Comment Detail

Comment

I see the government movement toward increased restrictions on tenant evictions and requirements to accept section 8 vouchers as part of a government abandonment of public housing. Public housing has been a failure. I think it has been a failure because strict behavioral standards and tenant accountability were not enforced. Admittedly enforcement would require having much larger staffs at public housing facilities and would also generate many lawsuits by advocate groups. So the government is abandoning public housing and asking the rest of us responsible citizens to deal directly with people who have bad behavioral problems and or mental issues. We as individuals should not be forced to deal with unruly young people, drug addicts, single moms having kids indiscriminately with multiple men and other people whose behavior is deeply disturbing to the vast majority. I realize that public housing segregated a lot of the bad behaving folks away from the rest of us and there is theory that if we had close daily contact with them we would influence behavioral improvement. The opposite could also happen. The stress of daily arguments and threats because of continuous bad behavior by people we cannot avoid having contact with could lead to increases in violence. Please reverse this social experiment and bring back more public housing, but with strict behavioral standards for the occupants and also more counseling support to hopefully convince some of the bad behaving tenants to turn their lives around.