Vicente Gonzalez: “I have a much longer perspective on housing problems than most of my colleagues. As a younger man, I helped develop the…”

“I have a much longer perspective on housing problems than most of my colleagues. As a younger man, I helped develop the first public housing in San Antonio. Today there are thousands of people living in San Antonio, housed in safe, decent, affordable public housing. My colleagues on the Republican side have drawn a grotesquely distorted picture of public housing in America today. The truth is that the majority of public housing is safe, it is decent, and it is well-run. Are there problems? Of course there are. But I say to my colleagues that our cities will not be made better by excluding poor families from public housing. The truth is that excluding the poorest from public housing only means that they will live in the meanest neighborhoods, on the meanest streets. To pretend that we are solving the problems of public housing by reinventing Hell's Kitchen is obviously very foolish. What this bill does is to solve the financial problems of the local housing agencies by encouraging them to get rid of the poorest of the tenants as rapidly as possible, by a variety of means: excluding them from admission in the first place, or making it easier to get rid of them if they are already there. I say to my colleagues that in the meanest and most miserable of circumstances, people have pride. They want dignity and they certainly want a better life.”