Government

Your Home Is Your Castle, Unless You’re Poor

Do people who make agency rules ever consider basic human dignity?

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Last week, a story claiming that you could no longer smoke in New York’s public housing buildings caught my eye. It seemed like an extremely dumb and discriminatory policy aimed at making life for poor people even harder in a city that is already infuriatingly oppressive. I was ready to call De Blasio the new nanny state mayor when I noticed at the bottom of the story that this is not actually a new city policy, but a nationwide Housing and Urban Development policy. Of course! Ben Carson is really turning the screws on poor people. It made sense.

Still wrong!

This is not a Trump policy. It’s an Obama policy, slipped into the lame duck period in the final days of 2016. It’s framed as a public health measure, protecting people from secondhand smoke, and a “cost saving” measure. Trampling over the rights of Americans to enjoy their own homes will save the government in the range of $150 million per year. (The Trump Administration HUD’s proposed, totally slashed skeleton budget for 2019 is more than $40 billion. $150 million is barely more than what Ben Carson will spend on dining sets over the course of his tenure.)

The people subject to this new ban are overwhelmingly poor people of color. Take New York as an example: The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is the nation’s largest public housing administrator, with somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 tenants. As of 2015, 95 percent of those tenants are non-white, and 90 percent are black or Hispanic. The average gross income per household is less than $24,000. Almost 40 percent of households are headed by someone over 62, and the average tenant has lived in public housing for more than 20 years. Oh yeah, the buildings that NYCHA operates are also often 20 or more stories tall with notoriously bad elevator service. Definitely not the kind of place conducive to walking outside and 25 feet away from the building to have a smoke.

I generally have pretty disparaging things to say about libertarians, but then something like this happens and I start to think they have a point.

I’m not a smoker, nor do I have any particular regard for smokers. Smoking is a public health nightmare. Every time I go to Las Vegas I feel blessed that smoking is banned indoors in public spaces where I live. But smoking cigarettes is a legal activity enjoyed by the rich and the poor alike, and if you ban an activity for some of the country’s most vulnerable residents while letting the rich puff away on Park Avenue it starts to look like maybe you (Democratic regulators) value the agency of certain members of society more than others.

I’m an ardent supporter of both the Third and the Fourth Amendments. A person’s home is their castle. Which is precisely why the government would never dream of trying to ban smoking in everyone’s homes. It couldn’t. It has no right, short of making tobacco a controlled substance. But in public housing, and only in public housing, tobacco now is essentially a kind of controlled substance. This policy is not a suggestion. People who continue smoking inside their buildings can (and will) be evicted for consuming a legal substance in private.

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This rule is not really about public health, but about which Americans have the right to dignity in their own homes and which don’t.

Shane Ferro is a law student and a former professional blogger. She is (obviously) a bleeding-heart public interest kid.

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