Public Housing Quotes

• Public housing is more than just a place to live, public housing programs should provide opportunities to residents and their families.

  Carolyn McCarthy

  Opportunity, Homeless, Program

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• Prison is the only form of public housing that the government has truly invested in over the past 5 decades

  Marc Lamont Hill

  Past, Jail, Government

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• Lots of people have gone from public housing to do great things in the world and have a tremendous sense of duty to their fellow man because of it.

  Jewel

  Men, People, Gone

  "Jewel Talks Singing Competitions, Silly Rumors For HuffPost’s #nofilter". Interview with Erin Clements, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 29, 2013.

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• There's no question that in my lifetime, the contrast between what I called private affluence and public squalor has become very much greater. What do we worry about? We worry about our schools. We worry about our public recreational facilities. We worry about our law enforcement and our public housing. All of the things that bear upon our standard of living are in the public sector.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  School, Law, Worry

  Source: progressive.org

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• I was raised in a Bronx public housing project, but studied at two of the nation's finest universities. I did work as an assistant district attorney, prosecuting violent crimes that devastate our communities.

  Sonia Sotomayor

  Two, Community, Assistants

  President Obama Announces Sonia Sotomayor as Supreme Court Nominee, www.washingtonpost.com. May 26, 2009.

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• We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. We couldn't do it, but God did.

  Richard Baker

  New Orleans, Hurricanes, Hateful

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• I don't know whether it's the finest public housing in America or the crown jewel of the American penal system.

  William J. Clinton

  America, Jewels, Presidential

  Clinton, William J. (1994). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton, 1993”, p.1931, Best Books on

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• we are reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  America, Prison, Program

  Barbara Ehrenreich (2008). “Going to Extremes: Notes from a Divided Nation”, Granta Books (UK)

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• I just thought someone has to figure out how to break through that barrier and create a narrative for a black super hero story to unfold at the same scale as something like Star Wars. Rythm Mastr is about producing a narrative of a hero engaged in a struggle as complicated as those other stories. The catalyst for it was the beginning of the demolition of public housing in Chicago.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Stars, War, Hero

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Public housing projects as well as private landlords are free to deny housing to people with criminal records. In fact, you don't even have to be convicted. You can be denied housing - or your family evicted - just based on an arrest.

  Michelle Alexander

  People, Criminals, Records

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union - like public housing in the United States - look decrepit within a year or two of their construction.

  Milton Friedman

  Years, Two, Political

  Milton Friedman, Rose Friedman (1990). “Free to Choose: A Personal Statement”, p.42, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• In Illinois, community, migrant, homeless and public housing health centers operate 268 primary care sites and serve close to 1 million patients every year.

  Jan Schakowsky

  Illinois, Years, Community

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• I was born on the other side of the tracks, in public housing in Brooklyn, New York. My dad never made more than $20,000 a year, and I grew up in a family that lost health insurance. So I was scarred at a young age with understanding what it was like to watch my parents lose access to the American dream.

  Howard Schultz

  Dream, New York, Dad

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• One of the things that's amazing about reading the private writing of these folks is that they enthusiastically describe things which we have now seen, and which are widely regarded as unappealing. They'll write, "It's going to be beautiful, we're going to have a town of 1,000 stone buildings that are all identical." And we as modern readers think, we've seen that; that's bad Soviet architecture or a public housing project. Nobody fantasizes about living there.

  Christine Jennings

  Beautiful, Reading, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• One of the things for me, as a biographer, that is so significant is for Eleanor Roosevelt - the child who never had a home of her own, who lives in her grandmother's home and then goes to school and then gets married and lives in her mother-in-law's homes, and then in public housing (like the White House and the State House) - housing becomes for Eleanor Roosevelt the most important issue.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Mother, Children, Home

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• As the data from the past decade clarify, there is no evidence that poverty causes crime but a great deal of evidence that crime causes poverty. By aligning themselves against the police, against commonsense tactics like stop and frisk, against metal detectors in public housing, against swift and certain punishment, and for a broad array of legal protections for accused criminals, liberals helped to aggrieve the lives of the poor and society as a whole.

  Mona Charen

  Past, Data, Punishment

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• Ive introduced eight bills to fight for support for our small businesses and ensure we get funding to rebuild public housing - among other things.

  Cedric Richmond

  Fighting, Eight, Support

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• When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly.

  William J. Clinton

  Country, Moving, Weekend

  "Interview on MTV's "Enough is Enough" Forum". www.presidency.ucsb.edu. April 19, 1994.

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• By laying the groundwork for a system centered on home ownership rather than the public housing popular in Europe, the New Deal made possible the great postwar housing boom that populated the Sun Belt and boosted millions of Americans into the middle class, where, ironically, they often became Republicans.

  Jonathan Alter

  Home, Europe, Class

  Jonathan Alter (2007). “The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope”, p.284, Simon and Schuster

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• The fundamental fact in the lives of the poor in most parts of America is that the wages of common labor are far below the benefits of AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, public defenders, leisure time and all the other goods and services of the welfare state.

  George Gilder

  America, Benefits, Leisure

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• We believe the 36, nearly 40, billion pound discount given for a right to buy houses took a million houses out of the public housing sector which is desperately needed for rent.

  John Prescott

  Believe, House, Pounds

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• When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it. That's what we did in the announcement I made last weekend on the public housing projects, about how we're going to have weapon sweeps

  William J. Clinton

  Moving, Weekend, Gun

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• Total ghettoization, because they were in charge of public housing, the local council, and they deliberately located people in a ghetto situation in order to ensure that they maintained control.

  John Hume

  Ghetto, Order, People

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