The Enemies of the GoodAuthor(s): Martin MayerSource: The Brookings Review, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Summer, 1997), p. 3Published by: Brookings Institution PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20080743 .

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A CONSIDERED OPINION MARTIN MAYER

The Enemies of the Good hen the future graphs the history of public housing in the United States, two political events will appear as

devastating declines.

The first was passage of the 1949 Wagner Taft-Dingell bill that promised "a decent home

. . . for every American family." From 1937 to

1949, public housing had helped provide af fordable housing to low-paid workers. Washington subsidized the construction and pretty much re

moved the capital costs; the operating costs were to

be paid by local authorities from the rent rolls. After

1949, public housing became increasingly a refuge for the jobless, a roster increasingly dominated by the socially disorganized, especially unwed mothers.

The second disaster was Senator Edward Brooke s

1975 amendment limiting the rent in public housing to no more than 30 percent of a tenants income. A

1965 housing act had already freed local authorities from the requirement to pay operating expenses out

of rent rolls, and Brooke assumed that an agency of

government at some level would make up the differ

ence between the cost of maintaining an

apartment and the new rent ceiling. He did

not contemplate what actually happened? that the local housing authorities would re

main confined to their own income stream,

and everyone who lived in "the projects" would suffer the effects of deterioration.

Meanwhile, advocates for the least suc

cessful students in the public schools pressed Congress to fund programs for "special edu

cation." Because the school systems received

greater revenues if they had more problem

kids, more kids were diagnosed with prob

lems. When it was discovered that most of

the children in the special ed classes did not

improve their performance, the advocacy shifted to a

philosophy of mainstreaming?there was

still extra money for special ed, but children with

problems were "entitled" to be with their peers. That

entitlement, like all others, was enforceable in court.

Not infrequently, what made the children "spe cial" was

disruptive behavior. Teachers who can man

w

age such behavior are hard to find.

Run-of-the-mill teachers can be

seriously distracted from their work with the rest of the class.

Non-special children pay the

price. In the end, just as the peo

ple who would make the best

neighbors abandon the housing project, the teachers and children

who set the tone of a successful

school move away. The losers are the larger number

who, of necessity, stay put.

These results derive from fundamental tendencies

in the American polity. From the Enlightenment, Americans inherited a central belief in individual

rights, whether or not they discomfit the majority. Americans have never had much sense of the great est good for the greatest number.

Add a can-do philosophy and the idea that bad luck should be illegal, mix well in committee under the watchful eye of crusading lobbyists, and leave the

definition of the legislative language to future court cases.

Inevitably, you get "the essential fact" Senator

Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted in Maximum Feasible

Misunderstanding, his book about the "great national

effort at social change" in the 1960s. His fact: "the

government did not know what it was doing."

No small part of the problem is the reliance on

lawsuits to enforce "rights." Judges must look back

ward to the law as it was on the date of the alleged

transgression and remedy the individual damage. Lawsuits are anecdotes. Legislators

are supposed to

weigh future consequences to entire communities.

To leave significant policies at the mercy of lawsuits

is to invite the counterproductive "reform" that

characterizes so much social policy, especially in the

areas of public housing and public schools.

In both, we must manage what the police de

partments call "quality of life issues." Both do need

money they're not going to get, but they need even

more the power to determine what will most benefit

the greatest number of their essentially voiceless

populations. This will have some terrible conse

quences. Sadistic junior managers in brief authority will torment people required to keep their apart ments in good shape

or lose their housing. Hostile

teachers will drive struggling students to tears and

despair. Even the most robust administrative con

trols?and there is clear need for ombudsman proce dures in both institutions?will not avoid awful

anecdotes, some of which will make the newspapers. But without such grants of authority

our hopes

will continue to be barriers to opportunities. A bill

passed by Congress this spring on special education

and several proposals on public housing begin to dis mantle these barriers. We can get results through in

cremental progress?improving the skills of the more

educable who don't now learn, cleaning out the

squalor that now afflicts the more ambitious in public

housing. Once we have learned to do the merely dif

ficult, perhaps we can tackle the impossible. Today's

governments cannot afford the wishfulness that lets

the best become the enemy of the good. H

Martin Mayer, guest scholar in the

Brookings Economic Studies program, was

a member of the Presidents Panel on

Educational Research and Development

in the Kennedy and Johnson administra

tions and the National Commission on

Housing in the Reagan administration.

SUMMER1997 3

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