Rick Lazio: “Nobody wants a situation of a State Street, of a New Orleans or a Detroit. I remember getting this small document from…”

“Nobody wants a situation of a State Street, of a New Orleans or a Detroit. I remember getting this small document from the Department of Housing and Urban Development about the 40 largest public housing authorities, places like Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans. Mr. Chairman, if your child went to school and came back with the grades that these housing authorities have been coming back with for not 1 year or 2 years or 5 years but for 17 straight years, you would say, we are wasting our money in that school. New Orleans scores 27 out of 100, Mr. Chairman, 27. Can you imagine if your child came back and said, I got a 27 on my test scores of 17 years? Atlanta, 49; Pittsburgh 47; Chicago 44 out of 100. What we have when we tolerate that failure year after year, when we sink hundreds of millions, in many cases billions of taxpayer dollars into housing authorities that are chronically mismanaged, chronically troubled and, in many cases, corrupt, is to say to Americans in those projects, we do not care about you. We do not care about the people living in that housing authority. Mr. Chairman, we would rather protect the bureaucracy, we would rather ignore the reality, we would rather say that politics is better keeping it just the way it is so we can get past one last election. This bill rejects that, Mr. Chairman. It is time that this body rejects that same mentality.”