In Part Four, per capita income and average home value were closely correlated with percentages of subsidized housing by zip code. But so are demographics: specifically, percentages of black and Hispanic residents.
The chart below compares the 15 zip codes with the highest percentages of subsidized housing to the 15 zip codes with the lowest percentages. In Part Four, we noted that the zip codes with the highest percentages of subsidized units had half the per capita income and half the median home value of the zip codes with the lowest percentages. But we can also see that the highest percentage zip codes had more than four times the percentage of blacks and three times the percentage of Hispanics as the lowest percentage zip codes.
Race tends to be correlated with income. In 1999, white non-Hispanic Montgomery County residents had an average per capita income of $55,533 in 2007 dollars. Black residents had an average per capita income of $29,717 (54% of whites) and Hispanic residents received $21,190 (38%). These income differences affect where these groups can live and some of this may be reflected in the above data.
But there is more than that. The location of subsidized housing, especially large clusters of subsidized units, is extremely controversial. Few politicians will risk constructing public housing complexes in wealthy neighborhoods. We have seen signs of this in Montgomery County, whether in the protests of some Burtonsville residents against “undesirables” or resistance to use of the Piotrow residence in Hillmead for public housing. There are many reasons for this but race and class tensions cannot be dismissed.
Consider the following emails sent to the County Council urging demolition of the Hillmead house:It did not take too long for your plan to house a “special needs” population next to Hillmead Park to impact property values in our neighborhood. One house under contract x2...both contracts pulled once the potential buyers received word of the county's plan. We have been told that Hillmead is “red-flagged” for potential buyers as well as builders. This is not too encouraging for the prosperity of our community. Your thoughts? Do you have any concerns for the tax- paying residents of this neighborhood? I think this is a fair question as Mr. Leggett is raising property taxes to collect $128 million dollars to address this county's fiscal crisis.
*****
My family has lived in Hillmead for over 40 years.
I would like to voice my concern about the building now standing at 6221 Bradley Blvd. and what is being proposed to become.
I would rather see more green space. I would rather have more animals be housed in the green than to have people come in tractors and kill more trees and pollute more the air.
I am concerned that the people you are proposing to be housed at 6221 be so poor that they would need to take extreme measures for survival and break and enter into our homes or for that matter break into our cars and drive away with them. I am concerned for children's safety.
Three years ago my husband's brand new car was stolen right outside our door. We still think to this day that the people at the shelter, or their visitors, mainly the visitors had something to do with it.
We live in this neighborhood because it was a safe and beautiful place to raise a family and it is the only house we have had since we got married. We work very hard (two jobs each) to keep up with Montgomery County taxes, food prices, rising gasoline prices and also to keep the house up to date so that we can sell it and have money for our retirement.
You tell me, dear council members, would you like to be in a dilemma of getting a lot less money for your property just because your neighbors are not up to par with the rest of the area? If you don't mind, then, may I suggest that you let the poor family live next to you and you let us tear down the house at 6221 at Hillmead citizens' expense and leave the park area as park and let the earth be green and reign once again.
*****
Have you lost your minds? I simply cannot believe that anyone with an IQ above that of a retarded chicken would seriously consider putting a welfare brood sow and her 13 kids in a $2.5 million mansion paid for by the taxpayers of this county. This is appalling!! What kind of message does this send to hardworking individuals who are struggling to stay in their homes because of high property taxes in this county? Answer: Be a irresponsible bum and the county will put you in a mansion. Even Lenin in his wildest moments never came up with a scheme this diabolical.
Consider the following comments made on Marc Fisher’s post on the issue (anonymously of course):Now if the voters will remove [Council Member George] Leventhal from office, then victory will be complete. Enough of this political stupidity from councilmembers and media types who want this garbage in everyone's neighborhood but their own.
Congratulations to the residents of Hillmead. You have a lot of support.
*****
The “thousands of families sitting on Montgomery's waiting list for housing assistance” wouldn't be on Montgomery's waiting list if Montgomery would quit putting them in hotel rooms at taxpayer expense. They would move to a place where the cost of housing is in line with their skills, such as PG County or Allegany County.
*****
There is plenty of affordable housing for people who work in Montgomery County--it's called “Frederick.”
And here are more anonymous comments on a Washington Post article about Hillmead: Why should anyone welcome “needy” (read: most likely addicted, convicted, evicted, and illegal) residents in prosperous neighborhoods? So they can move in and turn a lovely street into one dominated by the house that has 11 cars, a revolving door for “relatives”? So that a drug dealer is closer? So sorry, I don't get it...
*****
People will always protect their own neighborhood and I don't blame them. They have every right to stop the county from artificially changing the landscape of their neighborhood.
*****
Let George Leventhal put the homeless in HIS house, then we'll see whether he walks his own talk.
Not enough? Here’s one more comment from another Marc Fisher post: Leventhal is insane, that's all there is to it. He has no logical link between fair housing and spending taxpayer money on a veritable mansion. Quite simple, the neighbors have every right to decide where public housing goes because that's the definition of PUBLIC housing. Housing is zoned through an democratic process involving elected officials. Through that process the neighbors absolutely get a say. What's next, because of fair housing, the count council should not be an elected body because that would give neighbors a voice in where public housing is built? Leventhal is confusing public and private housing and is envisioning himself as a king who doesn't have to answer to his constituents. He's so far right wing he thinks he's left wing.
I would gladly have paid the family who “got” that house $3000 per month to rent it from them and, based on friends who have successfully done that with rent controlled apartments in NYC, I would have succeeded. Then the family would be dealing with housing issues and I would be written up in the Post as tricking the system.
But in fact, that's not tricking the system, that's how every single instance of public housing works at all times. The system has zero effective historic examples. There is, quite literally, not one single example of publicly-set up affordable housing that did not fall victim to scammers, graft, and “friends who are just staying for a little while.” Zero examples of successful public housing in American history. It's true.
Did race and class animosity motivate every person who wanted to demolish the Hillmead house? No. Did it motivate some of them? Yes. Do racism and prejudice against public housing recipients exist in Montgomery County? It is difficult to read the above remarks and conclude that they do not. After all, every one of these comments was written by a real human being. The only question is the magnitude of the impact of these sorts of feelings on public policy, especially on the location of public housing.
The fact is that Montgomery County’s subsidized housing is disproportionately located in less wealthy neighborhoods with large percentages of blacks and Latinos. Most of the richest neighborhoods are protected from it. Two-thirds of the subsidized units are not convenient to Metro. For whatever reason, whether economic or influenced by racial and class animus, the county’s public housing system reinforces the regime of economic and race-tinged segregation created by the private market.
And our leaders have a moral responsibility to do something about it.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Where is Subsidized Housing in MoCo? - Part Five
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5 comments:
Adam, I think you are confusing cause-and-effect here. Such misattribution isn't at all uncommmon among idealists. Yet no matter how wrong something might seem to be on moral grounds, it may be that when you make proper attributions as to cause and effect, the situation may be no less morally questionable, but solutions might become more apparent than if you're looking at the situation crosseyed through bad glasses.
Look at market costs, for example. And no, I'm not one of these newfangled libermarxitarians who see everything as economic determinism. Still, if the county wants to subsidize the poor, they're going to buy up spare housing stock at the lowest costs possible. That is why Aspen Hill, for example, was one of the preferred neighborhoods for group homes and halfway houses. Before the housing boom, it was one of the most affordable places in the county to get a single-family detached residential home. The other places were mostly in the much older housing stock such as in Maryvale, but most of those houses weren't fit for the purpose because they didn't have basements.
I suppose that the county could go ahead and buy up a few fairly large expensive buildings in Chevy Chase or Potomac for that matter, and populate it with several families of working-poor. And they'd be able to get jobs right near where they live, as domestics or yardcare workers. But let's stop to ask of that wouldn't totally reek of a plantation mentality, more or less with taxpayer dollars subsidizing sharecroppers so that the rich could underpay even more than they do, on the grounds that their domestics/yardworkers didn't have transportation costs to factor into income requirements.
Now, it is definitely a problem that a lot of MPDU aren't located near Metro stations, but when you consider that this combination of proximity to mass-transit and exclusivity and modernity is perhaps the major bloc of selling points for the yuppies who are the primary driver of urbanization-style growth, you would have to massively subsidize MPDU and those MPDU are not likely to be suitable for the intended subsidy beneficiaries. For example, how are you going to fit a single-mom with 6 kids into a 2-bedroom MPDU in a tower full of thin-walled apartments for single yuppies or dual-income/no-kids couples?
Leaving that out of the discussion for now, you say "[t]he fact is that Montgomery County’s subsidized housing is disproportionately located in less wealthy neighborhoods with large percentages of blacks and Latinos."
Uh, cause and effect is a valuable thing to understand. Does it not occur to you that black and latinos in the non-degreed populations tend to be rather poor, and they need to be where rents or mortgage-payments are low? You were perhaps expecting the rich to move into declining neighborhoods or into struggling suburbs, when they have the alternative to move into revitalizing close-in or downtown neighborhoods and become part of a gentrification? With the latter choice, they get walkability. So the cause-and-effect of this is that the poor live where they can afford to live, as do the wealthy.
Isn't it enough for you that the county is subsidizing people to get them off of the streets and into non-shelter housing? There's a huge waiting list, as you point out. So let's not go overboard here. It's more important -- in my humble opinion -- to put roofs over the heads of the many, rather than play feel-good games of "social justice" that houses far fewer people and far less speedily. Remember, for every hugely subsidized MPDU in the rich parts of town, there's that much less money to go around for people to have housing in the poor parts of town.
To conclude, this was an excellent and well-researched series. Yet you may wish to get a new tint for your sunglasses that might allow you to see that there are better ways to spend money than by fostering an inevitable plantation mentality which must necessarily result from piling MPDUs in the wealthier communities at exhorbitant costs to the taxpayers.
With regard to the five-part series, it once again confirms what has been accepted and promoted by Montgomery County leadership for many, many years. Unfortunately this is not news to our politicians.
I thought the 1999 Brookings report "A Region Divided" not only hi-lighted the regional issue, but laid out the clear divide in Montgomery County. That report had a nanosecond of life with M-NCPPC and Council. See:
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/
rc/reports/1999/07washington_center%
20on%20urban%20and%20metropolitan%
20policy/DCRegion.pdf
Then, there's the MCPS classic "Red Zone" map. See the map within this report delivered at Harvard...
http://www.hbs.edu/pelp/docs/Weast070620
Harvard.pdf
I do have one comment regarding the details of the series. I'm guessing that you may have put all of 20904 into Council District 4. White Oak is a major repository of subsidized housing and has a 20904 zip, but it in Ervin's 5th District.
Regarding Mr. Hardman's comments--these arguments are often put forward by developers. "The cost is too high for our project here, let's do it (more & more) there." There is no oversight, and no consideration for over saturation.
Most recent example is with the Falklands' project. That developer purchased a smaller complex in White Oak to use as the possible affordable-housing receiving area for his DTSS project.
Once again I appear to either be posting incomprehensible gibberish, or perhaps people would simply prefer to misconstrue and/or misattribute.
I don't think I have ever heard of a single developer saying "let's not build MPDU in wealthy parts of the county because it has the appearance of a plantation mentality and building servants' quarters and sharecropping".
In any case, it seems that I recall that a lot of the MPDU do in fact never quite manage to get built, or the second they get built, someone scams on it and it's sold at market value anyway and the profits are maximized for the flipper out of the pockets of the taxpayers.
So if the taxpayer subsidy money winds up in the pockets of speculators in any case, why not spend as little as possible.
I do agree that concentrating poverty is not a good idea, and in particular, concentrating poverty far from rapid and affordable mass-transit access is a terrible idea. The ultimate extreme of that, of course, were the corbusierian monstrosities of the Welfare Towers such as Chicago's infamous Cabrini Greens. But if you're concentrating poverty, maybe it's better to not have it sprawl out over a significant portion of an entire County Council district and be almost no place else.
And what sort of oversight could there be? A lot of our current concerns emerged as unintended consequences of whatever was all the rage in the urban planning and social engineering communities back when permits were granted and groundbreaking happened. Well, we know better now, and hindsight is 20/20... but they thought that they knew what they were trying to do back then, as much as we think we know what we're trying to do in the modern day.
Nice to see that not everyone is on vacation.
A couple points:
1. There were several zip codes that overlapped County Council districts. In those cases, I assigned the zip code to the district that accounted for a majority of its area. So zip code 20904 was assigned to District 4 and zip code 20901 was assigned to District 5. I do not have subsidized unit counts below the zip code level so the council district statistics cannot be 100% precise.
2. MPDUs and subsidized housing are not the same programs. HOC buys small numbers of MPDUs and rents them out, but otherwise MPDUs are sold to private owners and are eventually returned to private sector pricing.
3. Mr. Hardman, my sunglasses are tinted by data. This blog has now published more of it on this subject than has yet existed. As you say, concentrated poverty is not something to be encouraged by the government. There is also a question of programmatic effectiveness if public housing provision at the lowest cost results in poor people living far from transit. We have exposed this to be the case in MoCo. I suspect that many county residents would neither expect nor welcome that effect of our subsidized housing policy.
... and Mr Pagnucco:
At a Town Hall meeting by Mr Leggett almost two years ago, held at Northwood HS if I recall correctly, several people stood up to speak but one man stood up and recited a litany of horror, pretty much, about how this and that was piling up and unattended to and how nothing much tyhat you'd expect from MoCoGovCorpInc(tm) was getting done. There was trash on the yard, overcrowded housing, people dumping tires and dead batteries on the lawn, etc etc.
The man summarized and concluded, to paraphrase, with "so, what's the Plan here, you all just going to let the East County slide? I don't guess you'd let this happen over in Potomac."
And that was one of my eye openers. I decided that it was time to pay attention. And I haven't seen anything in your data to contradict that man's conclusion. I don't expect you have seen it either.
But where I'm talking about your rose-tintie outlook isn't that you're all annoyed about what your data shows; you should be upset with concentration of poverty (or even of income class outside of the poverty level). However, I don't think that MPDUs (allocations, set-asides) or Subsidized Housing (also allocations, but delivered as support instead of set-asides) will solve the income divide problem we have emerging here in MoCo. Taking a position of 'no more subsidies/MPDU unless they're in Potomac or BCC' probably isn't going to change much in the built-up parts of the County.
Probably the only thing that is going to do much to improve the lot of those living in East County will have to do with providing more crime-control but moreso to do with more and better educational and vocational opportunities for the people growing up over here.
Look, I don't know exactly where you live, but Aspen Hill isn't exactly Potomac nor is Four Corners or Glenmont.
So far as I know, around here, a lot of formerly HOC type subsidized housing went the way of the dodo when the landowers decided it would be better for them if they went condo. Also, for the people trying to get subsidized housing in the single-family-detached dwellings here could get that only as part of group-home situations like rehab or outpatient or halfway-house placement. And in that last set of cases, if you're uber-progressive, it's a tough call to decide whether to allocate the funding for people who are just plain poor or people who are just plain poor and can't possibly take care of themselves, like lots of the non-disabled poor really ought to be able to do in a boom economy. It's an even tougher decision when the revenues decline even as a downturn increases the pressures on everyone.
In any case, thanks very much for the data, if you can find a more permanent place than blogger to put it, go right ahead. I recommend District4MC. Despite the fact that I'm the sysadmin I am not running it on a partisan basis; facts are facts and facts are welcome. I appreciate you going to this effort and I will probably use a lot of these facts in my own debating. Thank goodness you didn't succumb to the usual MC Democrat tendency to gloss over unpleasant reality or even to trashcan data that doesn't support the party line. Many kudos, sir and again I thank you for the extra work.
Regards,
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