When writing my second policy paper I was at a loss as to how the housing crisis has not been resolved or looked at in ten plus years. Not only do these people continue to live without a home, but the percentage of people without increases every year while it is not dealt with. It is a cycle of a continuing piling problem. One that was once met with much enthusiasm and attention from the government.
Public housing hasn’t been expanded in fifty plus years. That is when an act was put in place to suspend all activity regarding expansion of public housing. The previous years 1937 and 1949 were the establishment of the Housing Act, constructing public housing, and further expanding this concept. This worked well as a means to provide housing for the citizens without. Unfortunately, after 1974 the public housing was only on a decline. They were suspended and then torn down with half replaced nearly twenty years later. This left thousands of vulnerable people and children once again homeless. Four years after that destruction of public housing, an amendment is put in place to further limit the construction of new public housing. That is just after 10,000+ units have been destroyed (NLIHC). This is the story of public housing in America.
The only recent action towards solving any housing issue by the federal government revolved around rental assistance. Rental assistance was offered as an alternative option to the housing crisis that faced the nation. When public housing had halted in 1974, the government turned to housing vouchers. Rental assistance is similar to a housing voucher, both reduce the cost of housing. Rental assistance through money and a housing voucher through the promise of money to the landlord of the property (government pays landlord). Money has not been spent in over fifty years on a direct form of housing for the homeless or vulnerable populations.
It is hard to believe such a rapidly growing and dangerously vulnerable population would be swept under the rug for so long. Every year is a record-breaking year for a new highest count of homelessness. This is the progress we make. In 2023, nearly 700,000 people experience homelessness on a given night (Soucy). These people struggle to live daily life and are forgotten by their neighbor. America has seemingly forgotten these citizens of its nation. It is time to pick up where they left off in the 1970s. There needs to be a change in the action taken against this housing crisis facing America.
In conclusion, there is a housing crisis facing America. One that has been dealt with on and off. There should be a change in the action taken by the government to see a bigger change in the situation for the positive.
Your reaction got me thinking about why the two areas of public welfare where the American welfare system most severely fails are housing and mental health care. With mental health care, it’s pretty obvious that people do give up on anyone with a chronic severe illness. Even families give up on them, so I think social workers have a difficult quest when it comes to shifting opinion toward creating a humane and effective system of mental health care (including prevention and treatment for substance use issues). But, with housing, I can only imagine that the stigma against paupers, the contempt our society has for persons in the bottom third, or bottom 20% or the 11% below the poverty threshold, is at the psychological root of our failure.
I’ll give you some insights.
First, if you look a the history of public housing in the United States, you’ll notice that from the beginning, public housing was conceived as a solution for persons who were very poor, and the idea was to make wholesome and modest places for very poor persons to live. If you look at societies that do a much better job with public housing (e.g., The Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Singapore, Hong Kong), you’ll see that in those lands, the provision of housing was seen as a human right, or an economic necessity, and public housing is available for middle-income and moderate-income as well as low-income people. In some of those societies, from a fifth (in Denmark) to over half of the population (80% in Singapore, one of the wealthiest countries in the world) lives in housing that was subsidized by the government. Based on Census data on household incomes combined with Department of Commerce reports on housing costs and expenditures, it seems to me that about a quarter of American households could benefit from public housing or housing choice vouchers, but in fact, less than 4% get into such housing. (I’m getting that “less than 4%) by summing up the households participating in various housing voucher programs and public housing and Tribal housing and taking that as a percentage of the 127 million American households).
Once the public sector gets involved in providing subsidized or public housing (and encouraging social housing), it typically needs to respond to the market and provide increases in social housing / public housing while also increasing the productive of lower-cost private market housing. In societies (such as Hong Kong) where public housing is not enlarged to meet demand and little is done to boost the construction of private-market affordable housing, you can get skyrocketing costs for low-end housing (see paper by Michael B. Wong from 2022). The Faircloth Amendment of 1998 put a cap on the provision of public housing, and although our housing choice voucher programs have expanded, the increase in units available to persons with vouchers has been lamentably small compared to the explosive growth in demand. And so, I think even though about 45% of Hong Kong residents live in public housing and less than 4% of American live in public or subsidized housing, we have similar problems with the governments decreasing (or failing to adequately increase) the supply of affordable housing, and we’re getting similar results (rapid, dizzying increases in rental and home prices).
So, the United States has a limited housing policy because we have assumed (incorrectly) that subsidized housing should only be for the very poor, and our policy of not expanding public and subsidized housing makes the problem worse by allowing the market to drive up housing prices for those who cannot afford them.
Another issue is that housing policies are not seen as federal issues, and so our federal programs are trivial, and states and counties and cities are not stepping up to shoulder the weight of this obligation. With a few exceptions, most towns and cities allow developers (who often contribute significantly to county and city mayoral and city council candidates) to build urban sprawl type communities where the houses are all for persons in the top half of the income distribution (more expensive houses have higher profit margins), but there are relatively few incentives for developers to invest in the creation of mixed-income or low-income housing. The sort of dense housing construction model (e.g,, as in Carmel, Indiana) that provides significant tax revenue for local government is ignored for the financially unsustainable extension of road, sewer, and water infrastructure out to expanding suburbs, where tax revenue is low and the cost of maintenance and replacement of public infrastructure is much higher than tax revenue (making these places a long-term trap for city bankruptcy). Cities, counties, and states also do not see that ending homelessness is really their responsibility, and you can see in any city or state budget that the amount giving to the creation of social housing, rapid re-housing, permanent supportive housing, or locally-controlled public housing is often trivial.
Another issue we have is that the social experiment we did with public housing in the 1940s through the 1980s demonstrated that it’s a bad idea to segregate and isolate concentrated populations of impoverished households. Persons in households with low incomes benefit from living and rearing their children in a community where many of their neighbors have higher incomes. Concentrating and isolating poor people in large communities where everyone is poor tends to foster anti-social behaviors and oppositional (sometimes criminal) subcultures. The lesson we should have taken from this fact is that in our urban planning and affordable housing policies we must always scatter subsidized and public housing throughout a community, and create decent and attractive affordable and public housing that blends well with market-rate housing that remains attractive to middle-income and upper-income home buyers and renters, even if some public or subsidized housing is mixed in nearby. Instead of taking that lesson to heart, it seems to me that government leadership has instead only remembered the idea that concentrated poverty is bad, and therefore both parties seem to accept the Faircloth Amendment and agree that we should move away from a public housing model. Public housing is not such a social threat when it is available to households in the entire bottom third of the income distribution and it is widely dispersed and attractive, but it can be a source of public disorder when it is ugly, poorly designed, and concentrates persons in the bottom 10% of income all together in a densely packed area that is isolated from jobs and middle-income neighbors.
To my way of thinking, a problem here is that Americans want wealthy and middle-income citizens to pay only about 20% to 35% of their incomes to the public good, but if we accepted a situation where the combined local/state/federal government took a larger share of personal income (not radically more, just up to 25% to 40%, an increase of about 5-percentage-points or a 20% to 15% increase in total taxes paid to all government units through all levels of taxation), we could provide things like an adequate supply of public and subsidized housing, universal health care, and adequate funding for public schools and universities, as well as child protective services, mental health and substance use treatment services, and so forth. Yet, the rhetoric around government spending is focused on the premise that the government, at whatever level, is inefficient and is likely to spend increased revenue in ways that are unproductive, ineffective, or wasteful. Governments are huge entities, and there will always be some error and waste in any large and complex human organization. But people can’t distinguish between serious problems that make a policy unfeasible and the problems that are like random error, just minor fluctuations in the economy or government work. At any rate, there is no desire by politicians, even in a Democratic Party dominated state such as Illinois, for any revenue increases (increases in taxes). Thus, I fear that our governments will not gain the revenue necessary to adequately fund housing policies that would help make housing affordable and available in a sustainable way.
Works Cited
NLIHC. “Public Housing History.” National Low Income Housing Coalition, 17 Oct. 2019, nlihc.org/resource/public-housing-history.
Soucy, Daniel, et al. “State of Homelessness: 2024 Edition.” National Alliance to End Homelessness, 5 Aug. 2024, endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness/.
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