Self-help housing: a program for low income families in the struggle against poverty

A growing number of fighters in the war against poverty seem now to be focusing their attention on improved housing for the poor. This is partly because the poor themselves frequently rate housing as their most pressing need. Bad housing is thought to comprise several important links in the circumstantial chain which nearly always encircles and throttles the poor. Thus, while the war against poverty has emphasized such goals as education, employment, and community action, there remains some doubt as to whether any of these desirable objectives can be fully met without first ensuring decent, day-to-day living facilities for the poor. Therefore, good housing is the basic underpinning of any national effort to eradicate poverty. Very few social observers would argue that bad housing is not an agent of despair among the poor. On the other hand, it has often seemed difficult to argue that good housing necessarily guarantees family advancement. For example, experience with subsidized housing, sketchy as it is, has not been reassuring on this score. Many of the families who have moved into such housing appear still to be hopelessly enmeshed in the poverty net. Sometimes the housing itself, instead of transforming the ' lives of its occupants, is transformed by them. There are many reasons for these disappointments. The point is that decent housing, while always essential, is not necessarily a social cornucopia from which all other blessings flow. Success may depend upon the degree of family involvement in the housing process. At present, the only kind of anti-poverty housing which emphasizes involvement at both the family and group level is self-help housing. This method varies from program to program, but in general it offers people an authentic chance to build or rehabilitate their own homes. It thus combines home ownership with family participation in the building process. There are currently quite a few self-help housing programs in this country. Supporters of these programs and of the technique in general have made some rather broad claims concerning the benefits that flow from self-help. Some of these claims follows: 1. Self-help renews a man's confidence in himself and sharpens his sense of personal achievement. 2. Self-help teaches marketable skills to the participants. 3. Self-help and home ownership encourage careful maintenance of the home. 4. Self-help fosters family stability. 5. Self-help trains participants to cooperate and communicate, and thereby opens the way to new social opportunities. 6. Self-help tends to sweep away that sickly sense of uselessness which often afflicts the poor. These claims would seem to be grounded in a fair measure of common sense, but they have never been empirically tested. No investigator has ever set out systematically to confirm or refute any of the benefits of self-help housing, and no self-help housing program has ever set up a measurable framework by which controlled situations would provide some reliable information about the social impact of the program.