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January 12, 2007
Philadelphia public housing officials weren't bluffing when they warned that federal budget cuts would force them to lay off hundreds of workers and slash services for the city's 80,000 subsidized-housing residents.
The dimensions of the cutbacks announced Tuesday by Philadelphia Housing Authority executive director Carl R. Greene are disturbing nonetheless.
PHA is laying off about 350 employees, or one in every five on Greene's staff of 1,600. The agency's maintenance staff will be among the hardest hit, along with its housing police force.
That means building repairs will lag, causing minor problems - a roof or plumbing leak, for instance - to develop into major expenses if left untended.
With a reduced security presence, PHA developments could see a spike in criminal activity - with the attending impact on surrounding neighborhoods.
Neither the consequences nor the inevitability of these cutbacks should come as a surprise. Since early last summer, Greene has been sounding the alarm on federal funding policies for PHA and other local housing agencies nationally.
During the Bush administration, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development budget has been trimmed by one-fifth. PHA expects to receive 12 percent less from Washington than last year. Since Congress failed to pass a new budget last fall, there's no new money even for HUD-acknowledged increases in utility costs.
And this makes sense? Only if you subscribe to the theory that no good deed goes unpunished.
The gradual starvation of public housing agencies by Bush and the Republican-led Congress is a failure of leadership in Washington. It would be scandalous under any circumstances, given the need for affordable housing. As a penalty suffered by PHA - which has made major strides - it's twice as offensive for penalizing success.
Under Greene, the Philadelphia housing agency has run smarter and leaner than at any time in its recent history. The last of the crime-ridden high-rise developments came tumbling down. Suburban-style communities rose in their place, transforming large swaths of the city, boosting property values and promoting private investment nearby.
Meantime, the PHA workforce fell to less than two-thirds of its size six years ago.
There's nothing wrong with trying to do more with less, which could justify some federal budget trims. And as an economy move, PHA could afford to sell off some vacant properties that are costly to maintain.
But housing professionals such as Greene make a convincing case that federal cutbacks of this size were simply punitive. In the context of tax cuts for the wealthy, it's cruel and cynical to starve public housing, which serves the poor.
Good to hear Mayor Street's pledge to lobby congressional Democrats to restore the federal housing aid.
The region's congressional delegation - mayoral contenders and all - need to pitch in and rally their colleagues. Washington needs to invest in the success of public housing, not cut and run from its duty to help citizens most in need.
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