June 8, 1998

The Tragedy of the Gardens

A Case Study in Corporate/State Collusion Against the Poor and Elderly, Being Also A Revisitation of the Development and Further Mediation, and Therefore Mystification, of Ground Rents, and Also of the Mediation and Mystification of the Discrete Landed Aristocracy

In 1968, a biologist named Garrett Hardin wrote an essay entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which appeared in the December issue of Science magazine. In terms of the population explosion, Hardin—who can only be described as a “soft” socialist, replete with rallying cries to renewed morality and with Weberian technocratic bureaucracy standing in for capital—examines the inevitable conflict between the modes of production and distribution that arise in modern societies, coming to the conclusion that such problems must be taken out of that class of policy- and technologically-soluble problems to which we would normally assign them: “[T]he concern here is with the important concept of a class of human problems which can be called ‘no technical solution problems’....” The process which gives rise to such problems is a tragedy in the literary sense: Fate and Destiny are at work in certain fatal flaws. Hardin quotes Alfred North Whitehead, an early-twentieth-century American thinker, on the definition of tragedy: “The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.” That is the perfect characterization of the tragedy examined here: that of the Simmons Gardens apartment complex, located on 10225 Scott Street, just past Airport, in the oft-forgotten, nearly 100% black, nearly 100% poor, Southern part of Houston, Texas. Remorseless working, indeed, which results in remorseless nonworking and systematic failure.

The apartment complex was completed in November 1997, being financed in part by low-income housing tax credits, a state subsidy, which, however, comes under the auspices of federal law: “The tax credit program is administered by the [US] Department of the Treasury and by state tax credit allocation agencies. The state agencies determine which housing projects should receive allocations of tax credits and,...how much.... The program is used primarily by private for-profit and nonprofit housing developers.” In Texas, the state agency is the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs. In this case, the private for-profit housing developer was Wilmic Development, based in Prairie View, Texas. “Developers with no tax liabilities, including PHAs [public housing authorities]...convert their tax credit allocations into development funding by forming partnerships with corporations or other private investors [like Wilmic Development]. An investor provides a developer with cash...for developing the housing and receives in return an income tax credit for ten years....”

This type of privatizing “innovation” in public policy finance—the conversion of publicly subsidized tax credits, discounts, into up-front cash, through a convoluted process which stands in for the simple and outright sale of the tax credits, like pollution credits to Third World manufacturing countries—seems at first glance to be precisely the type of technical-yet-political trick-fix against which Hardin directed his polemic, but that diagnosis would be premature without asking the prior question.

So, is the problem—low-income housing development—a member of the special class Hardin defined? Here, the special place carved out for state agencies to develop “partnerships” with private developers, that is, the withdrawal of the federal government from low-income housing, that is, the impetus to innovation, seems to be a part—no, the genesis—of the problem: “The number of housing units completed annually by PHAs through the public housing program has decreased from 29,576 in 1981 to 2,603 in 1991 because of declining federal funding.... The decrease in federal funding for public housing development, coupled with persistent housing needs among low-income families, has prompted increased innovation among some PHAs in using alternative funding sources to develop low-income housing, such as the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program.” Thus the need for me to draw a very fine line to maintain journalistic integrity: Neither the Texas Department of Housing and Community Development nor Wilmic Development are PHAs: They are improvised and devolved stand-ins, as is at least one result of their “cooperative” efforts.

This particular effort, Simmons Gardens, stands out in the borderline rurality of the “South Side,” bordering the Sunnyside and Acres Homes neighborhoods. As a development built with the low-income elderly and handicapped segments of the population in mind, it looks surprisingly institutional (no one went out of her way, as is often now the case, to make the place appear homely), as any compound of one-story bungalows with concrete paving and immense driving spaces must, when set into a pasture of horses to the south, and open field to the north.

On April 2, 1998, a friend and I spoke with Mr. and Mrs. Blunt, and Mrs. Edwards, all residents of bungalow number five, to follow up on some murmurings to which I had been privy: The privy was out of order, according to an anonymous source. The plumbing subcontractors—let alone the general contractor, doubly so the developers—had done a substandard job, and raw sewage had been running in the open for days, weeks, and months now, despite at least four months of complaints from the residents of both bungalows five and nine.

We knocked on door 502, and were greeted by a round old black woman. This was Mrs. Pearly Blunt, who welcomed us in, and I remarked to myself the absence of a difference between her voice as mediated by digital cordless technology and her immediate and personal one. She had had a tracheotomy, and the hole in her throat made her voice sound hollow. Whereas personal revelations—even unilateral ones—usually tend to break the ice, what I thought to be a rather embarrassing invasion of privacy, for me to have witnessed the hole in her body, did not lessen the distance I felt as she ushered me and my friend into her living room, and sat coolly across from us, as if she had thought everything out well in advance, the better to counteract the objectifying effect of journalistic, tape-recorded scrutiny. Her husband, Robert Blunt, shortly joined us. There was no small talk.

“I have heard that you all have been having some problems with your plumbing, like, that raw sewage was running in the open, and that the management hasn’t done anything.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Blunt, “they were just out here two days ago....” That is, Wednesday, March 31, 1998. No wonder. As we drove up into the complex, I had expected to be assaulted by a waft of funky disease-ridden sewage air. I was not. They had cleaned just two days before.

Mr. Blunt, an old black man, whom one might expect to be balding, but sporting a head full of shining, jheri-curled hair, interjected at this point, to bring his knowledge of construction to bear on the problem. He told us that it was part of a long pattern: The residents would complain, and two weeks later, they would send the Roto-Rooter man to snake the pipes—that is, to run a mechanical hose through them, to clear them out—under bungalow five, and then that several days later, the sewage would back up again.

“It can cause a lot of problems ’cause a lot of us in here have all kind of ailments.” At least two of the tenants are classified as disabled (and therefore eligible to live in the apartment complex) because of HIV infection, which we know to lower the resistance of the immune system. Virtually all of the other tenants are old people. Mr. Blunt ran down a list of potential plagues, including exotic Third World types, like cholera and dysentery. “And you know we’ve been complaining. You know that. But before, it was more buildings, but now after they got the last two buildings, it started backing up in here [bungalow five], coming through the floors two days ago. But the broken part of it was out in front of the building.” That is, the north side, facing the driveway.

“So, to fix the problem, they wouldn’t necessarily have to dig up under the building?”

“No, it’s right there [at the north side of bungalow five]. I don’t know if they cleared out the other part though.”

“The other part” was an ominous possibility: Mr. Blunt explained that the last time someone came to snake the pipes, they pulled a large clump of human waste and paper out of the pipes, but that a small camera at the end of the snake had found a larger clump of the same even further underneath the bungalow. What this indicated to Mr. Blunt was that the pipe might be broken even further underneath the bungalow, which, if true, would require extensive and expensive repair. Meanwhile, the management sent someone on March 31, 1998 to replace a six-foot segment of pipe which jutted out of the north side of bungalow five.

“Can you show me those pipes?”

“Yeah, but you can’t walk over there ’cause it’s still wet.” We got up to leave the Blunts’ air-conditioned living room. Mrs. Blunt went back to her ironing. Mr. Blunt walked us around to the north side of bungalow five, to show us the pipes which just two days ago had been spewing a river of raw sewage across the lawn, sidewalks, and parking lot, only to be drained off at the far side of that parking lot, by a city water drain.

“It was seeping up from under ground there... Look at how pretty that grass is and how green it is.”

“A hefty cost for green grass, though.”

“That’s where the pipes were, and they replaced about a six-foot section in there yesterday. They had a section that went out away from it about six feet or so [underground].”

“Out towards the field?”

“Yeah, going that way [north]. Into the sewer system which is sitting right over there off the driveway....” That is, the drain at the far side of the parking lot.

“I can’t believe they had ya’ll living like that,” my friend exclaimed.

“Yeah... We just complain and complain. And they’ll take two or..., it was three weeks this time before they done anything, period. And if you walked along here, you would have had all this stuff flowing out there towards the drain.”

I tried to chuckle: “Is that what all these footprints are?”

“Well, that’s where the plumbers were yesterday. They dug up the area.” That is, the lawn onto which the pipe would spew.

“So they had [the sewage] running down here?” Across the lawn? into the parking lot? down the city sewer drain?

“See that system right there [the drain]? They even had it backing up from there and filling in from here,” he pointed to the pipe jutting out of the side of the building, “and then flowing back into here,” as he gestured over the entire span of the parking lot, “cause it was running over.”

So not only the landlord but the City of Houston itself was negligent: The sewage would first flow out of the pipe at the north side of bungalow five, make its way towards the drain, only to meet it overflowing itself into the middle of the parking lot, so that a veritable lake of sewage collected there.

Mr. Blunt and his wife had expressed hope that this pipe replacement would solve the problem. It was the first time that anything other than a temporary pipe-snaking had been undertaken.

“Do you know the names of any of the contractors? You weren’t here when that happened, when the contractors messed up?”

“We weren’t living here. We had furniture here then. We weren’t staying in this apartment because it wasn’t ready yet. But we had some furniture in this apartment back in November, even though we weren’t living here. But this started going on at the beginning. Matter of fact, they were probably just wasting money.” Mr. Blunt mentioned another woman living in 505, Ms. Houston, who had some problems with sewage backing up into her living room.

“You know, we did see some puddles right outside 505, in the breezeway.”

“Yeah, right outside the door [to her storage closet], while the stuff overflows inside her storage closet.... See that grass is pretty and green over there, too? How many other buildings [bungalows] you see with pretty green grass?”

“Can you look at the breezeway with me?” Tacit consent. We walked towards 505.

“Did they offer to move you to another building?” my friend asked.

“No. They just kept telling us that they would get to it. They’ll get to it. That’s it.”

When we reached the breezeway, Mr. Blunt opened both the storage closet doors on either side of the hall. “They got drains in each one of these here [storage closets]. And what it does when the sewage backs up, it comes back up through each one of these drains...”

“And it gets left in this hallway?”

“This is where it stops.”

About this time, another woman walked out of apartment 506. “That’s what I’m fixin’ to do.”

“What’s your name?”

“Mrs. Edwards.”

She moved into the complex on February 1, 1998. She was toting a red children’s wagon behind her, and it blocked the exit from the breezeway. It transported a black bucket which sloshed with solvents and cleaning fluids. She had come to clean out her storage closet and to wipe off her property. Inside her apartment, she had been having trouble flushing her toilets. She told us that none of the apartments in the complex were flushing like they should.

Mr. Blunt continued his demonstration. “These drains right in the center, you can see the drains right here, in the floor. It comes back up.” Mrs. Edwards quickly corrected him. Only one of the drains really overflowed: “But that one [on the north side of the breezeway] will come back up and go right back down.” It was set deep enough into the concrete floor of the storage closet to allow some overflow. “But this here”—the drain in the storage closet to the south side of the breezeway, that is, her storage closet drain—“is sitting on the top of the ground.”

“That gets all on your property, too.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Obsessed by this point with property rights, which seemed to me to be in such tragic conflict—those of the tenants, who have the right to the benefit of their bargain, versus those of the landlord, which corporate nonentity can expand its profit margins by failing to provide the tenants with that benefit—, I smuggle in the obligatory litigious revenge-fantasy: “Are they going to pay for all the property damage?”, to which Mrs. Edwards quickly nonresponded, “It’s a health hazard, it really is.”

She then confirmed Mr. Blunt’s claim that the trouble had only recently been contained primarily to bungalow five. “Three used to be trouble, but now the main ones with troubles are building nine and this one.”

“Do you know anyone in building nine who I might talk to?”

“There is one lady in nine who flooded all in her living room. It came right on back in there because they were capping [the metal caps in the breezeway]. They take that cap off in the front [to make the sewage] run off into the driveway. But they put a cap on it so it had nowhere to go.”

“What’s her name?” Neither Mrs. Edwards nor Mr. Blunt could remember. “But they allow it to flow here [through the breezeway] to keep it from flowing into the apartments.”

After my friend and I knocked on all the apparently-inhabited doors in building nine, receiving no answers, we left, having learned the primary lesson in corporate shit-management: Manage the problem, don’t fix it. I suppose the second would advise absence when it hits the fan.

On April 4, 1998, I decided to track down Brian Montgomery, the Communications Director at the Texas Department of Housing and Community Development, the title of which department is only slightly differentiated from that of its federal model, HUD, which difference I chalked up to the fact that even the urban areas in Texas are more rural or suburban than any image possibly corresponding to the phrase “Urban Development.”

After some initial confusion over the scope of my question, whether there were any quality control standards above and beyond the local building and health codes specific to developments receiving low-income housing tax credits, which he mistook for one of the nuts-and-bolts of tax credit finance, i.e., whether the tenants’ incomes were low enough to qualify, he told me he would get back to me.

Waiting, I did some legal research. Surely the law of the great state of Texas would not leave its tenants swinging in the contaminated breeze. I knew for a fact that such statutes did exist: New York, for instance, has very tenant-friendly landlord-tenant laws.*

The very first pages of the Texas landlord-tenant statute appeared to be helpful. The introductory parts of the statute indicate that the problem is practically solved as soon as it has begun: “A landlord shall make diligent effort to repair or remedy a condition if: (1) the tenant specifies the condition in a notice to the person to who or the place where rent is normally paid;... (3) the condition materially affects the physical health or the safety of an ordinary tenant.” The tenants had notified the landlord numerous times, and raw sewage is likely to affect the health of any possible tenant, let alone the elderly and otherwise immune-impaired tenants which would fall under the relative category of “ordinary” in this case. There is another statute which read quite fairly: “A landlord has the duty to repair or remedy a condition and is liable to a tenant as provided by this subchapter if: (1) the condition materially affects the physical health or safety of an ordinary tenant;... (3) the landlord has had a reasonable time to repair or remedy the condition, considering the nature of the problem and the reasonable availability of materials, labor, and utilities from a utility company....” Truly “liable”? I felt myself to be making progress. The next subsection, which requires written notice from the tenants to the landlord that remedies will be deducted from the rent, seemed also to be a blessing, just a token requirement to keep the tenants honest in their pursuit of happiness, as a precondition of appeal to § 92.056(b)(3): “[A] tenant to whom a landlord is liable under Subsection (a) may:...(3) deduct from the tenant’s rent, without the necessity of judicial action, the cost of the repair or remedy....”

When that is coupled with the following, it looks as though we have a clear-cut case for something like a rent strike, in which the deductions from the rent would cancel out the rent for several months, with which leverage the tenants could force the landlord to cough up the cost of the capital outlay for the repairs, since she would be paying at the end anyway, and it is better to give the landlord a chance to hold the money and earn interest or something. The law was really reaching out to help: “(a) If the landlord is liable to the tenant under subsection (a) of Section 92.056, the tenant may have the condition repaired or remedied and may deduct the cost from a subsequent rent payment as provided in this section.... (d) Repairs under this section may be made only if all the following requirements are met:.... (3) any one of the following events has occurred: (A) The landlord has failed to remedy the backup or overflow of raw sewage inside the tenant’s dwelling or the flooding from broken pipes or natural drainage inside the dwelling.” There is only one catch: “Repairs and deductions under this section may be made as often as necessary so long as the total repairs and deductions in any one month do not exceed one month’s rent.” So, the uncannily precise formulation of the Simmons Gardens tenants’ structural problems appears buried as a condition of the possibility of a right to make the repairs oneself, as long as those literally-deep structural problems, which the law clearly recognizes as such, are not too expensive. The law would not want to cut into land-rent profits.

How about the tenants taking the law into their own hands with a romantic-and-yet-revolutionary rent-strike, unsanctioned by public authority? A glorious upwelling of civil disobedience? Can we spontaneously bring the black flag of anarchy back? “If the tenant withholds rents...the landlord may recover actual damages from the tenant.” No ifs, ands, or buts, ’cause the cops are a-waitin’. There is not one single “reasonability” standard in the entire passage. But the law is fond of extending them to the other side.

How about some good old-fashioned income-redistribution, something slightly analogous to rent for the landlord? Is it possible to contract for repairs and send Wilmic the bill? A slightly-less-sexy, albeit-still-revolutionary tactic? “The tenant shall not have the right to contract for labor or materials in excess of what the tenant may deduct under this section.” So, there seems to be a direct negative correlation between one’s monthly rent—which is positively correlated to one’s monthly income, especially if the group selected lives in low-income housing—and one’s ability to influence one’s environment via legal methods. Sounds like the property tax system for funding education, don’t it?

About the best any tenant can hope for is a series of court orders: “(1) an order directing the landlord to take reasonable action to repair or remedy the conditions;”—there’s “reasonableness” again!—“(2) an order reducing the tenant’s rent; (3) a judgment against the landlord for a civil penalty of one month’s rent plus $500; (4) a judgment against the landlord for the amount of the tenant’s actual damages; and (5) court costs and attorney’s fees....”

Is it clear whose property rights win out? who gets the benefit of her bargain? The tragedy here is not the conflict of interests, which we have grown to expect. It is the laser-tight, Ziploc-slick, hermetically-sealed ensnarement of the tenant in the landlord’s legal web, spun almost unconsciously by legislators playing almost automatically for votes in a long-lost game. Remorselessly.

But my hopes were not completely dashed. What about the special status of these particular tenants as residents of a special type of complex? A partially publicly-financed complex for the elderly and handicapped? When Mr. Brian Montgomery called back, he did so with a colleague, the Compliance Director, Ms. Susanne Phillips. On a conference call, we discussed various aspects of compliance. Ms. Phillips informed me that the Simmons Gardens complex had just gone through the allocation process whereby the agency calculates how many tax credits the property will receive. The City of Houston had inspected the building once, “cursorily,” and I regretted to hear that there were no building standards specific to tax-credit financed housing. The only standards to which developers were beholden were the local health and building codes. Ms. Phillips, like I attempted to above, could not express strenuously enough the distinction between public housing, e.g., Section 8 federally-owned housing, and partially publicly-financed housing such as the development at hand.

Even so, she did inform me of a process whereby, upon hearing of such substandard conditions, the Texas Department of Housing and Community Development would notify the city inspection department to go to work once again, and also contact the owner of the property. The property could lose its tax credits, which, being negatives—deductions—come properly at the end of development.

But as I spelled out above, developers are extended credit upon the basis of their tax credits, otherwise they would be useless for financing development. This being the case, it is more than a little bit ironic that, in 1996, our friend on Capitol Hill, US Congressional Representative Bill Archer, the Republican chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, undertook what has been described as a one-man war against the low-income housing tax credit on the grounds that “[T]he people who use it start to take it for granted....”

I am sure that Bill Archer’s spokesperson had the poor and elderly in mind for such a harsh and austere formulation, but those most likely to take the tax credit for granted are the developers themselves, to whom such GOP types would normally agree to extend even more credit. The actual tenants to which his ire was most likely directed are not even secondary, but merely tertiary beneficiaries of the low-income housing tax-credit financing process.

And in that process the tenants do not receive much credit at all. The average rent paid in all public housing, including that which is merely partially subsidized, was $169 per month in 1996. The rents typical of Simmons Gardens apartment complex, where most of the tenants are elderly people on Social Security and otherwise fixed incomes, are $245 and $360 for a one-bedroom and a two-bedroom apartment respectively.

So where are the tenants? At the mercy of the profit-seeking policies of their landlord and the incoherent trick-fix policies of the state. And trick-fixes they are indeed. In 1996, when a state Senate committee, the Senate Intergovernmental Relations Committee, convened on the topic of public and low-income housing, the Chairman, State Senator Rodney D. Ellis, a Democrat, probably of the “New” variety, recommended that the state: 1) find more reliable sources of funding for the Texas Housing Trust Fund, which helps to fund PHAs (public housing authorities), nonprofit organizations, and private citizens, 2) rig a new set of “incentives” to attract developers to “enterprise zones,” and 3) create a task force to think up ways to invest pension funds in housing. The first is like flushing a clogged toilet: There is no guarantee of quality output, or even a minimum quantity of product delivered. I have spent the great length of this article showing the second to be a failure: Developers can take the money and run after the most substandard work is completed. The third is like asking old people to invest in their own maltreatment at the hands of the first and the second.

Are these trick-fixes of the type Hardin denounced? Is the problem of low-income housing an “insoluble” one? Are the residents of Simmons Gardens ever going to have their pipes replaced? Can we appeal to the developer’s conscience, to leave the haven provided for her in the law, to do the right thing? As surely as the answer to the first two questions is “Yes,” the answer to the last is “No.” Hardin writes: “If we ask a man who is exploiting a commons [in this case, the low-income housing tax credit, a form of public, and therefore common, financing, and the class of commoners, elderly and handicapped people, who are treated as resources for profiteering] to desist ‘in the name of conscience,’ what are we saying to him? What does he hear? ... Sooner or later, consciously or subconsciously, he senses that he has received two communications, and that they are contradictory: (i) (intended communication) ‘If you don’t do as we ask, we will openly condemn you for not acting like a responsible citizen’; (ii) (unintended communication) ‘If you do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who can be shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the commons.’ Everyman is then caught in...a ‘double-bind.’ ” Hardin’s political noncommitment consigns him to a fatally relativistic solution: “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.” If this sounds a lot like already-problematic capitalistic liberal democracy, that’s because it is. The “admitted flaws” of his “new” “social arrangement” are pathetically apologetic, not only of themselves, but even of the fact that they sound exactly like the apologies offered up for all the flaws of the status quo. One sharp-eyed respondent purified Hardin’s true insights of their bad liberal pathos: “The cause of this tragedy is exposed by a very simple mathematical model, utilizing the concept of utility drawn from economics. Allowing the utilities to range between a positive value of 1 and a negative value of minus 1, we may ask, as did the individual English herdsman [the popular model of the tragedy], what is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd that grazes on the commons? His answer is that the positive utility is near 1 and the negative utility is only a fraction of minus 1 [because all share the harm, but the good accrues only to one]. Adding together the component partial utilities, the herdsman concludes that it is rational for him to add another animal to his herd; then another, and so on.... [T]he same rational conclusion is reached by each and every herdsman sharing the commons.” Of course, the irrationality of economic rationality has already been demonstrated here and elsewhere. Hardin’s “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon,” which relies, all his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, upon a Smithian invisible hand to ensure a rational outcome, is precisely what this dominant rationality prevents. For example, where was Rodney Ellis’ proposal to guarantee good low-income housing for all people with low-incomes? Where was the developer’s proposal to move the tenants out of the Gardens? Why must the rational result be mediated by the trick-fix? Crowe knows: “Aaron Wildavsky, in a comprehensive study of the [federal] budgetary process, has found that in the absence of a calculus for resolving intrapersonal comparison of utilities [the changes in use-values for different users of the same goods, e.g., housing, used by low- and high-income earners] the governmental budgetary process proceeds by a calculus that is sequential and incremental rather than being comprehensive.... The operational requirements of modern institutions [including corporations, those most modern of institutions] makes incremental rationality the only viable form of decision-making....” Why Wilmic Development’s innumerable Roto-Rooter snake-pipe quick-fixes, the cost of which could have conceivably approached that of a permanent solution? The only rational answer is to admit irrationality: The rationality of the developer was eventually blinded to what was supposed to be its own guiding principle—profit—which in turn is eventually sacrificed for the mere appearance of low cost.

Economics, tragically blind to its own flaws, is condemned to experience them as something invisible, like the hand of God, or something all-powerful, like the Market. In this case, the landlord has self-destructed—it has destroyed itself as such, by “abandoning the game,” by refusing to play its legally-required role—and both the sick and elderly are forced to live badly out of the relentless and remorseless irrational working of incremental economic rationality.

Afterword

I wrote this piece on April 2-3, 1998, at the request of the editor of the Houston Press—one of several allegedly alternative newspapers owned by New Times, Inc., based in Phoenix, Arizona—after I responded to her advertisement for new writers with new ideas, and interviewed with her in her office. She liked my three story ideas. Of course she refused to publish the preceding. “You have a ‘story’ in there somewhere, but...” I should have known better. But of course, then naïveté ruled my days, as is also obvious from the socialdemocratic content of the article.

The only thing I regret about the experience, my first piece of journalism, is that, after my piece was rejected, I never had to courage to tell the Blunts and Mrs. Edwards what happened, that their story would never be told. I never spoke to them again, and two months later I moved to New York City.* And, no, New York does not have better landlord-tenant laws. They are much more precise in their abstraction, their calibration of average-area incomes to maximum area rents; the Housing Authority makes sure to allow a very high maximum for each leasing cycle, within which time market values are prone to change quickly, following fashionable flavors of the month.

Only punctuational changes—mostly removed hyphens—have been made for webposting. I also changed one personal pronoun to the name of the individual.

June 8, 2000





























































































1. Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons, 162 SCIENCE 1243 (1968).

2. Id.

3. Id. at 1244.

4. US Gen. Acct. Off., GAO-RCED-93-31, PUBLIC HOUSING, LOW-INCOME TAX CREDIT AS AN ALTERNATIVE DEVELOPMENT METHOD 3 (July 1993).

5. Id. at 4.

6. Id. at 3.

7. Id. at 4.

8. TEX. PROP. CODE ANN. §§ 92.001 et seq. (West 199_).

9. TEX. PROP. CODE ANN. §§ 92.052(a) (West, 199_).

10. TEX. PROP. CODE ANN. §§ 92.056(a)(1),(3) (West, 199_) (emphasis added).

11. TEX. PROP. CODE ANN. § 92.056(a)(4).

12. TEX. PROP. CODE ANN. § 92.056(b)(3).

13. TEX. PROP. CODE ANN. §§ 92.0561(a), (d)(3)(A) (West 199_).

14. TEX. PROP. CODE ANN. § 92.0561(c) (West 199_).

15. TEX. PROP. CODE ANN. § 92.058 (West 199_).

16. See, e.g., TEX. PROP. CODE ANN. §§ 92.056(a)(1),(3) (West, 199_) at text accompanying supra note 10.

17. TEX. PROP. CODE ANN. § 92.0561(i) (West 199_).

18. TEX. PROP. CODE ANN. §§ 92.0563(a)(1)-(5) (West 199_).

19. James Robinson, Housing Tax Credit in Jeopardy, HOUST. CHRON., Jan. 21, 1996, at A5 (quoting a spokeperson for Archer).

20. David Hess, House Votes to Revamp Public Housing in U.S., HOUST. CHRON., May 10, 1996, at A1.

21. Hardin, supra note 3, at 1246.

22. Id. at 1247.

23. Beryl L. Crowe, The Tragedy of the Commons Revisited, 166 SCIENCE 1103, 1103-1104 (1969).

24. Id. at 1106 (quoting A. Wildavsky, THE POLITICS OF THE BUDGETARY PROCESS (1964)).

25. In an attempt to clarify the class of technically insoluble problems, Hardin explains that the class is not a null class.

Recall the game of Tic-Tac-Toe. Consider the problem, “How can I win the game of Tic-Tac-Toe?” It is well-known that I cannot, if I assume (in keeping with the conventions of game theory) that my opponent understands the game perfectly. Put another way, there is no “technical solution” to the problem. I can win only by giving a radical meaning to the word “win.” I can hit my opponent over the head; or I can drug him; or I can falsify the records. Every way in which I “win” involves, in some sense, an abandonment of the game, as we intuitively understand it.

Hardin, supra note 3, at 1243. It is clear that the landlord has won the game of tenant exploitation by refusing to live up to its duties as a “landlord,” which word retains only a degraded—in Hardin’s terminology, a “radical”—meaning.




























































housing elderly public.welfare journalism houston landlord.tenant