As to public housing, Henry Cisneros, Vince Lane, et al., constantly maintain that no one can “really live” in a high-rise building. Their much-touted solution is to tear down the present buildings, erected at great cost to the taxpayers, and spread the inhabitants around the suburbs.
Nonsense. There are scores of high-rise buildings in Chicago which are lived in comfortably, and in a civilized manner, by tens of thousands of Chicagoans. But these residents don’t throw their garbage in the hallways, urinate in the elevators, deface the walls or steal the fixtures.
There is a solution. Let the government give each public-housing tenant his or her dwelling, to be owned as a condominium. Let the new owners maintain their newly-acquired property. In this way, two laudable things would be realized: The residents would know the joy and pride of home ownership and there would be no further cost to the taxpayers.
