The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; "What To Do With The Failures In Public Housing: Fix Them Up, Or Tear 'Em Down?"

(Film showing public housing project being demolished.)

JIM LEHRER: The demolition of public housing in St. Louis in 1972. At the time, those who knew the crime-ridden, mostly vacant thirty-three buildings cheered; but six years later the images still haunt some federal officials. Other cities want to erase their public housing failures. But with long waiting lists for people who want to get into public housing, the federal government is saying you can`t tear them down.

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. There are 14,000 public housing projects in this country providing 1.2 million housing units directly subsidized by the federal government. They exist in 2,700 communities, and a lot of them work. People with very low incomes can live decently at small rents. But about sixty of the projects are disasters, and the problem is what to do with them. In St. Louis, as you saw, they simply blew the buildings up. Several other cities would like to do the same, among them Seattle, Nashville, New Orleans, and Alexandria, Virginia. But it isn`t that easy. Tonight, what to do with the failures in public housing: fix them up, or tear `em down? First, a close look at one example: Columbia Point, Boston. The reporter is Donovan Moore of Public Television Station WGBH.

DONOVAN MOORE, Reporting: This is Columbia Point, the model of federal failures in the business of building housing projects-- 1,500 units on fifty of some of the most valuable acres in Boston; in so many ways another world, where heroin is the currency and where firemen and plumbers don`t venture in without a police escort. For more than twenty years Columbia Point has stood, monolithic, mocking the public funds that built it. It was, however, not always so. Until the 1950s Columbia Point was little more than a large vacant lot. Back then Boston was short on housing, especially for veterans. And so for its returning soldiers the city built a sturdy housing development, out on the point where it had the space. The theory was that veterans would spend a year or two here -- in school, perhaps -- and then move on, start their families elsewhere. This project was never designed to house ten-children families, as it does now.

BETTY WASHINGTON, Tenant, Columbia Point: When you leave I have to walk. you down the stairs. It`s just that bad.

MOORE: Betty Washington has lived at Columbia Point for about as many years as she has children -- ten. And in her more than a decade of living at the project, she has witnessed the decline and fall of Columbia Point. The numbers tell the story. Ten years ago more than 1,200 of the project`s 1,500 units were occupied. Out of that, less than 500 were minority families. Eighty percent occupied, forty percent minority. Ever since, the trend has been steady and unbroken. In 1972,a little over 1,000 units occupied; sixty percent minority. Today, except for a few elderly, a core of a little more than 300 families lives full-time at the project, and they are all minority, mostly black.

White families fled, while most black families found it harder, if not impossible, to transfer out. At the same time, still more blacks and Puerto Ricans were placed here over the years, all taking place under the aegis of the Boston Housing Authority. And although the Housing Authority denies it, one urban planner familiar with the area explains the reduction of Columbia Point to a black pocket of crime and poverty by saying that whenever officials couldn`t place -- or more likely, didn`t want to place a family - - they sent them here. Columbia Point is a kind of human dumping ground.

The project long ago became a repository for the female side of the marriage-children-desertion cycle. Where the husband/fathers move on to other addresses and other jobs and other cities, their spouses have no such mobility, and this isolated spit of land is by necessity home. That of course doesn`t mean there aren`t men at Columbia Point. The winding streets inside the project are filled with them, moving from one building to another, like a troupe from some sad circus. But by and large they don`t live here. The project is more a convenient roof and a base for dealing drugs. They enforce the project`s laws, often with a severity unmatched in other parts of the city. For example, not many days ago the Boston Police began investigating the death of a man found impaled on an iron fence inside Columbia Point. The man`s wife and children are among the last few occupants of this high-rise building, an eight-story structure with dark, nearly black hallways. The police believe the man was thrown from the window, and they are still questioning suspects.

For its size, the Columbia Point Housing Project makes what can only be described as an astounding contribution to crime in Boston. The crime per acre in this neighborhood of crowded high-rise buildings is easily the highest in the city. The statistics: last year alone, four murders in the project; almost ninety stolen cars found inside the project grounds; 3,000 calls made to District 11 of the Boston Police. Maintenance men from the Housing Authority venture into the project only in pairs, and with reason. A little over a year ago an exterminator working alone one afternoon was killed inside one of the now vacant high-rise buildings. Fire trucks stop at the project`s entrance to wait for their police escort before answering a call. The firemen servicing the project use a special truck, modified for use at Columbia Point. Custom-built enclosures for protection, with everything that isn`t nailed down stored in locked cabinets, including even the nozzles. This truck in fact shows the scars of fire fighting at Columbia Point. The Fire Department estimates it made about 1,000 runs to the project last year, at an average cost of $625 per run. One Housing Authority official estimates that the total police, fire and maintenance costs for the project today are enough to put all of the remaining 300 families up at the Ritz for almost a year. In fact, crime is so routine at Columbia Point that District 11 of the Boston Police has assigned a car full-time to patrol just the project alone. And what happens when the police make an arrest?

FIRST BOSTON POLICE OFFICER: Well, of course the problem is that in most cases the victim knows his assailant. And it`s very difficult for somebody to testify against somebody whom they have perhaps gone to school with or grown up with...

SECOND BOSTON POLICE OFFICER: Plus, they also realize that, hey, you know, once you leave here you go home, but I gotta live here. And you know, the frustration is there for us, true enough, because we either can`t get it into court, or when we do we can`t get a conviction because the people fail to show.

MOORE: District 11 even keens a Columbia Point mug book, a kind of family album of the worst the project has to offer. They are, by and large, not tenants but outsiders, bringing with them crimes as varied as the faces inside. In the long list of things unique to the Columbia Point Housing Project, it is perhaps the strangest twist of all that this boarded-up development stands on one of the most valuable pieces of property in the City of Boston. As in all port cities, there is only a finite amount of waterfront, often affording the best view; and in Boston one of the grandest views of all belongs to Columbia Point.

BETTY WASHINGTON: This is a valuable piece of land that could look like Charlesgate, you know. It`s waterfront. And when it`s over, and when they have pushed us over into Carson Beach, it`s going to be a nice place, but we won`t be around here.

MOORE: This is what many people consider to be the key to the future of Columbia Point, the construction of the John F. Kennedy Library. It`s going up on the tip of the point, near the campus of the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and it will be the housing project`s newest neighbor. Designed by architect I. M. Pei, the library will be a modern, mostly glass structure with a spectacular panorama of Dorchester Bay in front, and in back a wall that cuts off the view of the housing project -- a feature that one "isn`t supposed to notice," as one university official put it. It is to be the foothold for change on Columbia Point, the gamble that pays off, bringing visitors and prestige to what had been an isolated campus. Although the nearby Bayside Mall has the Boston Teachers Union as a new tenant, the mall long ago withered into little more than a staging area for school buses. Grocery stores in the neighborhood gradually retreated further into Dorchester and South Boston, forcing the project`s elderly to take a special bus and the rest of the tenants to take cabs simply to buy groceries. The First National Bank has a computer facility across the street from the housing project. Bordering on the point are a local television station and the Boston Globe. And finally, unhappily holding the lease oft e nearly vacant Bayside Mall, is the John Hancock Company.

EPHRON CATLIN, Financial Consultant: That`s a pretty strong team, in this town. When you get that team together and they all agree, things happen in this town.

MOORS: Indeed, Ephron Catlin himself makes things happen. The prime financial mover behind the remodeling of the Quincy Market, he is chairman of the Peninsula Planning Committee, an ad hoc group with a stake in the future development of Columbia Point.

CATLIN: If you had some boats and a dock and (unintelligible) and a yacht club, oh boy.

MOORS: But how do you get a potential developer past the housing project?

CATLIN: Well, I don`t think you do. You just show him aerial photographs (laughing) of the place, and they can see with all ocean around it it looks very attractive from 10,000 feet.

MOORS: At the Boston Housing Authority`s Office of Tenant Selection, there are 10,000 names on file, all waiting for a spot in public housing -- waiting, of course, while fully eighty percent of the Columbia Point project is boarded up. No one on the list wants to live at Columbia Point, yet the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington steadfastly refuses to tear it down.

CATLIN: We think that eventually the federal government -- common sense will cause them to realize that they have to demolish some buildings.

JERRY HICKEY, Communications Director, Boston Housing Authority: I haven`t heard any planner or any spokesman for the authority or funding agencies who can foresee the possibility of Columbia Point being made livable without the removal of some high-rise and a dramatic reduction in the density.

GORDON BRIGHAM, City Planner: There`s a general consensus that the buildings need to come down

MOORS: There is indeed, but in Boston, not in Washington. And because the federal government cannot see what many people say is the light of day when it comes to housing projects like Columbia Point, the problem of what the Boston Housing Authority should do with the development it created over the past twenty years continues.

HICKEY: It`s just a common understanding now that in public housing throughout the nation you can`t put families in high-rise.

KEVIN FEELEY, Acting Director, Boston Housing Authority: I think that with proper work and with proper guidance a high-rise building can be viable, and that`s what we would intend to do with the three or four that we`re looking at rehabbing here.

MOORE: And so the BHA is embarking on a six million dollar refurbishing program at Columbia Point, a campaign to lure tenants back into both low- and high-rise units. There are those, however, who are skeptical.

CATLIN: So far there`s very little physical evidence that the funds that are being poured in there are having any great effect. I see no hope but to spend a hell of a lot of money to make that place -- money and training, because you`ve got to train the people how to live there.

MOORE: It is that kind of zoo analogy, of course, that doesn`t sit well with the tenants of Columbia Point. With the Kennedy Library construction so close by, and with all the grand plans for the rest of the point, the project sort of sits sullenly, watching all that`s going on around it. And so for the moment the only people who live on this prime parcel of land are those who simply cannot afford to move out.

MacNEIL: That report was edited from a longer report by Donovan Moore of Public Television Station WGBH in Boston. The local plan for dealing with the blight at Columbia Point is to demolish the high-rise buildings and create a mixed community, twenty-five percent low-income, fifty percent middle, and twenty-five percent high-income. The present low-income tenants would be assured housing there.

But that plan and others like it in different cities have run into problems with Washington. Jim?

LEHRER: The agency of the federal government which oversees the country`s public housing projects is the Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD. Stephen Coyle is Special Assistant to the Secretary of HUD, Patricia Harris. The Columbia Point story we just saw, I think everybody would have to admit, is a very grim story. How does that stack up with the other sixty that are on this "worst" list? Are they all similar to that around the country?

STEPHEN COYLE: Columbia Point is probably one of the most extreme cases that we have in the public housing program. But the other multiproblem projects are in similar condition but not nearly as extreme. Columbia Point has 1,100 vacant units; there`s no project in America that`s comparable to it.

LEHRER: All right, what is the official HUD policy now on this question of tearing down projects like Columbia Point or renovating them?

COYLE: Secretary Harris announced a policy in October, and her position was simply that all possible alternatives to demolition must be explored before local community housing authorities and cities request the government to approve them. When this proposal for Columbia Point was first thought out, it had two requests for demolition: the 1,100 high-rise units, and secondly, eight years later, the developer was to have the option to eliminate the balance of the 400 low-rise family units. The position we`re taking, based upon positive experience in other cities -- cities like Cambridge, Massachusetts; Springfield; and even St. Louis, in a project within one mile at the old Pruitt-Igoe, were found that...

LEHRER: Pruitt-Igoe, that`s the one that was torn down, in the film at the top.

COYLE: That was the one you saw, right. We found in other communities people have sat down and taken the time to plan the reuse of these buildings, so what we`re saying, we`ve said to the people from Boston, we`ve said to them for the last seven months, we`re not totally against thinning out projects, but we don`t want to have people begin with the assumption that demolition is the only course of action. We`ve seen too many examples where these kinds of buildings can be reused. At the same time, we have this year, very recently, approved thinning out of some projects where the thinning out of the project will lead to a useful life of viability in that project. So the policy is not totally opposed to demolition; the policy is against just coming in and blowing up projects, and we have many reasons for that.

LEHRER: What are some of the reasons to be opposed to tearing them down?

COYLE: First, we think that tearing them down would be a tacit approval of the management system that has produced these projects. If you go across the country, as the President learned when he went to the South Bronx, for example, some of the best housing in those areas are the high-rise public housing. We`re not saying that`s what we prefer; in fact, by law we don`t do that any more, and you will not see this administration building high- rise. But the first thing we have learned is that in some places high-rises work.

There are selection policies at the local level, maintenance policies, management policies that lead to a Columbia Point. My last visit there I saw many things that could be done to improve it that just require more attention. So first thing, we`re not going to approve that kind of management that lets these things fall apart. Secondly, it is a very expensive course of action. People don`t tend to look at the cost. It can cost you between a thousand and two thousand dollars a unit to tear them down. At Columbia Point that`s a three million dollar price tag. Third, when we tear down a project we have to continue to pay for the debt service. These projects are financed on a forty-year term, so that Pruitt- Igoe will still be paying for that in 1994.So we have an obligation to the taxpayer to try to get the best use.

And finally, every one of these projects -- Columbia Point I said was an exception -- but most of these projects are rented up. There`s a higher vacancy rate in troubled projects than in our national program, which has about a three percent rate.

But we have to find alternatives for people to live in, and we`re confident that they can be rehabbed. We`ve never said that in Columbia Point or any other place we would automatically oppose requests for thinning out, but we just want people to understand that it`s a very involved question, and we want them at the local level to do some different kind of planning studies before they say blow it up.

LEHRER: All right, thank you, Mr. Coyle. Robin?

MacNEIL: The group in Boston which wants to redevelop Columbia Point, the Peninsula Planning Committee, has the political clout, as you heard someone say in that film, that usually makes things happen. The committee`s former staff director is Gordon Brigham, a city planner who now works for the City of Boston as Director of the Boston Plan. He is with us in the studios of Station WSBK in Boston. Mr. Brigham, how are your feelings locally, on the scene, about HUD`s sentiments on demolition?

GORDON BRIGHAM: I don`t think there`s much of a difference. I think there`s a certain tendency, maybe, to try and make this an us against-them problem, and it`s not. I think perhaps last year, when the Peninsula Planning Committee was putting its ideas together, there was a sense that maybe on a policy level we might get a commitment out of the federal government that demolition in and of itself was a solution to the problem. But that was last year and last summer, and I think now we`re into a new process, in which it`s clear to everybody, both at the local level and the federal level, that whatever answer we come to with respect to those buildings, it`s got to be an answer that we arrive at through a careful, thorough study process in which we do in fact consider all of the possibilities, ranging from leaving the buildings and fixing them up as they are, to tearing them down. And I don`t think it`s until we go through that kind of process and take into account not just the physical buildings themselves but the kind of community that we want to create there that we`ll know what the right answer to those buildings is.

MacNEIL: With all your experience in Boston, and your own personal experience, Mr. Brigham, would you really be undertaking a lengthy, involved study of this situation if the federal government didn`t make you? If the federal government had said yes last summer, you`d be tearing them down, wouldn`t you?

BRIGHAM:I don`t think so. I think perhaps we begin with a clear, strong commitment to a community that`s there; and I think last summer we were just beginning -- the city was just beginning -- to work on some of the units, the lower-rise units. And until that work began, and it has now and there are some tangible signs out on the peninsula that some of those buildings are going to get fixed up, I think there was such a general sense, perhaps, that even beginning to tear the buildings down would signal the fact that the city was simply not interested in protecting the people that were there. So just to add, I think that now that interest is clear, the modernization work is started, the first units are being fixed up, and I think now we are in a position where everybody -- tenants and city alike -- can begin to look at what the choices may be with respect to those other buildings.

MacNEIL: Well, do you believe that high-rise, high-density, low income housing by itself can no longer work; or can, through rehabilitation and fixing up, still work? Do you know the answer to that question?

BRIGHAM: No. I think that may be partly what we`re trying to find here. I think there`s lots of information, lots of studies around which argues that an overly high density community just can`t work. The problem is that I think we have tended to look at that as an issue apart from the kind of housing that`s there, the kind of management, the kind of community that it is. I think I would certainly argue that the density inside, at the heart of the Columbia Point project as it now stands, is at the high end and so far towards the high end that you really have a problem of making it a place where at least families can happily live. But I think there are examples across the country where high-density housing has worked. It`s a question not just of the physical community but the kind of management and the kind of services that are offered to the people that live in that community.

MacNEIL: I see. Would you say you`re grateful to Mrs. Harris and the Department of HUD for pointing out to you to go slow, there may be an alternative?

BRIGHAM: Oh, I think we will certainly look forward to working with the federal government on this. I don`t know that we would have ignored those questions if they hadn`t told us that we had to do it, but I think we`re looking forward to the study at this point.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Mr. Coyle, let`s say Mr. Brigham`s group goes through the process that he just outlined, and they come back in a year or so and say, "All right, Mrs. Harris, we still want to tear `em down." Then what?

COYLE: That`s a very difficult question for me to answer, because I`m one of those who believes that if a commitment is made at the local level, if the tenants who live there are involved, there are great possibilities for reusing these properties. We also recognize, however, that it would almost be inevitable not to consider thinning out of that project to make it more viable, but if the request were to come in and eliminate 1,100 apartments, that would be difficult.

LEHRER: No matter what the process had been.

COYLE: I guess we`re going to have to wait until that date.

LEHRER: You keep using this term "thinning out." What does that actually mean? Does that mean tear down the high-rise and leave the low and mid-rise buildings?

COYLE: I`ll give you a good example. Very recently the Secretary approved "thinning out" of a project in Nashville, Tennessee. The project had 500 units but it had only one access road. The local police and the local community complained that they couldn`t get safety vehicles in and out of the project in time. The tenants worked with the Housing Authority in a combined process and they sent a request to us. They said, "Look, let us take out fifty-seven units out of a 500-plus-unit project." This would create, in essence, three access ways. We approved that. We`re not opposed to any taking down of buildings, we`re just opposed to eliminating projects. So thinning out, we mean to say that it`s a way to restore the viability to the project.

LEHRER: Mr. Brigham, is there a thinning out that could be done on the Columbia Point project that might get around some of the objections that HUD has and at the same time help resolve the problem that exists there in Columbia Point?

BRIGHAM: I think it`s quite possible. Some of the studies that were done last year looked at exactly that kind of possibility, and what we were looking at was taking down some of the buildings, not simply be cause they had to come down but in order to improve the circulation system, in order to make it possible for people to get out to the shoreline more easily, to open up some space around the buildings. So I think there are certainly possibilities for that kind of intermediate solution.

LEHRER: You said also earlier, Mr. Coyle, that high-rises are out, as a matter of policy. Why? They work as far as apartments; why won`t they work for low-income housing?

COYLE: Partly they`re out because that`s the Congressional intent, and people have learned through experience that unless the local government, the local housing authority, can provide all of the other services, they have a higher risk of failure than the low-rise developments. And most of our housing is in low-rise developments. So as a preferred course of action we seek the low-rises.

LEHRER: On these sixty disasters -- they`re on the list with Columbia Point -- are most of them high-rises?

COYLE: A good number. And I should take this opportunity to explain that we do have a program. The Secretary has announced in March a program to address the specific needs of these projects; they`re not simply going to be neglected. She`s calling the program Urban Initiatives, and what she`s trying to do is take together sources of funds from different HUD programs to provide planning assistance to local governments, technical assistance to the tenant organizations, money to the physical rehabilitation, extension of other programs such as the Crime Insurance program -- put this money into one special set-aside, as it were, for these projects. So there is a strong sense of commitment to restoring it. And I want to say one other thing. When I mentioned thinning out, I did not have in mind any of the existing low-rise structures, which are now being rehabilitated with HUD funds.

LEHRER: You meant strictly high-rise.

COYLE: I meant strictly the high-rise.

LEHRER: All right; Robin?

MacNEIL: Mr. Brigham, one of the things that intrigued me about the Peninsula Planning group plan, the group that you used to work for, was that it stressed mixed income groups. Is it part of your thinking that communities only become viable when there is more than one kind of income group in it?

BRIGHAM:I think it certainly helps. I think if through the work that`s going on we were to end up on the peninsula with the 420 units of renovated existing low-rise public housing and nothing else, I think perhaps we might not have done the best job we could to create a community out there that`s good for both present residents and other people, too. And I think in order to do that we need to look ahead to look to the kind of other housing that might also be built along with the public housing community that`s there.

MacNEIL: Mr. Coyle, is that any part of yours or Mrs. Harris` thinking at HUD, that maybe the way to go in the future is not only low-rise but to try and encourage the development of communities where there are people with different incomes living near each other?

COYLE: The Secretary has expressed a number of times her commitment to developing mixed income projects. We can get at this many different ways. One is to have combined projects, as Mr. Brigham is pointing out for Columbia Point; another is to come at the regulations that govern admissions and continued occupancy a little bit more progressively, let`s say.

MacNEIL: So you don`t get kicked out when your income rises above a certain ceiling.

COYLE: Yeah. That has been a problem in the past.

MacNEIL: I see. And are you in fact exploring places where these mixed projects might be encouraged?

COYLE: I`ll give you an example in Washington, D. C.

MacNEIL: If you can do it in twenty-five seconds.

COYLE: Okay. In Washington, D. C. there`s a place called Capitol View, and it`s a fine example-- it`s near RFK Stadium --it`s a fine example of how you can mix low, moderate income and you can also provide home ownership incentives to people. And if you`re looking at public housing you should look to some of the successes to show what the program really can do when it`s administered properly.

MacNEIL: Which of course is what the people in Boston, who would like to redevelop that site, would like to do.

COYLE: We intend to give them all the support they need to make Columbia Point a decent place to live in the future.

MacNEIL: Okay. Thank you very much, Mr. Brigham in Boston. Thank you, Mr. Coyle in Washington.

COYLE: Thank you.

MacNEIL: Good night, Jim.

LEHRER: Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: That`s all for tonight. Jim Lehrer and I will be back tomorrow night. I`m Robert MacNeil. Good night.