Anyone serious about making new public housing different from the old has to make sure that it doesn’t look like the ugly modernist boxes everyone expects. This part of the job brought Philip Hickman, head of scattered sites for the Habitat Company, up against the Reagan-Bush Department of Housing and Urban Development.
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If Hickman ever takes up a new line of work, he could turn his HUD stories into a stand-up routine. The agency controlled new public housing in two different ways. It allowed the CHA–and Habitat as its receiver–to spend only $92,000 per unit (now $101,000). But beyond that, HUD’s “Modest Design and Cost Containment” regulations dictated every detail down to the shape of the foundation, the roof angle (flat), and the color of brick. An honest conservative regime simply would have imposed a dollar limit and let initiative flourish (the Clinton administration’s position since January). But a government interested in making public housing hard to build, and imposing a public stigma on its occupants once built, would do what the Republicans did.
How Hickman builds is one headache; where he builds is another. “HUD won’t let us build public housing next to the el, even though some people put $300,000 townhomes there. They read us the regulations like they were from the Bible. We’ve even had them reject sites on streets with bus lines.”
