry HUD Section 8 subsidies have been pocketing the federal checks but then declining to pay their mortgage holders, or to spend money on maintenance.
Because of the weak way Congress wrote the laws, HUD must continue sending those checks even after the landlord declares bankruptcy leaving HUD to pay mortgage insurance. As a result of such "skimming," taxpayers are stuck with bad debts on decrepit projects, and tenants live in hell-holes.
HUD local or regional offices may be willing to provide information under FOIA, about projects where maintenance is particularly bad and where landlords may be in default on their loans.
Another routine problem: Housing and Urban Development guarantees loans up to $25,000 to lower-income people needing home renovations.
But it also lets contractors handle the loan paperwork. This is an invitation to fraud, and HUD has found plenty.
Builders get folks in debt they can't manage and then flee, often leaving shoddy or half-finished work behind.
6. Connections matter.
Welfare reform will affect the lives of everyone in public housing, driving up rents and, perhaps, leaving more kids unattended.
Public housing doesn't work in isolation. Changes in food stamp and welfare laws will cause huge changes.
Some families will become better off (and face higher rents, and may leave.)
Others will become even poorer. Some face benefit cuts.
Others must cope with sporadic employment or face new costs for transportation, health and child — especially after they lose the single year of "transitional" benefits guaranteed them by most states.
And as millions of mothers are pushed into the workforce, who'll be watching the children?
George Rodrigue can be reached at (202) 331-8426 or send e-mail to grodrigue@belo-dc.com