Cadillac Housing Documentary

Cadillac Apartments
Wine, Cadillac’s and five-star hotels may be one of the few things that come into mind when discussing luxury items. However, in today’s society something as important as housing has risen through the ranks as being labeled unaffordable. With that being said in this essay I will be analyzing a PBS documentary titled “Poverty, Politics and Profit” that examines public policies and their contribution to the affordable housing crises. I will begin the essay by describing the struggles and the discrimination that lower class individuals face. Furthermore, I will also be addressing different housing policies and the impacts they’ve had in society. Lastly, I will focus on under the table hushed white-collar crimes that potentially …show more content…
However, before one can decide who is actually to blame one must first look into the history regarding housing policies. Interesting enough it all began in the 1930s with the public works administration where they decided to build segregated housing which in other words meant that they separated the type of housing individuals could obtain depending on the mere color of their skin. Then during the 1940s we began to see the rise of suburbs or private subsidized neighborhoods specifically located outside central cities which were built exclusively for whites. Who would’ve guessed that a small change such as migrating individuals outside of cities could cause so much havoc in society. According to Richard Rothstein in the documentary he mentioned that because “industry left urban areas… poverty became even more concentrated, making low-income segregated neighborhoods even more desperate economically than they had been previously.”. (Frontline 2012) This heavy concentration of poverty was widely implemented into segregated neighborhoods which became poor mostly because the rich who owned the industries and factories where individuals who had left urban areas to move into suburb living. This in return created a high influx of individuals whom lived in very impoverished neighborhoods. Because of this many of them became dismayed about the conditions in which they found themselves in …show more content…
The way the tax credit program works is by allowing the states to receive billions of tax credits from the IRS and then rewarding the credits to developers. Credits which are then sold to investors for cash. Developers then use this cash to build affordable housing units. Although this program sounds pretty much fool proof one has to wonder if there is still so many individuals struggling to find housing then how well can this program actually working? In the documentary, they found that during 1997 through 2014 “The number of units produced has fallen… but the program is costing taxpayers more.” (Frontlines 2017) Eventually we find out that one of the reasons as to why the program has been costing more is due to a hidden kickback scheme that was being used by the private investors in where developers would tell contractors an amount and then they would go and lie to the state stating that they need more money than they had agreed to pay contractors. The reason as to why this program is so prone to white-collar crime is because the only agencies who have the ability to look over all of this money is the state housing officials. This is an issue because schemes like these shouldn’t go un treated or un caught. Especially when you have such large amounts of money like

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