Public Housing, Private Profits
                
By  MC86
                
    In January l99l, while Amerikan warplanes bombed Iraq back into the pre-industrial age,  President Bush's State of the Union speech was televised to Amerika. As part of creating the "New World Order," he extolled new government legislation called "Homeownership and Opportunity For People Everywhere (H.O.P.E.)."  Bush encouraged public housing tenants to support the development of a key feature of the program known as "resident management."
                
    During the last year, Jack Kemp, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing And Urban Development (HUD), has been touring Amerikan cities speaking to selected public housing tenants and representatives of the local ruling classes. He is touting resident management as "a far-reaching agenda to dramatically broaden home-ownership and upward mobility opportunities for low-income people" (1)
                
   In the newest version of Amerika's phoney "War On Poverty," public housing residents are being given the "opportunity" to self-manage the hellish complexes in which three million, mostly Black and Latino, people live. Although the government's own propaganda admits, in its small print, that resident management will only be available for 10% of the residents, (2) we are expected to believe that George Bush and Jack Kemp have the interests of the people at heart.
                
    Nothing could be further from the truth.
                
    H.O.P.E., which has already been cut-back, promised $2.8 billion, over two years, to "reform" the system of federally subsidized housing. (1)  Kemp, the inventor of the bogus "trickle-down economics theory," in l980, side-steps the reality that HUD's appropriation for subsidized housing has just drastically fallen from $32.2 billion in l978. (3) The ratio of defense spending to low-income housing expenditures in l980 was 5:1; in l990, it was 20:1. (4) The government is attempting to mask the basic fact that it is pulling out of the business of subsidizing housing for poor people and that, soon, public housing subsidies and Section 8 certificates will be but a dim memory for new generations of people without homes.
                
    The Cranston-Gonzalez Affordable Housing Act of November l990, which funds resident management, is a complex financial charade designed to distribute tremendous profits to banks and private sector developers, even as low-income housing is systematically demolished or converted into "fair-market rate" (expensive) condominiums.  A slew of "non-profit" corporations are being funded to "help" public housing tenants "manage" their projects. Of course, if tenants ever actually took controlQthe program would be disbanded!
                
    In reality, the non-profits are being licensed to move in and acquire valuable real estate. Tenants are expected to fall for this scam. Those who doQwill wake up: as their mattresses are thrown onto sidewalks by sheriffs waving eviction papers.  Beware of devils with smiling faces.
                
How It All Began
                
    Public housing was created by Congress in l937 as cheap housing for young upwardly mobile settler families. Over the years, cinder-block military housing was converted into projects and huge fire-trap, inner-city high-rises were constructed out of sub-standard materials on lots rife with toxic wastes. As the white settlers moved up the "ladder of success" and into the suburbs, the projects became home to millions of Blacks and immigrants laboring in Amerika's war industries. The buildings, paid for many times over by rents based on a percentage of tenant income, were allowed to deteriorate beyond repair.
                
    The projects became retail super-markets for small drug transactions controlled by local police pigs who wholesale kibbles and bits to teenage dealers and then turn around and shoot them in the back to make it look like they are fighting the "War On Drugs!"
                
The Economy of the Ghetto
                
     As corporate Amerika discovered that it was cheaper to manufacture products overseas, decent jobs dried up and minimum wage work and welfare became the main source of income for many project residents. Remaining industries moved to the suburbs and the cities became centers of administration, rather than production. (5)
                
   "Outward flows of income, capital, and human resources to the rest of the economy serve to keep the ghetto in a permanently under-developed state and feed the economic interests outside the ghetto I Labor is the ghetto's chief export. " (6)
                
     The massive amounts of money spent on "public assistance" has  the effect of pumping up the Amerikan economy as these checks are cashed and spent. (7) And nowQwith the extermination of Black people on the government's agendaQthe rulers no longer need to maintain traditional low-wage ghetto labor. They prefer to decentralize the armies of the unemployed. Their problem is how to profitably get rid of the projectsQand the residents.
                
Counter Insurgency
                
    After the urban rebellions of the l960s,  HUD and the Department of Defense implemented a plan called "spatial deconcentration." (8) Through "urban renewal," also known as "Negro removal," poor people were forced out of the downtowns by laws of "eminent domain" and dispersed into outlying areas.  Neighborhoods have been gentrified and made safe for commuting white-collar workers; who are preferring to live closer to their antiseptic skyscrapers and the mausoleums of High Kulture. Lack of jobs and high rents tend to drive the proletariat away from the vital city centersQwhere they were able to communicate and organize as a political force.
                                
   The projects have been sitting on real-estate which has vastly increased in value since World War Two. With urban land at a premium, the capitalists are eager to get their hands on Housing Authority property. Until recently, only the outdated l937 laws stood in their way. Changing the laws to suit their avarice has never been a problem for the bourgeoisie. As of November l990, a legal mechanism has been instituted that makes it possible for land speculators to seize ownership of this previously land-banked property by posing as friends of the people. 
                
    H.O.P.E. is the cover for completing the process of de-Africanizing the cities. H.O.P.E. greases the way for developers to obtain guaranteed government loans and to dispossess a large portion of theQat leastQ 13.7 percent of the Amerikan population currently living below the official poverty line of $12,700 for a family of four. (9)  H.O.P.E. is trying to throw entire populationsQ who have nothing to loseQ into the racist suburban areas.  In shopping-mall Amerika, urban refugees are forced to laborQif work can be found at allQ in extremely low-paying service jobs and to live in mini-ghettos.
                
Smoldering in Oakland, Chicago, New York, Houston I D.C.
                
    Plans to geographically disperse the revolutionary class may work for a time to throw water on the powderkeg. But, in a country where 60% of the jobs created for "minorities" since l979 pay less than $7,000 a year (10); where the actual production of commodity value has moved into the oppressed nations abroad and partially remains in the oppressed nations at home; where imperialism rots the spirit of those who live off the labor of othersQin such a country revolution is bound to eventually triumph because: capitalism does not work!
         
    People who live in housing projects should set their sights much higher than the glitter of the H.O.P.E. drug that George Bush is trying to shove down our collective throats.  Project residents should aim for real self-management: the dictatorship of the proletariat.
                
NOTES:
                
l.  Homeownership and Affordable Housing, HUD, 1/91, p. ii.
2. Speech by HUD Assistant Secretary Caprera, March, l99l.
3. Homelessness and Affordable Housing, United Church Board for Homeless Ministries, New York, J. McDaniel, ed., l989, p. 2.
4. Beyond Shelter, SFDPH, San Francisco, l989, table 2, p. 13.
5. The Political Economy of the Urban Ghetto, Fusfeld & Bates, Southern Illinois University Press, l984, p. 87.
6. Ibid, p. 145-146.
7. Ibid, table p. 146.
8. Spatial Deconcentration, documents collected from HUD by the late Ms. Yolanda Ward (assassinated); published in World War Three Illustrated.
9. NYT 9/27/91.
10. Beyond Shelter, p. 5.

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