HIV and Ward 6

Today is National HIV Testing Day. According to Street Sense, one of the most informative newspapers in the District, Ward 6 is tied with Ward 8 for the highest percentage of people living with HIV/AIDS:

Ward 6 2.8%
Ward 8 2.8%
Ward 5 2.7%
Ward 7 2.4%
Ward 1 2.1%
Ward 4 1.7%
Ward 3 .3%
Total in DC: 3%

Pruitt-Igoe and Ward 6

I highly recommend "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth," a documentary in the Silverdocs Festival (showing today [Sunday] at 7pm at AFI). Many US urban historians and urban sociologists teach about Pruitt-Igoe, the famous public housing project in St. Louis, because it has become a symbol of the supposed failure of public housing and well-intentioned government programs more generally. The photo above of its demolition in 1972 has become iconic of this failure. However, as urban scholars agree, this story of failure is a myth. The film explodes this myth in a fascinating and visually compelling way. The interviews with the former residents and urban scholars are amazing. Tickets sold out on Friday, so get your tickets soon if you want to go today.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History – Film Trailer from the Pruitt-Igoe Myth on Vimeo.

The main lessons of the movie are

• When Pruitt-Igoe opened in 1954, St. Louis was already beginning to experience its own implosion, like so many cities in the US. The mass movement of people and jobs to the suburbs removed both the city's tax base and Pruitt-Igoe's middle-class occupants, whose rent paid for the maintenance and security of the buildings. Within the context of the implosion of American cities and the lack of adequate funding, Pruitt-Igoe could not succeed. Public housing in NYC has been much more successful because the NYC Housing Authority has long had effective management and there was never an "under-crowding crisis" as St. Louis experienced.
  
• Many outsiders blamed public housing residents for the failure of public housing, but the majority of the residents were, in fact, victims of crime and violence by individual criminals and drug gangs, which, due to the lack of security, could take over public spaces and condemned buildings.
  
• Especially those who moved into Pruitt-Igoe early on truly appreciated the social life there. The interviews with the former residents are amazing. One woman said, "It was just a... wonderful place." Another woman said, "When I feel bad, I dream about Pruitt-Igoe." These women and early occupants fondly remembered the social connections they had living amongst so many families. Importantly, men often suffered greatly there, which the interviewees vividly reveal. Especially in the late 1960s, boys were the victims of extreme violence.
• The sociologist and influential DC resident Joyce Ladner gained her sociological training by studying Pruitt-Igoe. In the documentary, she provides excellent insights into the social life of its residents and the punitive, counterproductive rules imposed on public housing residents (like the fact that unemployed men could not live with their families in public housing, which caused them and their families great suffering). Ladner was a DC Financial Control Board member (1995-98), interim president of Howard University (1994-95), senior fellow at Brookings, and was named Washingtonian of the Year in 1997.
  

In Ward 6, Arthur Capper, Carrollsburg, Ellen Wilson, Temple Courts, and Sursum Corda public housing projects were similarly left to fall apart, due to lack of funding to maintain the buildings and provide security. However, the Washington City Paper has questioned whether this decay actually occurred, as one resident of Ellen Wilson said, "'There was nothing wrong with those houses,' says Stewart, a wiry 65-year-old whose voice still has a squeal of youth. 'But they moved us out anyway.'" These projects were dismantled (except Sursum Corda and maybe Temple Courts?) and, unlike Pruitt-Igoe, redeveloped as mixed income areas. Gentrification has been much more extensive in Ward 6 than in the area of St. Louis where Pruitt-Igoe stood. These public housing projects were still called failures. "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth" is fascinating and provides insights into the history of public housing across the US. Definitely worth a trip to AFI!

Inequality in DC and Brazil

The week before last, I was in Brazil, a country long known for its extraordinarily high levels of inequality. Recently, however, Brazil has a new identity, as a country that has significantly reduced inequality. According to the World Bank, Brazil has reduced its poverty (from 20% of the population in 2004 to 7% in 2009) and its extreme poverty (from 10% in 2004 to 4% in 2009). Furthermore, according to the same report, the incomes of the poor are increasing faster than the incomes of the wealthy:

Between 2001 and 2009, the income growth rate of the poorest ten percent of the population was 7 percent per year, while that of the richest ten percent was 1.7 percent.

Now, of course, the levels of poverty are quite different in Brazil and DC, but a recent Post article demonstrated that we are seeing opposite trends in the US, where "With executive pay, rich pull away from rest of America." A comparison with DC is thus interesting because, as Brazil reduces inequality, "weathered the global financial downturn with relatively minor impacts," and was one of the first countries "to resume growth in 2009," US and DC's inequality increased through the 1990s and has remained stable.

The standard measure of inequality is the Gini coefficient, which ranges from 0 (lowest level of inequality) to 1 (highest level). If everyone was poor or if everyone was rich, then the Gini coefficient would be 0, reflecting no inequality. If one person had all the income and everyone else had nothing, then the Gini coefficient be 1, reflecting extreme inequality. According to the UN, Gini values above 0.52 ranks as “very high.”

	1960	1979	1989	1999	2004	2006	2009
DC Gini Index		.450	.492	.549		.537	.532
Brazil Gini Index	.500		.63	[.61]	.56		.55

This table shows the downward trend in Brazil starting after 1989. In contrast, DC's Gini coefficient increased in the 1990s and then basically maintained that level since then. Brazil has consciously implemented policies to increase the incomes of the poor, which have brought down the Gini coefficient. Now, Brazil and DC have very similar levels of inequality.

However, the Gini index is a problematic measure because the slight decline in the DC Gini index could be due to many of the poor leaving DC or due to other shifts in middle income households or due to a variety of trends. In general, though, the Gini coefficient does show a highly unequal society, which has significant consequences, a topic for a future post.

Interestingly, Puerto Rico and DC have, in fact, long shared very similar levels of inequality:

	1960	1979	1989	1999	2004	2006	2009
DC Gini Index		.450	.492	.549		.537	.532
Puerto Rico Gini Index				.558		.535	.532
Brazil Gini Index	.500		.63	[.61]	.56		.54

DC and Puerto Rico also share their lack of representation in Congress. In 1989, when Brazil had reached its highest Gini coefficient level, the Brazilian people freely elected their first president after decades of military dictatorship. After 1989, Brazil's Gini coefficient declined significantly through the reduction of poverty. Could lack of democratic representation have an impact on inequality?

P.S. UN Habitat has highlighted DC as a particularly unequal city in contrast to more equal cities, such as Caracas, Amman, and Beijing.

Kate Masur's new book on DC

I wrote a review of Kate Masur's new book, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C., for Susie Cambria's great blog Susie's Budget and Policy Corner. Here's the first part of the review:

Kate Masur’s new book about DC emancipation struggles over a century ago speaks directly to DC today. In her book, Masur examines the revolutionary changes in politics and society in DC allowed by the 1861 secession of eleven slaveholding states and the ensuing Civil War. According to Masur, Lincoln’s Republican Party and African American activism made DC into a laboratory for egalitarian policy and "An Example for All the Land." This revolutionary period continued up until 1874 when, in response to these policies, conservative business elites dismantled elected government altogether for all DC residents and presented DC as a failure, a different kind of example for the country. It would take 99 years, until Christmas Eve 1973, for DC residents to regain self-rule. The struggles by DC residents and others to end slavery and realize equality, in the words of Masur, "resonate into the present, as do the strategies of those who ultimately defeated them" (p. 12). I highly recommend this book because Masur provides us a wonderfully well-documented and fascinating history of our city with lessons for today. Read more>>

See Kate Masur's recent op-ed about DC in the New York Times.