A recent article in the International Herald Tribune reports about poor whites in England. As with all news media reports on the lives of the poor, there is no questioning the fundamental pillars put in place in the 20th century to sustain the anti-poverty welfare states. The news media is conservative in this way: They never question the fundamental correctness of the comprehensive nature of the welfare state as it evolved over the 20th century.

The British have been at these anti-poverty welfare state efforts for a longer time than the US and the article linked above reports on the results:

WYTHENSHAWE, England: Wandering the streets after dusk in this endless housing project, the five teenagers said they were not troubled by the turns their lives had taken so far. Not by the absent fathers, the mothers on welfare, the drugs, the arrests, the incarcerations, the wearying inevitability of it all.

“When you live in Wythenshawe, you don’t expect any better,” said David Williams, a 17-year-old who says he dropped out of school at 14, is high much of the time, steals when he can and has been arrested too many times to count.

He was not posturing. He is not a gang member or a hardened criminal seeking street cred — he was simply giving the unsentimental facts.

The housing projects in Wythenshawe, near Manchester, represent an extreme pocket of social deprivation and alienation. But the problems here — a breakdown in families, an absence of respect for authority, the prevalence of drugs, drunkenness, truancy, vandalism and petty criminality — are common across Britain.

… Built just after World War II to house Britain’s poor, the projects here are now a series of neighborhoods covering 10.9 square miles, or 28.3 square kilometers, and taking in more than 66,000 people.

In its four most deprived neighborhoods, some 30 percent of the residents of working age are considered “economically inactive,” neither holding jobs nor looking for them. … Racism is not an issue: Nearly 95 percent of the residents are white.

A big mistake that the British made (and are still making), and which is also made throughout Europe (like in France), is to provide major public housing for the poor. Segregating the poor so that an underclass subculture is enabled to ferment and spread is one the biggest public policy mistakes a government can make when dealing with poverty problems.

In the Wythenshawe example above, 66,000 poor people are piled together - and then Brits are expected to hope that improved communities will emerge from this?

Or consider France’s response to problems in poor communities in 2005:

In response to the riots, the government has also announced it will accelerate programs for building more compact and attractive social housing with greater access to job training and leisure facilities.

Where are the political leaders anywhere in the western world questioning fundamental ideas about welfare? Tony Blair starting in the 1990s was supposed to transform welfare in Britain. He is criticized today for not improving the situation even though many new programs were thrown at the effort. The problem is that nobody questions the fundamentals - and it is exactly these fundamentals that are the only hope for fixing the downward spiral of the less fortunate in our societies. But instead politicians such as Tony Blair just don’t have the vision beyond tinkering with the existing anti-poverty institutions. The article above notes some recent efforts:

A public-private partnership aimed at regenerating the area has invested some £30 million, or $57 million, in community facilities in the past three years, said Angela Harrington, the manager for regeneration in South Manchester.

Anyone want to bet that nothing much improves? How about spending $100 million, or $200 million. Will this make a big difference?

Public housing complexes damage people’s lives by putting harmful incentives in place. People, including all of us, work because we have to. Enabling people to not work, or work little, is just asking for problems down the road. And giving people free or heavily subsidized housing places a huge speed bump (where do you think this blog got its name?) in front of them. If they ever start to make decent money, then they will lose their housing subsidies. Not working can quickly become an ingrained lifestyle. And the only way that people can get out of this cycle is to be cut loose from many of the government enablers to their lifestyle.

In country after country, while the debate should be going on over the very existence of housing projects - instead the debate always turns to what new programs are needed to stop the seemingly inexplicable downward spiral in poor communities. In other words, the demands for reform always amount to more of the same.

In the US, housing projects have largely been limited to helping poor blacks. Since US blacks are the ones now trapped in an underclass culture, not US whites, the problems fostered by housing projects are out of sight and out of mind to most of the middle class. It is easier to just blame it on the subculture within black communities or to blame it on macroeconomic forces.

In the US every last public housing project should be demolished or sold off to the private sector. Public housing is a failed experiment. Let’s be glad at least in the US that public housing has never become as entrenched as in Britain and France. But on the other hand, the public housing policies in this country have done much to degrade poor black communities. Blacks were climbing out of poverty rapidly until the Great Society spending spiked upward in the late 1960s. Just don’t tell anyone in the media about this - all of these programs are assumed to be worthwhile. Well, places like Wythenshawe, England point to an alternative conclusion.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Europe, UK, Canada, Politics, Poverty, Welfare State. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. For Trackbacks to this post, use URL: http://nospeedbumps.com/wp-trackback.php?p=1240