The proliferating bureaucracies in a complex industrial society tend to curtail democratic rights. Those that affect the affluent and powerful can be handled by appeals to the courts, which have power to prohibit unwarranted decrees or decisions beyond the scope of proper authority. The poor, however, are helpless. In welfare, public housing and education, arbitrary abuse of power cannot be arrested by means readily available to the victimized. In most cases the victim does not know he has legal redress and accepts the role of a supplicant unprotected by rules, regulations and safeguards. In some cases, the issue is uncontrolled bureaucratic or political power; in others, the question is the relationship between professionals and those they have a duty to service but too often humiliate or neglect.
Slowly, however, the concept is emerging that beneficiaries of welfare measures are not beggars but citizens endowed with rights defined by law. The principle that citizens should have "maximum feasible participation" in community planning and other decisions affecting their lives is growing. The rights of all parents -- not only the wealthy -- to have a significant role in educational decisions affecting their children is still another developing concept. From a variety of different directions, the strands are drawing together for a contemporary social and economic Bill of Rights to supplement the Constitution's political Bill of Rights.
The new forms of rights are new methods of participation in decision-making. The concept of democracy is being pushed to deeper levels of meaning -- from formal exercise of voting, still an issue in much of the United States for many Negroes, to effective participation in major decisions.
Two areas where the enlargement of rights has taken significant organized form are welfare unions and tenant unions. The untold story of bureaucratic abuse of welfare recipients is heartrending. The humiliation imposed is bad enough, but worse is the fact that recipients are denied substantial benefits granted to them by the law. Cloward has estimated that welfare clients actually receive only 50 percent of the benefits the law provides because they are consciously kept ignorant of their rights. As individuals they have no means of informing themselves or of asserting their right to withheld benefits. Through welfare unions, however, the maximum legal limit can be obtained and deeper solutions to the problems of poverty can be sought with organized strength and collective judgment.
Tenant unions are one answer to abuses resulting from the growth of public housing, which has made some cities the largest landlords and the largest bureaucracies in the land. Our experience in Chicago indicates that tenant unions can not only be built but can achieve sophisticated ends such as formal written and detailed collective agreements with both private and public landlords.
Welfare and tenant unions need legislation to protect members from reprisals and intimidation. Fear of loss of welfare or eviction from apartments inhibits organization. Just as labor obtained the right to organize expressed in the Wagner Act, welfare recipients and tenants need the same legal shield to facilitate mass organization.
Housing
The American housing industry is a disgrace to a society which can confidently plan to get to the moon. The costs of construction have risen more rapidly than most other items. Technological advances in housing construction are regularly heralded and seldom implemented. The employment situation is a scandal -- it tends to be a lily-white industry with as many intricate steps to entrance as the Social Register. Banks and government policy have actively encouraged and even required segregated housing; federal mortgage policy has only recently changed to favor some integrated housing.
The end result is that the United States is today a more segregated country in many respects than it was twenty years ago. Problems of education, transportation to jobs and decent living conditions are all made difficult because housing is so rigidly segregated. The expansion of suburbia and migration from the South have worsened big-city segregation. The suburbs are white nooses around the black necks of the cities. Housing deteriorates in central cities; urban renewal has been Negro removal and has benefited big merchants and real estate interests; and suburbs expand with little regard for what happens to the rest of America.
Both rehabilitation and some new building in predominantly Negro areas is immediately needed to alleviate inhuman conditions. But this should be done without foreclosing possibilities of later integration.
With the prospect of a new building boom in the United States and the emergence of new towns or communities, we must insure the development of integrated housing. The new and rehabilitated housing in ghetto areas should be temporary: constructed for a relatively short-term period of fifteen to twenty years. Units should be built with a plan to tear them down at the end of that period as housing integration is advanced. The financing and taxing of the housing should reflect this relatively short-term use; depreciation should be for a twenty-year period, rather than for the conventional fifty years, and demolition should be required when depreciation terminates. The construction activities should be subsidized though expansion of present-day housing subsidies, tax write-offs, low-cost rehabilitation loans and the like.
The interim for ghetto housing should not obscure the need for strict enforcement of sound housing practices. But inspection, fair housing, even rehabilitation cannot solve the problems of housing for the segregated poor. New, good housing available at low cost is needed to satisfy the dwelling needs of the underclass. While housing expenditures are a fourth or a fifth of a family's expenditures, they are less than a twentieth of governmental expenditures. Once more priorities have to be reversed; the federal government subsidizes the non-poor twice as much as the poor when we include various forms of subsidies such as middle-income public housing, tax deductions for mortgage interest and real estate taxes. The federal government should be subsidizing housing activities on such a scale that all American housing meets at least minimal standards of adequacy.
Housing is too important to be left to private enterprise with only minor government effort to shape policy. We need the equivalent of a Medicare for housing.
The possibilities for decent, integrated housing are not as remote as increasing segregation in large cities would indicate. The model cities and new towns concepts suggest ways to remake cities and their surrounding areas. The United States is now a metropolitan nation and will become more so. Government policy can powerfully facilitate an integrated society by refusing to subsidize planned segregation (which took place under government subsidies to suburban homeowners in the fifties and sixties) and by requiring integrated communities.
While we cannot resolve the issues of decent, integrated housing immediately, we are now making the choices which will determine whether we can achieve these goals in forthcoming decades. We cannot afford to make these choices poorly. [4]
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