Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, as we proceed with the majority's rope-a-dope strategy, I hope we can focus on the serious importance of this issue. Obviously public housing requires great change. The question is, in what direction? It is also important to inquire as to how it got to be a problem. Public housing came to be a problem in substantial part because of inadequate resources. No one, certainly not the poor, thought it was a good idea to take the poorest of the poor and put them in very large buildings with no services and inadequate construction, in many cases not near any other facilities. Society decided to provide housing but, having decided that, decided a little later it ought to do it as cheaply as possible. So we created public housing which was destined to deteriorate. But we should also remember that, as bad as the public housing is, no one lives there by force. As bad as public housing is, people live there voluntarily because it is the best they can get. As we denigrate and criticize and belittle public housing, remember that, when we do people the service of freeing them from this housing they live in voluntarily, we send them someplace worse. Unless we think they are totally insane, they live here voluntarily. It is relevant to note that because the housing budget that will come forward, in addition to what it does about public housing, will deteriorate our alternative housing resources.”