How Section 8 became a ‘racial slur’

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Coded language, by definition, conveys much saying very little. And so those words allegedly uttered in McKinney, Tex., before a confrontation between police and black teens — “Go back to your Section 8 home” — evoked a particular and vivid set of assumptions.

The words were offensive because of what we think they meant in the charged context earlier this month in which police were called on black teens using a private community pool in a mostly white neighborhood. The teen who recounted what happened described those words as a "racial slur." We can imagine they meant that these children came from poor families, that the government helped their mothers pay the rent, that their quality as people was reflected in the quality of their housing.

In a broad sense, this is an American tradition: conflating where people live with who they are. “We’ve been doing that as a society for a really, really long time,” says Lawrence Vale, an MIT professor who has written extensively about public housing. “And it’s been racialized for a lot of that history.”

This is the history of how public housing in the United States — originally conceived as enviable housing for working whites — has become a prism through which some Americans see poor blacks. It's a history that explains how some of the most visible public projects in big cities became, over decades, almost exclusively black, how the residents living there came to be among the country's most deeply impoverished. Today, households receiving government housing assistance — from traditional public housing to the private-market vouchers it inspired — live on average incomes of less than $13,000 a year.

This is a history that also helps explain how the outdated name of a bureaucratic-sounding federal program, Section 8, became a racially coded put-down.

The main public housing program in the United States was originally created in 1937 as the one of the last major acts of the New Deal. The goal of that act, though, was not to house the poor, but to revive the housing industry. In the middle of the Depression, housing construction had collapsed, and many communities faced a severe housing shortage.

In response, the federal government paid for the construction of hundreds of thousands of new housing units, many built on land where slums had been razed. The homes were considered modern and pristine, a dramatic step toward better housing from overcrowded urban tenements. Residents paid rent that was supposed to cover the costs of upkeep.

Most of these early projects were built for whites, and whites of a particular kind: the “barely poor,” as Vale puts it — the upwardly mobile working class, with fathers working in factory jobs. Housing agencies required tenant families to have stable work and married parents. Children out of wedlock were rejected. Housing authority managers visited prospective tenants, often unannounced, to check on the cleanliness of their homes and their housekeeping habits.

“The idea — although people didn’t tend to voice it explicitly — was that you could be too poor for public housing,” Vale says. In many cities, the truly poor remained in the tenements.

Where comparable public housing was developed for blacks, it was strictly segregated. St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe project, completed in 1954, housed whites in the Igoe Apartments and blacks in the Pruitt Homes. More often, though, housing for blacks and whites was located in separate parts of a city.

By the 1960s, the tenants living in public housing began to grow more deeply poor and, particularly in big cities, much less white, in large part thanks to another set of active housing policies pushed next by the federal government.

In cities like Chicago and Detroit, public housing “became a black program,” says the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein, “because the Federal Housing Administration created a different program for whites, which was a single-family suburban program.”

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Concluding paragraphs:

The stigma attached to Section 8 today also reflects a rising hostility toward the poor that touches programs far beyond housing. When public housing was created in the 1930s, it was a kind of reward for the working-class family trying hard to make it. It evolved into more of an aid of last resort for the poorest. Vale argues that we are shifting again in how we think about who should get it. When the housing act was amended again in 1998, after welfare reform, the new law had a suggestive name: The Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act.

“This is what John Winthrop would have called it in Puritan Boston in the 1630s,” Vale says. “The assumption that’s built into it is that the people who need these deep subsidies have somehow a moral failing that makes them incapable of affording the housing. It’s not about structural unemployment, it’s not about how maybe they are working full-time at a low-wage job that doesn’t cover rent.”

The way Americans think about public housing, he says, reflects how we understand much larger issues of social inequity, how we think about what aid should do and who should receive it. And so, “Go back to your Section 8 home” conveys, among those many other things, a judgment today that the family living there may not deserve it.

[leftWNYbecauseofBS]

When public housing was created in the 1930s, it was a kind of reward for the working-class family trying hard to make it. It evolved into more of an aid of last resort for the poorest.

Typical liberal entitlement bullsh*t.


When public housing was created, it was not intended to be a permanent housing option. It was designed to help people transition. Public housing has not evolved to an aid of last resort. It has involved to a lifestyle. One where people latch on to a system that is designed to keep them integrated and refuse to do what is necessary to break free from it.


There is zero need for an able bodied person to live in subsidized housing for 20 years and do so when they are capable of employment...yet the tenant lists of these housing developments are littered with such folks. Making things worse, there sense of entitlement to these programs due to it now being a core tenant of their culture, is what causes such distain from the average taxpayer.

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The "average" tax payer is fed up with ever rising taxes!

When ever they see anyone they perceive or are told someone isn't "Paying their fair share - or getting something subsidized" they get upset.

The average tax payer will go after Indians, Seniors, poor people(low income), or anyone who they think are "Getting over" !

Is it jealousy or frustration - is it because "Tax payers" feel helpless to change their situation and want others to feel the same pain ?

Unemployment Insurance, welfare, social services, subsidized housing and many other programs were sold as "Temporary" !

They evolved into major bureaucracies - thousands and thousands of tax funded employees and administration !

Is it the recipients fault or the government that grew these agencies ?

In poor areas seniors receive subsidized housing and such - in more affluent suburbs seniors receive subsidized recreation and meals.