Nik Theodore: Beyond the New Paternalism

Beyond the New Paternalism This is the first article from a book and a conference we did on the connection between social housing and (un)employment in a transnational perspective. Other contribution in both German and English will follow over time. See the Links under "Related News". Under "Links" you can access more information about the book and the conference. Use "Next" to browse thru the article

Demolition in Chicago (Copyright: ChicagoEye)

The New Victorians

In September 2004, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) announced new guidelines for public housing residents who hope to move into the mixed-income housing developments being created under HOPE VI.  Included in the Minimum Tenant Selection Plan (which sets forth the criteria for admission into these housing developments) are new work requirements that mandate that heads of household be employed for a minimum of 30 hours per week.  Other residents ages 18 to 62 also must either be employed or attending self-sufficiency, education, or basic skills programs for 30 hours per week.  

Justified in terms of tough-love approaches to "break[ing] the cycle of dependency " (Terry Peterson, CHA executive director quoted in the Chicago Tribune, September 22, 2004), the CHA has embraced the New Paternalist drift in social policy-making which calls for a greater role for "supervisory approaches " to poverty alleviation (Mead 1997).  By mandating participation in employment and job readiness programs as a condition for eligibility for public housing, the CHA plan extends the logic of workfare programs into the social housing arena.  It does so at a time when the U.S. economy is in the grips of a long jobless recovery, unemployment rates are on the rise, and employers are increasing their reliance on casualized employment.

The CHA’s plan can be criticized on a number of grounds.  First, the housing authority lacks a comprehensive workforce development strategy that could assist residents in meeting work targets.  In the absence of such a strategy of labor-market intervention and inclusion, the vast majority of residents will remain on the edges of the labor market, where they are prone to extended periods of underemployment.  Second, the plan is insufficiently responsive to prevailing labor market conditions.  The sluggishness of the U.S. economy, changing employer demand for low-wage workers, and the dismantling of career ladders that are connected to jobs paying family-supporting wages call into question such one-size-fits-all policies.  Simply mandating steady employment among public housing residents does nothing to improve the labor-demand conditions encountered by jobseekers.  In periods of rising unemployment, it stands to reason, such policies will merely lengthen the job queue.  Third, it assumes that workfare-style programs actually lead to self-sufficiency.  Instead, they are associated with crowding in low-wage labor markets and the channeling of jobseekers into dead-end, causualized employment (Solow 1998; Peck/Theodore 2000).

The CHA job requirements strongly resonate with the New Paternalism, an increasingly influential approach to social policymaking in the United States.  According to Lawrence M. Mead (1997: 1), a leading advocate of the New Paternalism, the trend is for government "to supervise the lives of poor citizens who are dependent on it, often in return for supporting them. "  This "close supervision of the dependent " (p. 1) is carried out using "new supervisory tactics " (p. 21) through which "behavioral rules are to be enforced through government " (p. 22).  The CHA’s work requirements are one such tactic.  They are, in Mead’s terms, an "enforcement device " that "use[s] the benefits on which people depend as a lever to ensure compliance. "  In this way, "Misbehavior is not just punished; it is preempted by the oversight of authority figures " (p. 5).

Whether such tactics are effective depends on the criteria used for evaluation.  If their purpose is to send a signal to middle-class households considering a move into in the new mixed-income developments, perhaps the message has been received.  The stigmatization of the poor that has characterized U.S. social policy discourse means that in some respects the nature of the CHA’s eligibility requirements is overdetermined.  For the mixed-income developments to be successful, those with choices in the housing market—upper-income households—must be induced to move into the new CHA properties.  On the other hand, if the purpose is to significantly improve labor market outcomes for public housing residents, then the policy is likely to fail.  As Charles Levesque, deputy general counsel for the CHA, remarked, "For too long, expectations [for public housing residents] have been nonexistent.  That creates a cycle of dependency, and we want to break that cycle " (quoted in Christian Science Monitor, October 5, 2004).  The implication is that the underemployment problem faced by CHA residents arises from a lack of governmental expectations (á la Mead) rather than from demand deficiency, inadequate training, and poorly functioning job search networks.  Even when taken at face value, however, the CHA’s policy must confront the reality that unemployment rates in some public housing developments are over 90 percent (Chicago Tribune, 2004) at a time when the stable, entry-level job openings are in very short supply.  Supervisory tactics can be deployed under such circumstances, of course, but rather than facilitating moves into stable employment, it is far more likely that they will discourage public housing tenants from moving into the new developments.