NEOCONSERVATISM
501
few survivors of urban destruction in that area, I didn't think that was a
very good reason to prevent public housing there. But then I looked at
the figures for the project, and this is what I mean by a fact, and it
turned out that each unit in this project was going to be subsidized by
the federal government
to
the tune of $5,500 a year. There is nothing
exceptional about that subsidy. This is not what the low income family
would pay; they pay additional rent, depending on their circumstances.
These projects a lso provide tax shelters
to
investors and thus
reduce their tax liability; and Boston foregoes the higher property taxes
it could get if it continued to allow middle-class rehabilitators to invest
their money in improving the area. The simple irrationality of this
kind of expenditure
to
subsid ize housing wou ld have been enough to
persuade me, but I thought further. This project is organized by an
Hispanic community group. So I wondered whether the project would
help Hispanics. They were probably living in the three deckers, the
typical working class housing of Boston in which the Irish and the
Jews and others had lived before them. Hispanics were probably doing
the same, living in one unit, renting out the others. What was the point
of this entire enterprise, I asked myself. It seemed an irrational form of
public policy, whose end effect was to spend a lot of public money to
hurt those few Hispanics who were buying and renting out housing,
and replace them with those few other Hispanics who wou ld be better
off by running this housing project on federal money.
My problem is that theory is short-that is, simple, principled,
ideological-social policy is long-that is, complicated, and even dull.
It's not that I think the profit motive is great and noble, but it does
seem to impose a modest economy and efficiency. A private land lord, if
you look at all of the figures, does a better job with old housing, better
for the tenants in terms of the resources being put in, than the pub lic
landlords do. He might do even better if he had part of those subsidies
that we give to public landlords.
I began by saying my views have come out of experience with
public policy. Those I disagree with, socialists and others on the left,
seem
to
have inherited their views along with a pristine distance from
these grubby issues. I have ended up, alas, generalizing, and I suppose
this makes me conservative, and if people add neo I'll have to suffer it.
This brings me to one definition of the term: a neoconservative is
someone who wasn't born that way or didn't start that way. He
stumbled upon the princip les of conservatism when he became in–
volved in the real world.
Now there are two other broad policy areas-and I'll say almost
