Escaping Poverty
But Still Using Public Housing
By Daniel Muniz

The purpose of entitlement programs is to provide assistance to those who are in dire need. But what if in the course of time the financial position of those same needy people improves? What should the recipients of government assistance do and what should be the response of the administering agencies?

The simple answer from most of the public is that these people should get off of the government dole. It makes absolutely no sense to be giving away free money and benefits to someone who doesn’t need it especially when there are less fortunate individuals standing in line who could use it.

Unfortunately, some governmental agencies don’t see it that way.

Fairfax County in Virginia, which is home to many of the suburbs of Washington DC, is one such example. They happen to have tenants in their public housing programs who are earning six figures a year. In the most extreme case, the combined income that one household is pulling in is $216,000 a year.

Talk about audacity! It is outrageous for someone to be making that kind of money to still be taking handouts.

Sadly, there are plenty of other occupants who are also making incomes in excess of $60,000 a year even though that is far beyond the eligibility requirements needed to qualify for public housing in Fairfax County.

Even though such a scenario is shameful, Fairfax housing officials are not concerned about it. In fact, they are doing absolutely nothing to correct this abuse because from their point of view, nobody is doing anything wrong or illegal; not the housing agency nor the tenants who are choosing to bilk the government.

Unfortunately, federal and county regulations actually back up the assertion of the Department of Housing and Community Development for Fairfax County. Apparently, a tenant is only required to qualify for public housing on the basis of need at the time when they first apply for it and then it doesn’t matter what happens years afterwards if these welfare recipients manage to climb out of poverty with better paying jobs.

Incidentally, these bureaucrats are very defensive of their policy by claiming that denying these occupants of their subsidized housing is tantamount to punishing them for being successful.

Now that is a perverted way of looking at government assistance. I am successful by my own accord because I have a good paying professional job but nobody is making my mortgage payment for me. And before I bought my house, I spent years paying rent to my landlords. Making mortgage payments or paying rent is simply a part of life.

Now what if a welfare recipient who is now earning a good income feels traumatized that he or she would have to spend their own money on housing?

That is not the taxpayer’s problem. When poor people reach self-sufficiency they have to come to grips with the harsh reality of living in the real world.

The problem in Fairfax County as well as with government agencies throughout the country is that there is no self-correcting mechanism within a bureaucratic infrastructure to monitor the eligibility status of welfare recipients on an annual basis. Once someone is approved for something like public housing, their income is never checked again even if their wages enable them to join the middle class. But most perversely, since there is nothing forcing the occupants to leave their government provided housing, many of them opt to stay in it.

One obvious question is why would someone who is making good money want to stay in a slum? Even though it is free money, it is not worth it to stay somewhere where you might get robbed or get your head shot off, so why stick around?

Well, times have changed.

The massive drug infested crime ridden housing projects from the Great Society programs that were intended to end poverty are being torn down. Those projects were a giant failure that exacerbated poverty instead of ending it. Today, low density mixed units that were smartly designed has replaced the monuments of urban decay. In other words, public housing in some places in the country is no longer such a bad place to live in.

However, it is time for every welfare agency, no matter what the entitlement is, to require their recipients to verify eligibility once a year. And to make this work, punishments have to be levied against the people and the agencies who abuse the system.

Unfortunately, poverty warriors who encourage people to continue to exploit welfare like to pull the race card in claiming that such annual verifications are racist. Accusing reformers and governmental agencies of discrimination has been very successful when other entitlement programs have tried sensible approaches to ensure that current recipients are actually eligible to receive benefits.

The race card is an ugly and brutal tactic but it works because nobody wants to be accused of being a bigot.

Even so, it is time to stop wasting taxpayer money and to stop promoting a culture of dependency especially by people who have obtained the means to strike it out on their own without government handouts. Abuses like this happen all over the country because these governmental agencies lack the leadership and the true grasp of what their mission really is.

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