Humane Habitation

Humane habitation is the fourth unalienable right that the board of the Institute for domestic Tranquility added to those three, among others, which Thomas Jefferson named—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Editors.

We were taught in grade school that food, clothing, and shelter were necessary for survival. It was unthinkable, in those days, that large numbers of people could be homeless in the United States. The comfort and security of the American home was taken for granted. We knew people lived in good or shabby houses, in the slums or the suburbs, but everybody lived somewhere. "A man's home was his castle."

An American Tragedy

Homelessness, in the meantime, has become a great American tragedy as we have seen the Federal Government become insensitive to the plight of homeless people. The Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) specifically, and deliberately, changed the housing programs to reduce or eliminate low income and affordable housing. Funds for these programs were cut, and in the low income housing programs that could not be cut, the rules were changed to allow landlords to prepay the low income housing mortgages and then raise the rents to what the market would bear.

As human beings, in common with all higher animals, we have need for adequate shelter and favorable habitat. As the citizens sovereign of the United States of America, however, we have the right to humane habitation. We have to start with a proper dwelling (house or apartment). The building has to meet the safety and fire codes. It has to be in good repair or readily repairable. The space has to meet the requirements of the occupants by today's standards. In the eighteenth century, necessary space was gauged by the number of people who slept in a bed. "No more than five people in one bed," said the sign in the New England inn. In the nineteenth century, adequate space was figured by the number of people who could sleep in their own beds per room. Now, late in the twentieth century, space requirements are gauged together with privacy requirements, and together these dictate, at the least, the separation of the children by sex in room assignment, and preferably one room per child, especially as the children get older.

Moving Up

After bare space requirements (bedrooms, kitchen, etc.) are satisfied, the dwelling must also contain space for amenities, such as a family room, living room, dining room, a place for shop or hobbies, etc. This latter would seem extravagant for low income housing, but not if the purpose of society and government were to get everyone into the middle class or better. Housing is a long term investment. A house (or condominium, etc.) is expected to stand and be occupied for 50 to 100 years, maybe more. The added expense of making it a proper living, working, playing environment, as opposed to providing the sparse necessities of living, is a trifle when amortized over the life of the building.

A Humane Community

It is not enough to have a proper dwelling for, in and of itself, a proper dwelling is not humane habitation. High-rise apartment buildings is St. Louis were so dangerous to their occupants that they had to be razed to eliminate their being the habitat of crime. Houses in which the old, the young, or the infirm are prisoners because they are in dangerous environments do not make humane habitation. In order to be humane, the proper house has to be in a humane community. The house has to provide comfort and privacy, which transforms it into a home. The humane community provides well being and security. No matter whether the home is part of an apartment building or apartment complex, or whether it is semi-detached or single, it has to be in a humane community. Only a proper house in a proper neighborhood is humane habitation.

All in the Family

The most intimate and, therefore, the most basic human relationships happen in the family. The family is an animal ecological unit as well as a human social unit. Some relationships in the family are ethological and have biological, as well as ecological, non-language roots. Infants learning to see or hear, to be toilet trained, or to walk are learning non-language based behavior. Sibling relationships, which incorporate the concepts of privacy, space utilization, and competition for scarce resources, among others, are all non-language behavior patterns, as is the basic concept of altruism. A mother's caring and sharing form the basis of altruism and it is taught and learned, in part, before children are weaned. A child, to be successful needs a successful mother, and a successful mother needs first to have been a successful child. The basic relationships between mothers and children and parents are non-language based animal behavior.

Language is the Key

As children become socialized to human society, they begin to learn language and language-based skills. Without language further human social development is severely limited. Language is the single most important skill that will be learned by the child socializing to human society. Language is the key to most all human technology, and the skills that are acquired from language and language-based technology determine the station earned in society. Basic language and mathematics skills will be shaped by early childhood learning patterns. Children with language-skilled mothers will have advantages. Children with mothers who are not language-skilled, or who themselves have dyslexia or other learning impairments will be disadvantaged. If the learning disabilities are not noticed and compensated for at the earliest possible moment, permanent learning disadvantages will result.

Early language training, speaking, and listening are family based activities. Early training takes place in the home. Humane habitation means that a proper environment exists for this early childhood training to take place. Successful parents have successful children. Successful children grow up to be successful parents. Nothing succeeds like success. The humane habitation is populated by successful people. Successful people in a moneyed society are in the middle class and above.

School and Church

At the family level, the rural family does not differ from the urban family. It's at the neighborhood level that the major differences in the urban and rural setting differ radically. Urban communities and neighborhoods are compact, within sight and walking distance. The rural neighborhood and its community is dispersed, gathering only in the village, at the rural church or market; it is not all within sight and may be well out of walking distance.

The rural neighborhood is defined by school, church or social organizations, and rural and village markets. With the advent of the automobile the rural environment became non-isolated, and many farmers have taken second jobs in the local urban environment. In addition, many urban persons find it desirable to have their homes in the country and their work and entertainment in the city. Until the recent threats of recession, more urban dwellers were purchasing a rural second home for vacations, hunting and fishing, or just as a get-a-way place. Radio, television, newspapers, and magazines, as well as schools, have given people common languages and interests. The differences between rural and urban people are diminishing as travel and communication become more universal. The exceptions to all the above are the rural and urban poor.

Social Isolation

Socially disadvantaged people, the poor (both rural and urban), black and white, hispanic and chicano are isolated. Their limited education condemns them to live in a highly diminished linguistic world. They live isolated lives with poor language skills. They may have colorful street language based on their harsh, instant gratification-seeking lives, but they don't have the richness and subtlety of vocabulary to understand the world of affluence that lies beyond their ghetto. They live in a world of diminished experience. A 14-year old black girl living in Anacostia, one of the most crime-ridden, larger neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., said she had never spoken to a white person in her life. The slums, ghettos, barrios et. al. are characterized by the lack of educational as well as financial assets. Poor is not only poor in money, it is poor in learning and experience. It is poor in art and the amenities. The environment of the disadvantaged is depauperate culturally.

A Transforming Tool

Schools in the ghetto should be one of the main tools for transforming the ghetto into the humane neighborhood, but the schools in most ghettos are battlegrounds at the worst and human warehouses at the least. They lack the mitochondrial spark to synthesize the stuff of the humane neighborhood. The school and the neighborhood are living environments that thrive on ties that bind, the relationships that are the key to the strength of biological systems. Families in their homes have to be bound in healthy relationships and these, in turn, have to extend outward to the neighbors, the local government, the local business community, and the school system. Family systems among the poor lack the educational assets to compete in the middle class world for families in a cycle of poverty are also in a cycle of diseducation.

A Biological Ecosystem

The home and the neighborhood are the biological ecosystem in which we live. Some of the best and some of the worst things in our lives happen in the home and the neighborhood. This is where we spend the carefree days of our childhood and our early school years. This is also the place that spouse and child abuse occurs. Neighborhoods are definable and in a biologically territorial sense they are defensible. That's why they make good drug territories. The drug wars of the United States are being fought for the control of the ghetto neighborhoods of the nation. In the days of prohibition the bootleggers fought for the control of the same geography for the same reason. A neighborhood distribution system is sensible.

Racism

As a result of racism the United States has many poor ghetto communities that once were middle class neighborhoods. A friend went to Anacostia High School in the 1940's. (Anacostia is an old neighborhood in S.E. Washington, D.C. that borders the Anacostia River.) The high school was then in an all-white, middle class neighborhood. One of her classmates was intellectually gifted and left Anacostia High in his junior year and was accepted in the School of Engineering at George Washington University. Others (most of which were the first in their families to do so) went to college, some on very good scholarships. Upon graduation they wanted larger, newer homes only to be found in the suburbs. The ensuing white flight not motivated by racism left a shattered social infrastructure, and only the poorer whites remained in the area. The middle class blacks, segregated as they had been for decades in upper N.W. Washington, did not move into the area. However, the poor blacks who had lived for decades on the northern side of the Anacostia River in S.W. Washington were at that time losing their homes: The Government's "Southwest Urban Renewal Program" was replacing their small and aging individual houses with high priced townhouses and condominiums. Where did the Government expect these blacks to live thereafter? No provisions were made for them in the urban renewal project. How convenient that right across the 11th Street Bridge in Anacostia there were more and more empty houses. As blacks began moving to S.E. from S.W., most of the area's remaining, poor whites began moving out of Anacostia.

Tax revenues were severely reduced in the Anacostia community. The school deteriorated drastically. Anacostia without a middle class and middle class values became crime ridden and moved into the clutches of drug dealers. In becoming a ghetto the area had lost not only its middle class and its attendant values, but its political power. Then it was abandoned to the criminal element. Where can the charge of racism be placed in this case history? On the Government? On the whites? Or on both?

This is the plight of poor neighborhoods all over the nation. The stories differ in their particulars from place to place, but there is repetition in that middle class people with their middle class values leave neighborhoods and the criminal element claims these areas as their own. Then people in these neighborhoods become prisoners in their own houses. Housewives have been killed by stray bullets on their front porches, and in New York the problem has become so bad that children going to school wear bulletproof garments.

The Failure of the Federal Government

The Federal Government instead of helping these neighborhoods has abandoned them. The principal effect of the war on drugs has been to keep the prices of the drugs high. Little else has been affected except the filling of local jails, and many more people, particularly young black males, recruited to the criminal system and awaiting either entry to a jail or a funeral parlor. Detention facilities in the United States are a growth industry.

HUD was established in part to provide affordable housing, not only for the disadvantaged but the middle class as well. In addition, it was to have had an influence on urban development in the United States. Urban development was tried with the urban redevelopment program called "Model Cities." Model cities was a disaster and has to be viewed, with hindsight, as being primarily a slum clearance program. In many cities like Minneapolis, MN, low income housing single, semi-detached, and apartment and hotel was demolished and replaced by commercial development. Much Government project housing was built at the same time. It is distinguished by its sameness in all parts of the country as there was no attempt at community or neighborhood building. The idea was to provide houses for those with low incomes. Many of these areas have become so crime ridden that they have had to be abandoned. The low income housing budget was reduced, on the one hand, and totally mismanaged on the other, effectively making affordable housing unavailable. Some of that previously built was converted to conventional rentals. This allowed developers to pay off the HUD mortgages, which carried the renter's low income stipulation with them, and to then raise the rents to market levels, which meant the rents that the middle class could afford.

The greatest insult to the housing market was perpetrated by the Federal Government under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, when it allowed the savings and loan industry of the United States to go unregulated for 8 years. There were Federal regulators but they didn't do their job. The accounts in these banks were insured by the taxpayers, so they were "fail safe" as far as the named depositors were concerned. Yet they have become a millstone around the necks of u named, unnumbered taxpayers. This has to be the greatest larceny in the history of the world.

Supply-side Failure

In addition, the needless trade deficit we are running also puts tons of money into the hands of the Japanese and the Germans—to the point where they are buying real estate to unload their dollars. We expect more from Third World governments than we have received from our Federal Government. We do not have affordable housing and we have multitudes of homeless. Still our Federal Government is trying to peddle the disastrous "supply side" economics, and to run the government without taxes.

The horrible mess we are in came about because of lowered taxes and increased spending. We will get out of the mess only when we reduce spending and increase taxes. We don't need new taxes; we need the old ones. The nation would profit immensely by reinstating the tax law we had before the Income Tax Reform Act of 1986. Bring back the loopholes, the tax shelters, and the deductions. They will be fine, and will put the 20 million low income persons back on the tax rolls. At least the wealthy will pay their taxes on a graduated scale.

Everyone in a republic who can should pay taxes, and everyone should benefit from taxes. We can hope that future elections will redress the balance between taxes, good government, and the basic principles of our Federal Government—a perfected union, justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, the general welfare and liberty.

Affordable Housing

Our needs for humane habitation are greater now than they have ever been. The problems surrounding affordable housing go to the heart of our viability as a nation. The S&L scandal has to be overcome and confidence restored in the banking system. This will best be done by spreading the pain for recovery over all levels of income and wage earners. The quickest and easiest way to put the banking system back in order is to levy a 5% Federal income tax surcharge. This may be required for some years, maybe five, but then the mess will be behind us and we can get on with other business. We should avoid a long-term payback since that will only increase the cost. The S&Ls have to go back into the housing business not into big real estate deals but into housing, the purpose for which they were established. If they are not going to do that they should be abolished and a new banking system for affordable housing should be started, just like the old S&Ls, but with the system's activity restricted to home loans. Oh, yes. The people responsible for the current S&L scandal, bankers and Federal officials, should all go to jail.

It is one thing to provide affordable housing for people who can afford to pay for housing; it is another thing to provide humane housing for people who cannot afford housing at all. In the past we have allowed the poor to be victimized by slumlords. The payments of public monies for rent were paid to the owners of substandard housing who were enriched at taxpayers' expense, while the poor suffered in poor housing. Building the projects did not improve the overall situation very much.

The major failing of the projects is that they were and are housing segregated by welfare and income status and, therefore, do not have the ecological properties of middle status communities. Whatever system we devise for providing housing for the disadvantaged should accrue to their benefit. It should form or be a part of a viable community and should not operate to the exclusive benefit of a landlord or mortgage holder.

Think Neighborhoods

Making humane habitation available to the citizens sovereign as one of their unalienable rights involves, first of all, having a firm grasp of what a viable biological, ecological community is. We obviously have to think of neighborhoods, where the vast majority of people live, as the biological, ecological community. If we are going to alter, amend, or make new such communities, we need to understand their properties. We can not simply find a vacant piece of land, build some houses or apartments on it, and then expect these various parts to be a community. The community has to have amenities, landmarks, schools, churches, and a market function. It could also reasonably provide employment.

Profit Without Speculation

After we understand something about community, as opposed to urban planning, we have to look for ways to make housing economically attainable, not only for the disadvantaged but for the fully employed as well. High on our list will be a savings and loan industry dedicated to affordable housing. If the present system cannot be saved, it should be scrapped and the remaining viable units incorporated into the present banking system. It is not enough to merely reinstate the insured savings programs to ensure affordable housing. We need insured savings to be sure, but maybe what we need more are insured interest levels to assure that the lending institution will make a profit without risky speculation, and that the lender will be able to afford the loan. The fact that the S&Ls' deposits were insured made them attractive as no-risk speculative funds. I would much rather see a Federal agency insure the interest than the deposit, although both should be insured. The Federal Housing Authority and the Veterans Administration did this in guaranteeing attractive loans for eligible borrowers.

Furthermore, the process for purchasing a home has to be simplified. Closing costs have to be reduced or eliminated, and as many other impediments to ownership as possible have to be removed. Loan requirements have to be simplified, substituting the length of the mortgage for the amount of down payment: The less the down payment, the longer should be the term of the mortgage. The maximum length of mortgage should reflect these values and should reflect a no down payment condition. A well constructed house should last for several hundred years. If this is not the condition of the average house, the building code should be modified so that houses are required to be well constructed and able to last several generations.

Ownership not Rental

The normal goal for supplying affordable housing through government programs should be ownership not rental. The system should be so arranged that ownership is transparent and attainable regardless of the financial arrangement. Subsidized rent could as easily go for subsidized payments toward ownership, or the payments could be a combination of subsidy and occupant payments. There is considerable room for innovative thinking in the financing of home ownership. This concept recognizes that home ownership is the bedrock of an ecologically healthy community. All payments for housing, regardless of source, should be considered potential house payments in an ownership plan.

The Public Domain

Each year some two to eight billion dollars accrues to the Federal Government as income from the public domain. At the present time this money is being treated like found money, and efforts have been made to give it to the States or apply it to the national debt, both of which are misuses of this money. Income from the public domain represents the common wealth. It is an asset that is to be shared by all the people of the United States. What better way to use the money than to establish a housing trust fund, (which could be an industrial development bank), and then use the income from the trust to support various forms of affordable housing? When one considers that the income from the public domain comes year-in and year-out, it is a sizable and therefore potentially potent source of funds. One could think of a 30 or 40 billion dollar fund, which should conservatively yield 1.8 to 2.4 billion a year, every year!

Sustainable Diversity

We need to look to urban and rural planning that provides for communities in which ecological diversity, cultural and natural, is sustainable. We need to examine the properties of communities, both rural and urban, and make provision for those attributes that provide for stability, diversity, and orderly change. We need to study the starting conditions of communities in order to establish or continue them in ways that will ensure the sustainability of their ecological diversity. Housing in such communities should also be designed for sustainability diversity, energy efficiency, safety, and a host of other characteristics that together with similar attributes in the community make a humane habitation. That's where we all should live.

...Ted Sudia...

© Copyright 1990
Institute for domestic Tranquility