Seconded: Still more on public housing. Local control

A reader from up north comments:

I read the Cabrini-Green post just now. Yep, an infamous failure. If you wanted to amend the post, you could include a reference to Pruitt Igoe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt–Igoe

The sketches and renders prior to construction made it look like an idyllic paradise, but less than 20 years after it opened, it was a broken wasteland. They ended up demolishing all the buildings, and footage of the demolition ended up in the film "Koyannasquatsi". It looked like a nuclear wasteland prior to demo.

Your own Greenwich Housing Authority seems to have been well run for years, however. Perhaps the answer is keep projects and properties small in number and hyper-local oversight?

I think he’s exactly right. Our local housing authority has people like Sam Romeo on board and he, and other volunteers and staff make for a great combination. Sam’s a political conservative and not prone to toss other people’s tax money around, but he’s also “one of the people”, grew uo in town, and knows what it’s like to be financially excluded from the Tesla class. We can dispute the details of particular efforts but overall, the reader’s right: the authority is well run, doesn’t squander our money, and genuinely cares about people. None of which can be said about any state or federally run project I’m aware of..

“Keep projects small and local”? Yes.

Circling Back. As long as there’s no real estate news to report, I thought I’d add a few more thoughts on this subject. The biggest failure of public housing projects seems to be neglect: the lack of maintenance and the tolerance of crime. Taking the second item first, I’ve sat in Norwalk housing court, waiting for a client/landlord’s case to be called, and watched the Greenwich Housing Authority evict even grandmothers for tolerating a family member selling drugs out of Granny’s apartment, even if Granny denies knowledge of the nefarious doings of, say, her wayward grandchild. There are certainly drug sales occurring in the projects, just as there are at Brunswick, but it’s nothing like the open markets in big city hellholes.

As for neglect of the properties themselves, our housing authority is comprised of members who know the projects and are in them frequently. Its recommendations for spending money are not infrequently trimmed or even rejected entirely by our BET or the RTM, but that’s what local control is about, and all in all, the units are slowly being modernized. It’s not grand housing, nor should it be, in my opinion, but if I had to live in a public housing project, I’d far prefer to live in one operated and maintained by our local Greenwich neighbors than one run by some faceless urban authority or worse, a bureaucrat in Hartford.