ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Breaking news: The federal government’s chief landlord, the General Services Administration, informed us on Monday that the government owns or leases 5,066 bathrooms, more than 1,500 prisons, 766 hospitals and 2,427 schools.
Not fake news: Ben Carson takes a lot of criticism. Much of the blowback is by default.
As a Republican, a member of Team Trump and the secretary of the Department of the Housing and Urban Development, he poses a triple threat to the progressive agenda.
The thing is the Trump administration’s push to rebuild America does have a link to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal for jobs and public housing. Both presidents’ policies cite Americans working on behalf of Americans.
Roosevelt, an independently wealthy New York Democrat, implemented America’s public housing “projects,” whose goal was to demolish ragged tenements, deplorable slums and ghettos, and replace them with subsidized housing as a springboard for the poor and less fortunate.
While poor families were on the receiving end of new homes with plumbing and electricity, the public complexes themselves were largely failures as successive generations not only became dependent on the government housing, but the housing itself became unsafe, crime-stricken, unmanageable neighborhood eyesores.
Eighty years and seven generations later, progressives still adore Roosevelt’s housing “projects,” however, and liberal-loving lobbyists, politicians and nonprofits rarely wag a finger his way.
Mr. Carson, though, can’t catch a break.
Example: At a recent forum sponsored by the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy, a think tank that advocates for free markets, Mr. Carson said he thinks residents of government housing should become self-sufficient and consider DIY (“do it yourself”) on occasion.
“Your toilet’s running, I’m not calling the [public housing authority], I’m lifting the lid,” said the former pediatric brain surgeon. “I’m gonna see if I can fix it because I’m saving the money.”
Well, you would have thought Mr. Carson was suggesting that he had etched in stone a new fix-your-own-roof policy that would force single-mother-turned-disabled-Grandma to run to Lowe’s, buy a Little Giant ladder and crawl onto the roof to replace new shingles.
Give the man a break. Perhaps people who live in public housing, even when not by choice, should consider a visit to a Home Depot to buy a wrench and tighten a faucet valve that’s been ignored for so long it’s now leaking into the apartment below. And is it too much to ask neighbors to replace light bulbs that their kids busted?
Mr. Carson hardly proposed that residents of public housing become “The Property Brothers and Sisters of Public Housing.”
He did, however, suggest they become more self-reliable, as the government should not be the landlord of first resort.
And just as the mindset of residents needs to be reset to self-sufficiency, the New Deal’s 80-year-old public housing policy needs a do-over.
Indeed, there’s likely a leaky faucet somewhere in the world that the federal government is responsible for, and the sooner it’s fixed, the better.
It’s important, too, to remember that public housing belongs to the public. So treating that property as if it were your own, as a property owner, is good advice.
Picture, please, the possible domino effect — even if you do not like Mr. Carson as the photographer.
• Deborah Simmons can be contacted at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.
• Deborah Simmons can be reached at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.
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