The elimination of informal authority was central to harming Black America.
Jack Fowler describes very well the central question raised by Howard Husock's The Projects, about the public housing movement. The movement was supposed to build improved housing in many American cities. But how did these "projects" become dominated by the poorest of the black poor—to the point where many had to be demolished?
My own close reading of Husock suggests this:
In this and earlier work, Howard argues that low-income sections of cities had been socially constructive. They provide bases for low-income families to build wealth through home ownership as well as becoming landlords for other poor families who needed housing. These families were mostly intact—headed mostly by fathers seeking to build wealth through ownership and further investment in their property. That was a world in which some single-mother families did exist but didn't dominate poor urban areas. And because most families were stable, crime was typically low and school achievement respectable. Upward mobility was pervasive.
The planners behind the housing movement noticed only that these were "slums"—physically dilapidated and unattractive. They simply didn't notice the positive social structure that made these areas socially constructive over time. Or they simply assumed that the norm of two-parent families was so unquestioned that it would endure even if housing were physically improved. The slums did make it hard on the few single-mother families that did exist, forcing them to make adjustments such as working or taking in lodgers themselves.
So the planners abolished the slums to build the projects. But then the resulting housing became more practical than any other option as the single mothers grew in prominence after World War II. So in practice, the projects became dominated by them. And that in turn allowed single fathers to abandon marriage and all responsibility for the children and mothers they had created. It's clear from Howard's account that few if any of the projects attempted to enforce marriage as a condition for eligibility for the projects. That was apparently more common in public housing in Europe. So the projects became key causes of the destruction of the family that—since the Great Society—has become America's greatest social problem.
The planners didn't directly cause this, but they acquiesced to it. They simply didn't realize what I've called cultural difference—the fact that black society gained from enforcement of the social norms essential to order in a free society, one of which is marriage. The projects plus welfare created a structure of entitlement for black single-mother families that freed them from all these demands. Civil rights seemed to forbid any attention to this key cultural difference. If the races were now to be equal, then we must assume that they will behave the same as whites. But some Southerners defending Jim Crow argued that blacks had to be required to work. To liberate then would lead to less work rather than more.
Prior to civil rights, this informal authority structure maintained order in poor black areas of cities. It was enforced by churches, community organizations, schools, and so on. That's why blacks in that era made rapid progress toward white norms in education and income. Liberal scholars such as Robert Putnam, are embarrassed by this. In my reading, this wasn't despite Jim Crow and anti-black bias. Rather, those demands helped keep order. I've heard liberal black academics attack these strictures, calling them unfair. They made blacks less free than whites. So they did. But without them there would never have been a black middle class. Many of these two-parent blacks moved to the suburbs precisely to escape the projects and the poor. It was out in the suburbs that the wholesale construction of new, chiefly single-family homes achieved the racial integration that the projects had failed to do.
Lawrence Mead is a political scientist, a professor at New York University, and the author of numerous books on poverty and welfare policy.