When five Democratic candidates for mayor made an overnight stay at a Harlem public-housing project, they must have thought it would underscore their solidarity with the residents.
It’s sure not looking that way now. Only two days after the politicos and the police looking out for them left, 23-year-old Olivia Brown was shot and killed just outside the Lincoln Houses where they’d stayed. That has served to highlight what many of these residents complained about: the huge disparity between the pols and themselves in terms of police protection.
Our sympathy is entirely with these residents. Bad living conditions, bad security and unresponsive management are precisely what we expect when the government is the landlord. So why isn’t a single one of these mayoral candidates who stayed in these projects calling for market-oriented reforms that would help those stuck in cruddy public housing enjoy the same kind of housing that the rest of us enjoy?
It’s not just housing. It’s the rotten public schools that so many less affluent children are trapped in. It’s the government health care, typically in the form of Medicaid, that isn’t nearly as good as the private insurance more affluent Americans have. And so on.
Put it this way: The best programs are those that give the poor opportunities to enjoy what those with money have — instead of walling them off into inferior government enclaves. While politicians may talk about, say, improving public housing, their recent visit to East Harlem underscores that they wouldn’t dream of living in it, except for the occasional photo-op.