The following excerpt is adapted from Howard Husock’s ‘The Projects: A New History of Public Housing,’ a forthcoming book from NYU Press.

We hear a great deal about what’s called the black-white wealth gap.  It’s not an inaccurate phrase. According to the latest data from the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances, the “racial wealth gap” stands at $240,120 — the difference between the assets of the median white and median black household. Median white assets are $285,000; for blacks, it’s just $44,000.  

There are a number of common historical explanations for this gap, many of them based in the lower rate of African-American home-ownership, the key American household means of wealth appreciation. That, in turn, is often explained by historic discrimination, especially the credit “red-lining” that excluded black  neighborhoods from government-financed Federal Housing Authority mortgages, as well as outright discrimination such as deed restrictions and ongoing violations of the Fair Housing Act.

To these explanations, another should be added, one that is not only overlooked and misunderstood but continues to be problematic today: public and subsidized housing, along with their close cousin that enabled them, urban renewal.

Let’s start with a key but perhaps surprising fact. In a nation in which blacks comprise 13 percent of the population, they make up 42 percent of households in public housing projects and 48 percent of those receiving housing vouchers to pay their rent. There are any number of reasons to be concerned about the over-representation of blacks in subsidized housing, perhaps most of all because these programs are correlated with low rates of employment and long-term dependency. 

The average time in public housing is 12 years; in voucher housing, 10.  New research I’ve done with the University of Chicago economist Bruce Meyer, based on data about more than 4 million subsidized tenants, finds that 85 percent of current subsidized non-elderly, non-disabled tenants will spend more than 5 years in such housing, 73 percent 10 years or more. Per Department of Housing and Urban Development data, only 3 percent are two-parent households with children. These are not tickets to the accumulation of financial assets. 

To understand  how we reached  this point, it’s my argument, in my new book “The Projects:  A New History of Public Housing,” that we must look to history, reaching as far back as the New Deal and the origins of public housing and the program that made it possible, so-called slum clearance.  As public housing began in the mid-1930s, progressives, most notably Eleanor Roosevelt, fought to make sure blacks were included in what they were certain would be a beneficial program. 

Roosevelt herself cut the ribbon for an all-black project at Detroit  that would be named for Frederick Douglass.  To clear the way for this and many similar projects named for important black historical figures such as Ida B. Wells, James Weldon Johnson, and Langston Hughes, historically black neighborhoods labeled as slums were taken by eminent domain and cleared. 

This was the case, for instance, with the Hill neighborhood at Pittsburgh, the scene of the plays (“Jitney,” “Fences”) of one of our most celebrated playwrights, August Wilson. His house is a preserved landmark but his neighborhood is gone. Sites in Wilson’s work were caught in the tide of urban renewal demolition: In the summer of 1956 alone, some thirteen hundred structures there were razed, displacing about fifteen hundred families and more than eight thousand residents, the great majority of whom were black. 

Between 1950 and 1990, the Hill lost 71 percent of its residents (more than thirty eight thousand individuals) and about four hundred businesses, leaving the neighborhood hollowed out. Five of the twenty-seven Pittsburgh Housing Authority projects that still stand, as of this writing, can be found in the Hill District. Keep in mind, public housing philosophy excluded retail businesses from the Projects. 

It’s my contention that this was tantamount to an original sin in the story of the black-white wealth gap.  Across the country, black  neighborhoods were labeled as slums and disproportionately demolished.  A National Bureau of Economic Research paper found, in sum, that “Approved projects had cleared (or intended to clear) over 400,000 housing units, forcing the relocation of over 300,000 families, just over half of whom were nonwhite.” A review of the historic memos related to the local evaluation process at Baltimore to determine which neighborhoods should be cleared shows race per se as a factor.

 “This is emphatically a colored area,” one such memo read. “In the heart of the negro [sic] belt of Baltimore. It is old mansions converted to rooming houses. It should be noted that a large number of domestic workers in private homes are drawn from these areas, that a great deal of laundry work is done within them.” One might have viewed this as a community of dispersed ownership marked by the sense of community provided by rooming houses.

But no. Another mark against it was that there were “several families occupying the same dwelling” and that “the white evacuation of the neighborhood has led to the usual conversion of white houses into colored tenements.” What is more, the “city as a whole” was making “inefficient use of this area. Potentially the area is the most in need of development for benefit to the city as a whole.”

It’s my contention that this was far from a benefit for blacks, as Eleanor Roosevelt believed,  but rather, constituted destruction of black wealth — as demonstrated by Census data. In Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood, cleared to make way for the high-rise Brewster-Douglass projects, there were more than 300 black-owned businesses. 

What’s more, in Detroit census tracts that were 60 percent or more black, 28 percent of homes were owner-occupied, with small multifamily homes and the renting of rooms to lodgers making the number of residences in which the owner lived with tenants — what I term owner-presence — even higher. Those who have concluded that black culture lacks entrepreneurship are historically misinformed.

As slum clearance rolled on, however, and its nature became clear, resistance to the replacement of “slums” with projects did begin to emerge. Put another way, citizens began to question the determination that the communities in which they lived were irredeemable slums

In Pittsburgh, newspaper columnist Paul Jones, writing for the black weekly, the Pittsburgh Courier, wrote critically about public housing  even before it was built. He argued that the clearance plans had simply not accounted for the Hill’s many community institutions and civil society. Judging a neighborhood narrowly on the basis of the character of its housing did not convince him that it should be demolished. “What about the churches, schools, business neighborhood associations, civic groups? All these are part of the whole problem of uprooting the lives of many people,  whose patterns of living have been labeled, ‘not desirable, not acceptable, not endurable.’”

That the Hill was rich in these uncounted ways is without doubt, boasting a radio station, a newspaper, and an array of jazz clubs, including the legendary Crawford Grill, and the Pittsburgh Crawfords, of the Negro baseball league. Yet it was taken for granted that “slums” were to be judged only by their apparent and superficial physical condition — and not by what their residents were crafting through their own plans, rather than those of city planners, of what they might do in the future to improve their community and their own situation. A snapshot of housing conditions was the sole prism through which a complex community was viewed—and judged. 

 In contrast — and this is key — the projects by their nature — government owned and managed, included no private ownership but only rentals, excluding retail and commercial businesses. They would not, and could not, foster the spontaneous community of dispersed ownership. What’s more, even if owners were compensated for the taking of homes, they were denied the long-term appreciation of land values that has come with central locations at cities like Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Roanoke, Virginia.

Whites were subsidized into suburban homeownership and blacks, instead, were steered into the projects and their successors, notably including the housing voucher program initiated in 1973 by Richard Nixon. The housing voucher was judged mainly as positive by comparison with the projects, already symbolized by the implosion of the 33 public housing high-rises of Pruitt-Igoe at St. Louis. Today, voucher households outnumber public housing households, 2.7 million to 876,000.

Together, they comprise by far the largest percentage of the budget for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.  They have, because of their over-representation of African-Americans, become a route to black dependency and a deterrent to upward mobility. Consider the rules governing such tenancies.  Rent is set at 30 percent of income;  thus an increased income is punished by higher rent and discouraged. In contrast to cash welfare, there is no time ceiling — thus encouraging dependency’s complacency.  

Keep in mind that, although 40 plus percent black is the overall national figure for public housing residency, there are public housing projects at New York that are 96 percent black — in a system where 23 percent of tenants have lived for 40 years or more. I have personally met such a tenant at Brooklyn’s Brownsville Houses. Subsidized housing at Atlanta is 94 percent black; at Birmingham, 95 percent; and at New Orleans 96 percent black.

There is reason to think that the history of black presence in public and subsidized housing has led black households disproportionately to seek it out. At San Bernadino, California, for instance, blacks comprise 52 percent of public housing households in a county only 9 percent black.  A housing authority employee told me she most often sees young African-American single parents applying.  As she put it, “It’s possibly just generational. It’s just that’s what Mom did, that’s what Grandma did. They know how to apply. They know where to apply. And so they do. And that feels very normalized to them.” This is not racial stereotyping but, rather, a direct observation by a government employee. 

If this is a norm, it is one that should be broken. It is, in other words, especially important to encourage black upward mobility by aligning housing support policies with other aspects of our social policy — to adopt a time limit and work requirements, to adopt a fixed rent to encourage saving, perhaps even to give preference to married couples as new tenants, as was once the case in New York’s system, the nation’s largest. This should be coupled with a non-taxable escrow account into which what would have been a percentage of incomes devoted to higher rents, pegged to higher earnings, instead serves as a savings account, providing a nest egg upon exit — and a potential home down payment. 

Today, America budgets almost twice as much for Housing Choice vouchers alone, $30 billion, as for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families grants to the 50 states, $16 billion. Although both are intended to alleviate poverty, the rules governing these two safety net programs are strikingly different. Voucher advocates are now pushing for their use as a ticket to so-called higher opportunity neighborhoods.  This idea rests on questionable assumptions, though.  

First, that poor neighborhoods are inevitably bad neighborhoods. The right set of well-delivered public goods — safe streets, good schools, and clean parks — can make any neighborhood a “good” neighborhood. Second, that  upward mobility can be socially engineered — rather than resulting from a series of good life decisions, about work and marriage and the success sequence. What’s more, moving low-income households en masse to affluent neighborhoods is hardly practical.

Better to reform housing subsidies to encourage households to create their own opportunity. If a time limit sounds draconian, remember such a time limit governs cash welfare, too. Beginning with the Personal Responsibility and Work Act of 1996, there has been a five-year time limit as well as a work or education requirement for those receiving public assistance. Since 1995, the welfare rolls have declined by 85 percent, to 1.9 million from 13.6 million.

Public housing destroyed vibrant neighborhoods, deeming them slums simply because they were majority black, or, often working-class white (see the Boston neighborhoods of South Boston and Charlestown). In some cases, especially in the South, segregated public housing replaced racially-integrated working class communities. It’s time to acknowledge the pernicious collateral damage public and subsidized housing has inflicted on African-Americans especially and to start to undo that damage.