Sabotage destroys public programs

(c) by Mark Dempsey

A friend who works on local low-income housing complained to me that he got to see some nice properties, when new, turned into trash when they became occupied by their low-income residents. The fact that poor people are inattentive to material things, or money apparently surprised him and those who anticipated the property maintenance budget.

But isn't that inattention why they're poor? And don't the public policymakers deciding to provide housing for the homeless know that maintenance will be expensive, especially when occupant neglect is expected? The failure to provide adequate supervision and repair is just one of many methods to sabotage these otherwise laudable programs. Ideally, "inclusionary zoning"--mixing incomes in such neighborhoods--would have the less-poor peer pressure the property-damaging poor people to take some pride in their environment.

Naturally, we don't do that. Sabotage has been a baked-in component of affordable housing even during liberal times. Sprawl subdivisions, which describes the bulk of what we currently build, are income monocultures, designed to keep poor people at arms length. Worse, they're the remnant of "white flight" which condemned central cities to a plague of slums.

There's an all-too-human tendency to believe that poor people don't deserve nice things, they're poor, and undeserving, because of their bad choices. Not realizing poor people have different priorities excuses sabotage and negligence.

What's the use of the poor people? I'd suggest they remind us of what it is to be generous. My poor in-laws would literally give me the shirt off their back if I needed it. This is a valuable corrective to the miserly behavior of our current ruling oligarchy which sabotages even palliatives for poverty, reducing social safety nets like unemployment insurance, welfare, and the dreaded (socialist!) Social Security. Both Democrats and Republicans have made those attacks too.

Our central bank, the Federal Reserve declares 40% of the population can't handle a $400 emergency without borrowing or selling something, and 60% of workers live paycheck to paycheck. To top it off, 65% of seniors have only Social Security and Medicare to fund their retirements--and the oligarchy's attacks on those programs are unrelenting, even though they are already plenty stingy. Medicare doesn't cover dental work, for one thing.

Sabotage isn't just a US problem, either. The UK has been de-funding its National Health System, privatizing portions of it, slowly sucking the life out of one of the crown jewels of Britain's public realm. The plan is to sabotage it so service will eventually be bad enough that the public will clamor to privatize it.

Among recent US attempts at enlightened policies, Oregon decriminalized drugs, but sabotage, or simply poor planning, made the Oregon legislature re-criminalize them. The idea behind adopting this decriminalization was to emulate other, successful programs. In Portugal, drug users can get a ticket which is also the pass to enter a rehab program. Switzerland legalized heroin, and crime declined by 85% around the clinic dispensing the drug legally, while needle-borne illnesses like AIDS declined dramatically.

But Oregon relied on its police to dispense the tickets/rehab. Unsurprisingly police did not welcome addicts' defiance. Consequently, the program failed in the short trial period when Oregon implemented it. Why police and not social workers? Perhaps this was an oversight, but it qualifies as a kind of sabotage.

More recently, CNN reported that more active lifestyles can extend life expectancy up to a decade. As someone who spent literally decades trying to get planners and builders to build pedestrian-friendly designs for neighborhoods*, I can testify that the current public policymakers' commitment to auto-centric, couch-potato-friendly sprawl is virtually impenetrable. Despite wide market acceptance for pedestrian-friendly design, public policy makers ignore and discard most steps in that direction.

One example development, Laguna West, attempted a pedestrian-friendly design that might make transit and neighborhood commerce viable. Both transit and commerce need enough potential customers within a walk to be successful. Unfortunately, when Laguna West proposed denser housing, lenders refused to make construction loans to build the apartment housing needed for such a neighborhood's success.

Yolo County tried no-cash bail when COVID first began, and basically turned prisoners loose. No supervision, no alternatives to meditating in one's cell, just turned 'em loose. Surprise, surprise! More crime and recidivism!

So...it pays to be at least a little suspicious of the crowing about the failures of the poor, drug programs, or anything short of brass knuckles to the skull in controlling socially undesirable behavior like crime. The sabotage--even unintentional sabotage--may have already decided the outcome.

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*The author spent nearly a decade on a Sacramento Community Planning Advisory Council, and continued to lobby for such civic design while working as a real estate broker and mortgage lender.