Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros has a vision for public housing, and it is explosive.
When 550 pounds of dynamite leveled Christopher Columbus Homes’ abandoned high-rise towers, he cheered along with the assembled tenants and Newark officials.
The buildings’ demise marked the halfway point in his campaign to demolish 30,000 of the worst public housing units in the United States by 1997.
At least as important to Cisneros was the explosion of hope among tenants in the new townhouse-style developments replacing Newark’s high rises.
“My whole life has changed,” said Rosemary Arroyo, 35.
Thieves and drug dealers ruled her old project, High Court. Vigilant mothers rule her new neighborhood. Her teen-age children are so safe, she told Cisneros, that she can leave them at home and go to work. In two weeks, she will start a training program with Continental Airlines.
That was sweet music to the former mayor of San Antonio, who is racing against time, political gridlock and a special counsel’s investigation in what he sees as a mission to save urban America.
He calls it “a crusade that is nothing less than saving lives and saving families, saving neighborhoods and saving whole cities.”
That crusade requires overturning decades of well-meaning policies that, by all accounts, have had grim unintended consequences. “It’s not rocket science,” Cisneros says.
By the turn of the century, he said he hopes to knock down 100,000 apartments in massive high-rise or barracks-style projects. Such units once housed thousands of tenants, but many are now partly or totally abandoned.
Some will be replaced with vouchers that allow tenants to rent from any willing private landlord.
In Dallas and its suburbs, vouchers will help replace units demolished by the Dallas Housing Authority. The goal is to give tenants a chance to live near suburban jobs, Cisneros said.
Across the country, the Department of Housing and Urban Development will replace other demolished units with small-scale townhouse developments such as the one in Newark.
Arroyo’s neighborhood, just across from the ruins of Columbus Homes, embodies much of that new design philosophy.
Its 74 two-story units boast brick facades and tidy, trim lawns. So well-kept is the project that private citizens have called the housing authority asking to buy homes.
Each cluster of 18 townhouses surrounds a playground. There are no hidden alleys, no risky elevators, no anonymous crowds.
Cisneros says that beyond better design, he also wants to change the projects’ atmosphere.
Old rules required tenants to pay 30 percent of their earnings as rent. That effectively served as a steep tax on tenants, who often quit working or left the projects for cheaper private housing. When they left, other rules often required that the poorest of the poor replace them.
HUD has pushed for changes that would allow tenants to keep more of their earnings and make it easier to move in working families. That, Cisneros said, should bring back the role models who often stabilized and inspired neighborhoods.
“Every expert tells me that these (complexes) will not work without a mix of incomes,” he said.
Worried that bad management would drive away good tenants, Cisneros ordered HUD to take over some housing authorities that had been classified as “troubled” and to form closer partnerships with others.
The Newark authority’s executive director, Harold Lucas, credits HUD’s newfound flexibility with helping him get his agency off the troubled list. “Before, HUD would have come in and told us how their regulations didn’t allow us to do what we wanted to do,” he said.
HUD also is allowing local authorities to implement “one-strike-and-you’re-out” policies against criminals and drug dealers.
By the turn of the century, Cisneros said, HUD may have fewer housing units, but more should be occupied.
How long his watch at the department will last is an open question. Even if President Clinton is re-elected and invites Cisneros back, he says, it will require “a serious family conversation” to decide whether he can afford to keep his $148,000 job. Legal fees are part of the problem.
Cisneros is under investigation by a special counsel for his admittedly false statements to FBI agents, who were clearing him for the HUD job, about the size of support payments he made to his former mistress, Linda Medlar.
The key question is whether those statements were “material” to his appointment, and therefore illegal. The White House and key senators, including Alfonse D’Amato, R-N.Y., say they would have approved him for HUD regardless of the size of the payments.
Of those statements, Cisneros says: “I don’t think that I knew the right answer, frankly. It was only a number that could be discerned once we got into it.”
Cisneros’ agenda borrows heavily from moderate Republican and Democratic thinking.
Some Republicans say Cisneros devised it to save HUD from extermination after their 1994 capture of Congress. Presumed Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole, among others, continues to call for HUD’s abolition.
Many of Cisneros’ ideas, however, were written into a bill he submitted before the GOP takeover.
Even conservatives in Congress, such as House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Irving, R-Texas, tend to say their big complaint about him is that he’s a member of the Clinton Cabinet.
When Armey complained that a desegregation lawsuit would give the Dallas Housing Authority power to operate in the suburbs, Cisneros asked U.S. District Judge Jerry Buchmeyer to amend his order so tenants could move to the suburbs using new housing vouchers.
“Isn’t it better than moving a whole class, literally a mass of people, and trying to create new public housing, to give individual families individual choices?” Cisneros asked.
Some housing activists have criticized the HUD motion, on which the judge has not ruled.
Aides say Cisneros’ handling of the Dallas case demonstrates his ability to bend to political winds while still getting the job done.
Last year, as Republicans trained their sights on HUD, he moved to replace 60 separate programs with three grants and to cut HUD’s staff from 11,900 to 7,500 by the year 2000.
But Cisneros can also talk tough. When Congress sought to cut the department’s budget by 25 percent, he called GOP leaders “callous” and “short-sighted.”
He bristles at Republican efforts to impose minimum rents on public housing tenants, an idea many housing directors support. He recalls the night he spent with a Detroit public housing tenant and her children.
“She opened her refrigerator, and there was absolutely nothing in there,” he said. “So when people talk to me in Congress about trying to raise the rent on the poorest people … I don’t know how they believe these people are going to make it.”
In general, Cisneros would rather charm his opponents than shout at them. He has toured Long Island with the local congressman, Rick Lazio, the House Republicans’ point man on housing.
Their relationship paid off last year when Lazio decided it was better to trust Cisneros to reform HUD than to abolish the agency and distribute its programs to other agencies.
“Henry Cisneros does have a reformer’s mind-set,” Lazio said. “He’s a man who thinks not just of where we will be a month from now, but where we will need to be five or 10 years from now.”
Nowhere is that journey farther along than in Newark, where a tenant lawsuit forced the authority to get a jump on new construction.
Eager to save money in the 1980s, the Reagan administration wanted to authorize demolition of decrepit projects across the country. Democrats who controlled Congress required full funding for new construction before any old units could be demolished.
But Congress provided little money for new construction. So by 1990, Christopher Columbus’ 1,500 units were abandoned, but it still stood. For thousands of suburban daily commuters, it “became a negative symbol of Newark,” Mayor Sharpe James said.
HUD’s legacy of gridlock, coupled with its reputation for corruption and neglect, worried Cisneros when he was considering taking the department’s top job in 1992.
But after a lifetime in urban affairs, he decided, doing anything else would be “a form of cowardice.”
Even for a self-professed optimist, his first months were sometimes dispiriting.
He visited one city and asked why their HUD vehicle didn’t carry an agency seal, which would make officials more recognizable when they attended community meetings.
“To tell you the truth,” his host said, “we don’t make community meetings. And when we do, we don’t want people to know that we’re there.”
He became a roving evangelist to his own staff, visiting every state but North Dakota.
Then one night in Cleveland he met Claire Freeman, a former Bush administration HUD assistant secretary. She showed him how her housing authority had completely remade the King-Kennedy project, by combining townhouse architecture, tough management, community policing and new job and drug-treatment programs. There were no shootings and no drugs.
