The Los Angeles Times had a long article on the Ramona Gardens housing projects in East Los Angeles. The article writes:
…Ramona Gardens, an Eastside housing project that has seen countless confrontations between the police and its home-grown street gang, Big Hazard. The cycles of seething standoffs and bursts of violence stretch back generations and have defeated every effort to bring lasting security to the neighborhood…
The police also say they are often targeted by Big Hazard. The gang has at least 260 members, including those in prison or living outside Ramona Gardens, and has connections to the Mexican Mafia, according to the LAPD.
Twice since January 2006, the police say, gunmen have fired at patrol cars in Ramona Gardens, with bullets narrowly missing officers.
“Every time we walk away from our car, it’s going to be vandalized,” said LAPD Capt. William Fierro. “I just don’t know how to get the roots of that gang out of there.”
None of this surprises housing experts. They say that Ramona Gardens, squeezed by railroad tracks and the San Bernardino Freeway, has become a field laboratory for housing policies gone wrong and that any solution would require razing the buildings and starting from scratch. The city’s oldest project, Ramona Gardens opened in 1941.
“It has outlived its useful life,” said Rudy Montiel, executive director of the Los Angeles Housing Authority, which runs the project. Rents for the 497 residences are based on income and can be as little as $50 a month.
Montiel said Ramona Gardens typifies a failed model, because it piles poor families on top of each other and is separated from the surrounding community — hothouse conditions for predatory crime. He said the old Aliso Village project nearby was in similar distress until it was replaced with a combination of low- and middle-income housing. That could ultimately be Ramona Gardens’ fate, he said, although there is no specific plan for such an undertaking.
“This is an area that has been neglected for years,” said City Councilman Jose Huizar, whose district includes Ramona Gardens. He pledged to begin meeting regularly with residents.
A litany of ills
The project has witnessed shootings, a thriving drug trade, shakedown schemes that victimized delivery and bus drivers, apartment squatting by gang members and street skirmishes that rained rocks and bottles on police, according to the LAPD.
The Ramona Gardens projects are not unique - all projects in the Los Angeles area are controlled by some notorious gang. You have the PJ’s and the Grape Streets controlling the projects in Watts, the Harbor City crips and ese’s controlling the projects in Harbor City, West Side Wilmas controlling the projects in Wilmington, and you have the Culver cities controlling the projects in Culver city. Time and time again, subsidizing low income housing translates to subsidizing gangs, crime, and drug use.
On the other hand, when the projects have been removed and replaced with market valued housing units it has been an incredible success. Take Harbor City as one example - my cousin grew up a couple of blocks away from the Harbor City projects and distinctively remembers how violent the community was. The area was so plagued with violence that many residents would avoid the main street so as not to pass near the projects. The Harbor City gangs that controlled the projects, Harbor City 13 and the Harbor City crips, were notorious in the Harbor Area, known as one of the, if not the, most violent gangs in all of the Harbor Area. However, since the projects have been torn down and replaced with at market housing all of that has changed. While the two gangs still exist, they are nowhere near the force they once were. Robbed of their hang out, their breeding ground for new members, and their shelter from the outside world, they have been reduced to a skeleton of what they once were. Tearing down the projects was good for the community and the people who may have ended up living in the projects.
There are two different approaches to subsidizing housing for the poor: providing ‘low-income’ housing which is what projects are, and then there are direct housing vouchers, where you give poor families a check that can be used as rent money at a housing location of the families choosing. Vouchers disperse the poor and in doing so make it difficult for gangs to control a certain area. Clearly, as the failure of projects throughout the LA area have shown, the latter method is much more efficient.
Yet our public school system relies more on the housing method than on the voucher method. By forcing members of a particular area to attend the school system in the community you create an environment where neighborhood gangs can take more control of the community members, thereby increasing the gang culture and the gangs hold on students in the area. This results in an increase in the number of students joining the gang and in the gangs power.
By separating the school from the community members you make it harder for gangs to control a certain area, you make it easier for students and attentive parents to escape the gang culture, and in the end you make for better communities and students. This has been the experience of projects around California, and I believe similar results would come if school vouchers were implemented.
I have been away from California for some time now and I was not aware that the Housing Authority of Los Angeles had already torn down at least one of its housing projects in Harbor City and erected a “market valued” neighborhood in its place.
The article commends the method of tearing down a low-income housing project to make room for “market valued housing units” as a correct approach to eradicating crime. Many who know about the conditions that thrive in L.A.’s housing projects would agree that they have been in dire need of rehabilitative attention for several decades, but I am not so sure tearing down the housing projects is the answer.
Low-income families don’t just disappear because they can no longer afford housing in a revitalized area. They move on to create another low-income neighborhood just like the one they left behind. In a few decades, when it’s time to increase the tax base and make lots of MONEY, the low-income families will be displaced once again.
Yes, folks, I am about to go there—The real motivation behind displacing a large group of low-income residents and erecting “market valued housing units” is the almighty dollar.
L.A.’s housing projects were built on many acres of cheap land in the 1940s and 1950s. Today, that same land is worth many millions of dollars. And if the city can dispose of the poor folks who can barely make their $50 rent payment and replace them with higher-income residents, the land instantly becomes extremely valuable and the city’s tax base increases for that particular area.
So what happens to the poor folks that can no longer afford to live in the new neighborhood? As far as the city is concerned: “Who gives a damn? They are out of our hair.”
Cities across the country have been using the same tactic to regentrify crime ridden urban areas. Decades ago affluent families fled these same urban areas to create the suburbs. In the southern U.S. it was called White Flight. Now that the potential value of our run-down urban neighborhoods has been realized, it only makes sense to take back “The Streets”. Or does it?
CHerrera
Cherrera,
Opposing housing projects does not equate to opposing housing assistance to the poor, it just opposes the means of providing housing assistance to the poor.
As I said in the post, there are more efficient means of providing housing to the poor - housing vouchers.
Edgar Olson, professor of economics at the University of Virginia, researched this very thing and found:
The full study can be found here.
It should also be mentioned that even your premise is unsubstantiated, in other words, ‘affordable housing’ programs by the government do not necessarily translate to overall affordable housing for the poor - in many instances (all?), they translate to more expensive housing, see here.
HP - like your argument for school vouchers, I’m also with you on this one. The change in Boyle Heights because of the Alliso Village is pretty significant.
I can understand, however, the criticism of this model, mostly on the grounds of supply & demand. On the micro-level, Alliso Village is a better place - for the poor that live their as well as for the mixed-income residents that now live there. But on the larger level, the number of units available was greatly reduced, and the number of units made for low-income families was even less. In the big picture, how to supply enough affordable housing?
Because the demand for housing in Los Angeles so far outweighs the supply, housing is barely affordable for anyone, let alone the poor. Relying only on the free market to supply housing doesn’t cut it. So what do we do to address that problem?
SG,
Affordable housing for the poor is a difficult topic - on the one hand, supply and demand via the price system is the most efficient means of allocating housing, in other words, it will provide the cheapest housing that the market can bare. But when you have such a large amount of demand, that housing price may still be higher than many people can afford. What to do?
The problem with using the government is that in creating ‘affordable housing’, it also increases the demand (or limits the supply, or both) thereby increasing even more the bottom prices of homes - making homes even less affordable to those at the bottom. Add in the fact that the government rarely does anything correctly, and you are left with a government program high on expectations and costs, but little on actual benefits and implementation. The best you can do is classify ‘affordable housing programs’ by the harm they do, and support the ones that do the least harm.
The ideal scenario though is to deal with the reality of the situation - prices mean something, and when the price of homes go up so much that some can’t afford to live in a certain area, that is a sign of the underlying scarcity. The most the government can do is increase supply (reduce, for example, environmental regulations, and other burdensome regulations that limit supply, see here). Those at the bottom have to either work more, wait for higher wages, or move out of the area - nothing else addresses the problem.
For example, I want to have a house overlooking the beach, but so do many other people and the only thing that separates them from me is how much I am willing and can afford to pay for such homes. The government cannot change the underlying scarcity, it can only move things around but in doing so, it makes the allocation of beach homes less efficient, not more.
Again, sorry for the deletion.
Let the free market do it’s work. That is in almost every case the best policy. The free market is a much more efficient way to allocate any type of resource, PERIOD!
ITS ALL ABOUT THE RG PROJECTS