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be involved in urban planning, the Constitution certainly

does not authorize the federal government to be involved in

that activity.33  On a practical level, HUD's redistributive

function is notoriously inefficient; tax dollars are fil-

tered through a federal administrative layer, which includes

both Washington and regional offices, only to return to the

municipalities from whence they came.  There is no reason

that such community development cannot be funded through

traditional state and local bonding for capital projects.

Rent Subsidies and Vouchers

HUD currently spends on rent subsidies some $6 billion

annually, an amount divided between subsidies tied to spe-

cific projects (that is, the housing units themselves come

with a rent subsidy) and portable vouchers, which tenants

can use to pay rent to landlords who will accept them.

Vouchers, at least, have the virtue of not necessitating the

construction of large, new subsidized housing complexes,

with all the financial and management implications they pose

for government.  Because vouchers contrast so sharply with

public housing and rely on private ownership, they have

become popular with many conservatives.  Indeed, it is

difficult to exaggerate the ills of public housing that

have, in turn, led to support for vouchers.  A 1988 study

estimated that making necessary repairs and improvements to

the nation's public housing stock would cost no less than

$30 billion.34  Moreover, social maladies--crime, drug

abuse, and teen pregnancy--are concentrated in public hous-

ing.  A 1993 study found that crime in Los Angeles's housing

projects, for instance, was three times greater than crime

in surrounding high-crime neighborhoods.35

But vouchers pose their own dangerous, even perverse,

incentives.  In effect, they offer tenants a chance to move

to higher-income or at least less poor neighborhoods without

having actually earned higher incomes.  By rewarding need,

not achievement, vouchers send the wrong message to those

they subsidize; they generate resentment among those who

have worked hard to achieve a better level of housing; and

they threaten to introduce social problems to the neighbor-

hoods into which voucher-holders move.  One study of a blue-

collar neighborhood in Boston to which many voucher-holders

were suddenly introduced found widespread public concern

that the Section 8 tenant-based assistance program and

neglected absentee-landlord-owned properties were destabil-