other programs may fare in a post-entitlement, balanced-budget world. Only one eligible family in three receives aid, and the demand is so great in many cities that even the waiting lists are closed.

While those paying 50, 60 or even 70 percent of their income for shelter include the disabled, the elderly and welfare recipients, there are also surprising numbers of working families in the same fix. Two million of the five million household heads with severe rent burdens are employed, and 12 million are working full time. Among other things, their situation offers a dark commentary on the stringent new welfare bill. Say it proves its doubters wrong, and those pushed from the rolls find jobs. Where are they supposed to live?

four times as much as it spends on low-income housing. More than two-thirds of it goes to families with incomes above $75,000. If the candidates detect any inequity in this arrangement, they haven't yet said so. For most of the campaign, they simply ignored the subject of housing costs. Then after months of silence, Bob Dole and Bill Clinton faced off this summer in a sudden competition to give prosperous homeowners even bigger breaks, by all but eliminating capital gains taxes on the sale of expensive homes. On a practical level, their proposals scarcely matter. Most homeowners already qualify for the exemptions (at a cost to the Government of another $20 billion a year). But as a matter of symbolism, the further courtship of the lavishly housed captures all too well Washington's reverse Robin Hood ways.

Perhaps it seems there is no other choice the very words "subsidized housing" conjure a landscape of failure and waste. But the Government is curtailing its efforts just as the low-incomehousing world has produced a variety of success stories the nation could build on, if not to serve the most desperately poor then at least for those a step or two above. As counterintuitive as it seems, the past two decades have arguably produced more successes in low-income

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housing than in any other realm of antipoverty policy. The quiet resuscitation of parts of the South Bronx is just one example.

Most of the progress has been led by nonprofit groups that, with Government and foundation support, have grown into adept landlords and developers. They screen tenants and keep projects small; they monitor maintenance and strive, when possible, to mix the poor with the working class. Henry G. Cisneros, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, is now trying to apply some of those lessons to an ambitious redesign of the worst public housing. So far he has presided over the destruction of 22,000 scarcely inhabitable apartments and is replacing them with smaller, mixed-income developments. But the effort comes with a cost. Since the new complexes will also be smaller, the overall housing shortage may grow.

I got my first sense of the problem's scale five years ago on a reporting trip to Charlotte, N.C., which as a midsize South

ern city is no one's idea of an unaffordable place to live. But a few days in town and my notebooks were filled with the woes of lowwage workers stooped by their rents. One was a character of such earnest energy, and unlikely misfortune, that he's never quite left my mind; if the housing crisis hit the big screen, Harold Coleman could be its Jimmy Stewart.

A kitchen aide at a downtown hotel, he spent almost 60 percent of his income to keep his wife and two young sons in a decent apartment. He furnished his living room with a reclining chair salvaged from a Dumpster, and all was well, relatively speaking, until the police knocked one night at 3 A.M. and carted him off to jail. The incriminating evidence was the extension cord connecting his alarm clock to a neighbor's patio outlet. With no money for a utility deposit, Harold Coleman had turned into an electricity pirate.

I returned to Charlotte recently to check on its housing situation and found an impressive blend of economic growth and civic concern. The city is booming, with two major sports teams, the headquarters of two growing bank empires, a row of new skyscrapers and virtually no unemployment. The good times have kept the public purse full, and the city is spending a good sum on housing, more than $3 million a year. The banks have been similarly generous, the housing groups are sharp and Habitat for Humanity, the nonprofit home builder, has constructed more homes in Charlotte than almost anyplace else. Citing such promise a few years ago, Jimmy Carter came to town, hammer in hand, to predict that Charlotte would become "the first American community in the whole United States that's going to succeed in eliminating poverty housing."

Guess how the story turns out.

.. AT 7:30 A.M. THE DOORS OF THE CRISIS ASSISTANCE MINISTRY HAVE yet to open, but the line outside is already 60 deep. Each year about 12,000 people trek to the social services center, just north of

Charlotte's downtown, for help with rent and utilities, and Crisis responds with a mix of funds from churches, businesses, the Government and individuals. Today, the first woman staked her place by arriving under moonlight at 4:20 AM. The door flings open and the crowd rushes in, clutching the numbered cards that determine the order in which they'll be seen.

No. 4 is seeking a weekly room because a friend kicked her out. "I am working," she snaps at the social worker across the counter. No. 12, a groundskeeper, carries his eviction papers with him, and so does No. 17, a clerk at a temporary agency who was laid off after breaking her toe. (Hers come with a cheerful reminder from the landlady: "Only good things can come from paying your rent on time.") In an effort to keep someone's lights turned on, a Crisis worker calls Duke Power to say the ministry will send a check. Though social work is typically shrouded in euphe mism, this exchange comes with an exquisite clarifying slang. In local parlance, this is "Crisis calling the Duke."

Though Charlotte is booming, so is its housing crisis. The ministry got 1,000 more requests for help last year than it did the year before, despite the city's overall prosperity, those seeking help reported incomes that were 4 percent lower and shelter costs that were 7 percent higher. Two years ago, the average person walking through the ministry's doors paid $417 for rent and utilities out of a monthly income of $622, a shelter burden of 67 percent. By last year, the average was $448 out of $596-an astonishing 75 percent.

It's fair to question the precision of the numbers. (Poor people tend to underreport their income.) But it's hard to find anyone in Charlotte who doubts the general story the numbers tell. Charlotte's city officials are as given to boosterism as those anywhere else, but when they discuss their low-income-housing market, they start quoting Dickens. "Even with such a bright future, Charlotte is becoming a 'tale of two cities," says the city's official housing plan. "There is a growing economic division of the 'haves' and 'have-nots.""

There are 160,000 households in Charlotte, and about 20 percent meet the Federal definition of "very low income"; that is, they live on less than half the area's median income, or less than $21,000 a year. The city plan notes that these households "cannot afford adequate housing" and that they "often must make hard choices on whether to spend their limited income on shelter, food or heat." About 10 percent - 16,000 households - live on less than $12,000 a year. About their prospects, the city is even more pessimistic. Without rental assistance, the plan says, they "are likely to be living in highly unstable situations, or doubled up with other families, behind on their rent and prone to eviction."

Each year the Federal Government publishes a list of "fair market rents," locally adjusted cost estimates of decent but modest

shelter. And each year the National Low Income Housing Coalition then calculates the wage needed to afford the rent. To afford a one-bedroom apartment in Charlotte (at $454 a month), a worker needs an hourly wage of $8.73. To afford a two-bedroom apartment (at $511 a month), a worker needs $9.83. That is more than twice the minimum wage of $4.75 an hour.

Notice here that we are talking about workers. Whatever one chooses to think about welfare mothers and their children, the nation makes no pretense to house them: only about one in four nationwide gets rental assistance, and in North Carolina the rest live on cash stipends that average about $270 a month. In other words, a mother on welfare could spend 100 percent of her cash income for rent and still have only half of what the Government says it costs to rent an apartment. Indeed, a welfare check won't pay the fair market rent in 48 states, which is why most recipients rely on boyfriends or unreported jobs, and why many families live doubled up. And so be it: from President Clinton on down, the nation has just said, "Get a job!" But the lesson of Charlotte's economy is that even when poor people do, at hourly wages of $5.50, 56 or even $7, many will still find themselves unable to afford a place to live.

As a result, the Crisis Assistance Ministry is flooded with welfare and working families alike. At age 54, Mary Parton is a repeat client though she has been working since her teens on farms, in textile mills and now as a night security guard at a commercial bakery. She started the job four years ago, at $4.75 an hour. By this summer she was up to, well, $4.75 an hour. "They don't give raises that often," she says.

Where does one live on a wage like that? Patton left one apartment when drug dealers shot through the door. She moved from a second when a police helicopter landed in the backyard while raiding her drug-dealing neighbors. Then she found a small brick cottage at the edge of a wooded cul-de-sac, which makes her yard a popular place for teen-agers to strip stolen cars. Patton stores her lawn mower in the kitchen to keep it from being stolen and has decorated her bathroom walls with red pot holders, just for the cheer. Rent and utilities for the two-bedroom house, which she shares with a granddaughter, run $500 a month, or $6,000 a year. That's 61 percent of the annual earnings ($9,896) recorded on her most recent 1040 form.

Oddly enough, Charlotte's housing problems represent progress of a sort. More accurately, they represent the price of progress

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREA MODICA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

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progress in this case being the eradication of the seriously substandard housing that was prevalent in the United States a generation ago. Mary Patton grew up in a house in the Carolina countryside with no running water and a wood stove for heat. It was brutish but cheap: the rent was just $4 a month. Even Charlotte was awash in shotgun shanties at the time. Now, for the most part, the outhouses, tin roofs and slumlords are gone, they've been replaced by housing inspectors, due process and rents that are out of reach.

Perhaps no one in Charlotte knows more about the trade-offs than Ted Fillette, a Legal Services lawyer who pushed for much of the change. He arrived in Charlotte 23 years ago, fresh from a legal clinic in Boston, then the hotbed of the tenants' rights movement. Charlotte, he says, "was literally like a third world country-tenants were like serfs." The city had an entire submarket of caveat emptor homes: take 'em as you find 'em structures with weekly rents and no heat. Tenants could be evicted on two days' notice if they dared to call a housing inspector. "I just decided this would be my focus," he says. "Tenants had to have some rights."

Now they do: rights to repairs; rights against evictions without a court order, rights to trial by judge and jury, rather than landlord-friendly

magistrates. What they don't have is money to pay for the improved housing stock. Fillette himself is ambivalent about the trade-off. "Were people better off when they were cold and paying $150 for their own place?" he asks. "Or are they better off with heat and plumbing, but living doubled up or paying every last cent for rent? I don't know." In the old days, one of Fillette's most frequent adversaries was Robert Pressley, a rural migrant in overalls who was among the most infamous of the city's low-income landlords. These days, the Pressley empire is run by Robert's son, Tony, who is no one's idea of a slumlord Low-income property is a small part of his sprawling commercial and residential business. He talks of renting inexpensive housing as a "duty," and he has served on the board of Charlotte's leading nonprofit housing agency. But he owns less low-income housing than his father did for a simple reason: there's no money in it. The market can adapt to the poor person's purse by selling cheaper toys or shoes, but there are only so many corners that can be cut in building cheaper housing. To be sure, codes should be simplified and red tape should be cut. But interest, utilities, taxes - these costs are fixed, regardless of the occupants' income. It costs between $40,000 and $55,000 to build an 800-square-foot two

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREA MODICA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

bedroom apartment in Charlotte, depending on the land and the interest rate. To service the debt, maintain the building and earn a modest return, landlords need to charge rents of $600 to $750.

The only way to push the rents substantially lower is through a subsidy, either to the tenant or the landlord or through the tax code. "I can't walk on water-and you don't see any new $400-a-month apartments coming on the marker," Tony Pressley says. The handful he sull rents are mostly old ones, already paid off. Though Fillette has spent his life suing landlords, he speaks sympathetically of the younger Pressley. "It's virtually impossible to make a profit and comply with

the law because of the inadequate income of the customers," he says. When a middle-income family spends half its budget on shelter (in fact, few do), it is making a life-style choice. When a low-income family does so, it is courting a crisis. The remaining money is rarely enough to pay for the bare necessities. Forger for a moment that these families may find themselves living in a virtual war zone. They may also be facing evictions, unlity cutoffs or even shortages of food.

Poor families tend to get displaced so often it's not hard to find children in Charlotte who have attended six elementary schools in a single year. Social workers at A Child's Place, a Charlotte program for homeless children, recently saw a third grader who had been to 13 different schools in a year. In the District of Columbia, the head of foster care has estimated that as many as half the city's foster children could be reunited with their parents if the families had stable housing. While there is surprisingly little research on the impact of rent burdens, some disturbing hints come from Dr. Alan Meyers, a pediatrician at the Boston Medical Center. In three different studies (two with a colleague, Dr. Deborah A. Frank) he found a connection between high rents and inadequate nutrition. In a 1993 study of 580 poor children, he found iron deficiencies in 19 percent of those whose families had subsidized rents. But of those in families without housing subsidies, 30 percent were iron deficient. In 1995 he published a more sophisticated study of 200 poor children, and this time the differences were even more dramatic. Only 3 percent of the children whose families got housing assistance were underweight for their age. But of the children whose families were on the housing waiting list, 22 percent were underweight. Earlier this year, Meyers published a third study. After examining the records of 11,000 children, he found that they were most likely to be underweight in the 90 days after the coldest month of the year. This bolstered his theory that families choose whether to "heat or eat."

Enough wild claims get made on the topics of homelessness and hunger that one hesitates to make too much of the findings. As Meyers is quick to note, two are based on small samples, and all come from a single hospital. As a scientist, he calls them "suggestive." But as a citizen

he speaks with less equivocation: "It's not rocket science. Without housing subsidies, the likelihood is that there will be more hungry and undernourished children."

And more parents like Richard Ussery, a veteran of the Crisis Ministry lines. His file there shows a trail 15 years long of utility cutoffs and eviction notices and doubling up with relatives, though it also shows steady employment. He's 43, separated from his wife and raising an 11-year-old son on his own. These days he's unloading trucks at piecemeal rates. He's been with the same company for about four years. His wages average less than $6 an hour.

I found him in August in a weather-beaten two-bedroom home stuck between two car lots. He was spending about 50 percent of his income on shelter, which doesn't count the $240 repair when Richard Jr. dropped a tennis ball down the toilet. He had curtains on the windows and napkin rings on the table. He also had a stack of eviction threats, with court dates for February, May, June and July. Each had been averted at the last minute by family loans or Crisis Ministry donations or forgone luxuries like fixing his broken false teeth. "Don't none of them go to trial," he declared. "I always pay 'em."

In a three-hour conversation, Ussery did not utter a word of malice toward his landlord, "who's doing what he got to do." And there wasn't a trace of sarcasm in his voice when he said, "I love this place." When I called back a few weeks later, Ussery had been evicted.

T

HE BULLDOZER LOOKS LIKE A HORROR-FILM INSECT AS IT roars across a desolate lot in Detroit. It slams its steel claw through a second-story window and lunches on bricks and glass. The action has drawn a crowd straight out of "The Bonfire of the Vanities"-kids chomping hot dogs, guys in dashikis, television crews and a man in purple sunglasses who flashes peace signs. When the demolition dust settles and the cheers fade, another 1,064 units of public housing will lie in ruins.

The scene cries out as a metaphor, but a metaphor for what? Presiding in a ceremonial hard hat, Henry Cisneros, the Housing Secretary, hopes the rubble will stand for renewal, of public housing and of urban life more generally. At a time when most housing funds are being trimmed, Cisneros will spend $80 million to transform the site into a smaller, mixed-income development. He is trying to bring down a total of 100,000 of the nation's most blighted units over the next few years. "This is about a renaissance," he tells the crowd, "a rebuilding."

But his efforts coincide with a second, less-happy demolition, that of the overall housing budget. Across the country, the Government is being forced to spend many new billions repairing, preserving or replacing apartments it built years ago; this leaves almost no money for new ones. Housing secretaries like Continued on page 68

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