Unintended consequences

My favorite breakfast is a sliced Honey Crisp apple (preferably huge and from Minnesota, but I'll take Michigan or NY if nothing else is available) and half a cup of whole walnuts. The problem is I had a frenulectomy in 1977 to close the gap between my front teeth. Let me tell you, when you've had surgery in your mouth you'll know it forever. I can't actually bite into a whole apple--it has to be sliced. After that surgery, all my teeth started to shift. You wouldn't think a tiny piece of flesh removal could do that much, but it did. Probably because I still have all my permanent teeth, even four wisdom teeth, as well as most of my childhood fillings. Even brushing my teeth and flossing can't remove the residue from this sticky breakfast, so I often don't eat until I get back from the coffee shop where I might talk or smile. The tiny shift of my front teeth has affected the enamel on my bottom teeth wearing it thin--so on it goes, 30 years later.

Every time we do something to improve something else, or to discourage something, or to destroy something, there are unintended consequences waiting. For instance, polio was virtually unknown when my grandmothers were children. Improved sanitation of the 20th century actually created the epidemics that began around the time of WWI. Middle class people were much more likely to get polio than the poor, and there was a time when they thought African Americans were immune! But in fact, in earlier times, everyone had had some exposure as children, got sick, and then recovered but had continued immunity. After the public water supplies were cleaned up, no one was able to withstand the exposure, which occasionally still lurked in water.

Let's jump a head to a bigger problem. Slum housing. At least, that's what it used to be called. In the earlier centuries in America, poor people built or rented their homes, and moved up or down as their income and circumstances dictated. The freedom to own land was a huge appeal to the immigrants who came here in the 18th and 19th centuries. My maternal grandparents had rented in Wichita when they were first married in 1901, then returned to Illinois in 1908 and lived out their lives on a farm inherited from grandma's father. My paternal grandparents were tenant farmers in the next county in the 1920s, had a large family (nine children) and a disability (my grandmother was blind). My grandmother's parents and other relatives were very good about helping, but there wasn't a government plan to assist them like there would be today for disabled poor people. There was charity, of course--my dad got a grant to go to college from the Polo Women's Club. So first their own children helped with the farm labor doing age appropriate tasks, and eventually, their adult children pooled their money and purchased a small home for them in town during WWII. Later, my grandfather who went to work in a plant when all the younger men had gone off to war (he really wasn't suited for farming), was able to save money, buy another home, and then another home, renting one. That's how housing worked in the early to mid-20th century.

Both Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt extended what started as a panic, then became a recession and then a depression by inserting government programs into problems instead of letting them heal themselves. My maternal grandparents had already begun sinking because of the easy credit for agricultural land and products in the 1920s. Like today, it was an over extension of credit that brought the economy down, but my other grandparents, tenants who had nothing anyway, really weren't affected. The New Deal of the 1930s built on Hoover's (a liberal Republican) mistakes and extended the Depression another 8 years. But worse still are the long term, unintended consequences of those programs.

The New Deal began the federal government's interference in the housing market which extends right up to the balance today in our 401-k and 403-b. It went way beyond zoning and health and safety, long a concern of government. The reason for the housing shortage after WWII, for the existence of all those Lustron homes in Mt. Morris, was rent control, and the government giving a corporation money to develop a house to meet the need and use factories developed during the war. Cheap housing just disappeared from the market, so rent and home prices soared. The government created that shortage. We didn't have fewer buildings in 1946 than 1941, just more rules. So who benefited from that? Certainly not the poor. Then when the poor had no access to even bad housing, the government stepped in again and built public housing, which quickly became a cesspool of crime, rigid segregation by race and very inhospitable living conditions. When public housing failed (remember the demolition of Cabrini Green in Chicago?), the government came up with new plans to "solve" the housing crisis--housing vouchers, community development agencies and non-profits, tax breaks or subsidies, condemning large tracks and rebuilding with tax incentives which created gentrification and scattered the poor yet again!

You think Katrina destroyed housing and hurt the poor? Nothing like what the residue of our federal government's housing experiments over the years have done! At every step, private enterprise has either been discouraged through regulation, or allowed to run wild through lobbying efforts and kick-backs to government officials who hold the keys to housing very tightly. Fast forward to the latest failure of our government to help the poor and low income with housing: the creation of the Community Redevelopment Act under Jimmy Carter, and it's expansion during the Clinton era to the point where banks were held hostage by "non-profits" with massive amounts of government funding receiving huge fees for each low income family they stuffed, unprepared, into a mortgage that didn't fit.

None of this was intended. There were enough good intentions to wall paper Washington DC. But there are consequences when you try to change people's behavior through government programming or reprogramming. Don't be fooled by politicians who weep and mourn over our "selfishness" when we have spent trillions on these government created crises and have only kept the poor down longer than they would have been if we'd done nothing and only stood by and wrung our hands.