Housing Crisis in America

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/.

Student considers policy reactions to housing affordability crisis

Democratic politicians at the state and federal level are pushing plans to dramatically expand the government’s role in addressing unaffordable housing costs, as rent prices hit new highs in major American cities and the party’s increasingly young and urban base embraces big social programs. Taken from the Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/07/19/rents-soar-democrats-push-new-policies-affordable-housing/?utm_term=.56c9e1835168

    New policies are being suggested to regulate housing rents and control rent prices on housing units and control unaffordable housing costs. I personally think that all of this sounds good, but the reality of it is that unless they find a way to put together and standardized rent based in on the number of rooms and the location of the neighborhood.

    Currently I have the knowledge of a suggested rental price strategy named the Fair Market Rent, not everyone follows the suggested fair market rent when renting their properties because it is not enforced for the landlords to fallow the FMR.

    Now the FMR prices are mostly followed by housing programs with federal funding and affordable housing; now in an ideal situation a family should be able to pay their rent with 25% of their income. The reality is that some people actually pay about 30% of their income or more towards their housing than when they are in subsidized housing. I know about this based on my experience working with housing assistance programs in the pass, and currently working with section 8 housing assistance.

    Now the California’s Democratic nominee for governor is calling for 3.5 million housing units in the state and low-income families to receive new tax credits. In my opinion the problem with tax credits and money being given to low income families is that landlords can definitely take advantage of the fact that their tenants now have all this money for them to take by increasing their rents. This is why if there is not any type of regulations place about rent control the landlords can always take advantage of their tenants in this regard.

    I personally think that rent and fair rent should be regulated by the government in a sense that there is fair treatment about rent prices and housing conditions for those low-income families. Policies that promote fairness and stable rent prices can definitely have a positive impact in these families and their housing opportunities.

    Now in the other hand this type of policies usually don't get approved because is most likely to interfere with the wealthy landlords and the realty businesses as it is well known that some people working in the government own

 Rental properties and will probably oppose to this type of policies that will affect the interests of the rich and wealthy. 

“The reality on the ground, of how severe the crisis is, is getting the attention of the policy makers” (Diane Yentel) – President and executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

    I personally think that the fact that fair regulated rent is being talked about and some good housing policies are coming out and then being rejected shows the importance of people being able to afford housing opportunities. Hopefully in the future the Housing Quality Standards for renters get to more adequate and affordable housing could definitely help to reduce the amount of people experiencing homelessness in the United States giving them the opportunity to provide for their families and get permanent employment opportunities.  

  I was not very familiar with the Fair Market Rent policies you mentioned.  I know that HUD establishes Fair Market Rent prices for various statistical metropolitan areas, and that these rates are used in setting allowed rental costs for persons receiving subsidized housing vouchers, and I also had the impression that the official Fair Market housing prices were also used in planning by community development agencies in their housing affordability strategies, but I had never considered the details of how those rates are developed or used.  Perhaps you would be interested in doing more with that issue in a later paper.

  Housing affordability and the human right to housing are indeed issues that America has not adequately addressed.  I can understand that in many markets it makes little sense for developers to produce new affordable housing, because their costs and inputs to create housing units yield far, far greater profits if they create housing for higher income residents, and even the many billions of dollars (somewhere around $7 or $8 billion?  Check the Frontline documentary)  spent by the Federal Government in tax breaks given to developers of low-income housing seem to have little impact on the problem.  The government recognizes (through policy) no right to housing (despite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—see article 25), and almost all the $40 billion or so spent on affordable housing in this country is discretionary spending.  Also, as we target low-income households with our public housing policies, we seem to be neglecting middle-income households, who cannot afford housing in many markets (San Francisco Bay Area; Los Angeles; Seattle; Washington, DC; New York City; Boston; etc.)

   I have often wondered why government at some level (could be state or city government if not the federal government) has not become more involved in providing more affordable housing directly.  I envision governments producing dense housing areas for mixed-incomes and then selling the properties at cost (revenue neutral), and perhaps financing most of the buyers (with adjustable interest rates matching or slightly above the increases in the consumer price index, again so there is no loss or gain to the government providing the housing).    The units could be owned by the purchasers and residents, but with some sort of a land trust agreement, so that when owners sold the units outside their families (they could give the housing to spouses, children, parents, or nephews and nieces), the government or land trust would be the buyer, and a condition of the initial sale would be that the price for the unit would be the same price paid by the owner, adjusted for the inflation since the time of purchase, and perhaps further adjusted for any improvements made to the property by the owner.  

Such a scheme could: 1) make housing available; 2) have minimal long-term cost to the government; 3) provide some slight surplus (through financing the sales of units with interest rates slightly above the inflation rate for those who could afford it) to the government that could be used to provide nearly free housing to persons who could not afford it; and 4) would not damage the private for-profit housing market much, since that market is interested in maximizing profits and therefore is not serving the low-profit margin provision of affordable housing anyway.  The policy could be instituted only in areas identified as having Fair Market Housing rates that were above some fraction of typical median year-round full-time wages of workers in the area.  For example, if local two-bedroom fair market housing rates reach higher than 40% of median monthly income of year-round full-time workers, the government can set up the quasi-public land trust and housing development agency to provide the housing.  Ideally, I would like to see the mixed-income housing units constructed in such a policy to encourage more environmentally friendly housing construction and more dense housing in city centers, so that residents would be more able to walk to work, ride mass transit, and live in structures that used passive solar heating in winter and solar or wind power generation to reduce energy costs of heating and cooling.  

  One problem I don't know how to address is the problem of low-income persons who are nuisance tenants. Among the persons who cannot afford housing there is a small subset of persons who are obnoxious neighbors who would destroy property even if they owned it. The scheme I envision involves home ownership (within the context of a land trust where the quasi-public land trust entity would have the right to purchase any unit that comes on the market at a price where no profit-taking—adjusted for inflation—would be part of the property sale), partly because I think residents will take better care of their homes if they own them, but even so, there are persons who are incapable or unwilling of taking care of their housing, and while I'm sure there are policy solutions to that problem, I haven't quite figured out what they must be, aside from the idea that there ought to be some form of assisted living services available for some residents. 

Section 8 Housing

Section 8 Housing

Section 8 housing is a federal program that provides affordable housing to those with low income. There is a selection process involved that determines one’s own and, if applicable, family’s gross income. Should one meet the criteria for Section Eight housing, a local housing authority will try to find a place in the limited sections that best fit their needs. However, there is a waiting list that is further exacerbated by the limited resources available to the HUD and local housing agencies.  

I became curious of what it was like to talk to people about applying for housing and the process involved. I found an apartment complex out in Athens, Illinois. There I called the number I found associated with that place and after a brief discussion I was given another number to call. I also had to ask for a specific person in regards to this phone call. So, I called the number and asked for this person. I was met by shifty voice that just said “I’m sorry, ill connect you to them.” I can assume quite accurately that this person took pity on me, which got my blood pressure going. Now, I didn’t need the housing, this was just a curiosity. But to speak down to to someone, is not right. 

What came next was the application itself I received in the mail. This application is pretty daunting and requires numerous details about one’s specific history. Which is fair, considering the nature of this program. What can be bad is that they have a zero drug policy and if one is caught selling, using, or distributing you will be evicted. What happens if a person just has a momentary relapse, which is expected of recovering addicts, and now they are back on the street? That is not conducive to a just society to push them back towards drugs by taking away their home.    

Housing Choice Vouchers (Section 8) and public housing both try to assure communities that the residents will be law-abiding and upstanding citizens.  Also, rules try to protect residents so they will not live in a community where addictive substances are widely used and available. For these reasons, which seem logical enough to me, people who use public housing or housing assistance must submit to some tough restrictions on their use of illegal mind-and-mood-altering substances. On the other hand, just as you point out, the penalty of removing someone from their home and taking away their housing assistance seems too harsh, and possibly a violation of human rights.  A referral to treatment seems a better solution than immediate eviction. 

Student reacts to articles about public housing

A student considers issues with public housing in this reaction essay:

In the four class sessions we attended so far, we did a small-group exercise where we had to present an example of an anecdote from the book $2.00 Per Day to the class. We summarized a character’s situation in the book in a way where we could present it as a story to persuade someone to care about a policy or service need that individual was or wasn’t lacking. We were supposed to make sure that the anecdote appealed to an ethical foundation such as: fairness/ justice ethic or loyalty ethic, purity ethic, conservation ethic, respect for authority ethic, and so forth. My group discussed the family of five who lived in a three-bedroom household. The grandmother was an elderly lady and receive SSI to help pay the bills. The daughter, who didn’t work at all and received food stamps for her child, which helped put food in the house, could not find employment.  The daughter’s husband, who also had a hard time finding a job, felt like less than a man because he could not support his wife and child. Lastly, the grandmother’s brother, who fixed cars for a living, helped out with bills from time to time. The cramming of five people living in a three-bedroom house creates a situation where we can ask, “is public housing actually helping or harming”?

  Howard Husock explains in his article, “How Public Housing Harms Cities”  that the housing projects radiate dysfunction and social problems outward, damaging local businesses and neighborhood property values, making this a noxious environment for their tenants.  Howard believes public housing now concentrates on welfare dependent, single parent households, whose fatherless children disproportionately turnout to be school drop-outs, drug dealers, non-workers, and criminals. This was not the original aim for the establishment for public housing.  Before World War II, President Johnson created the housing act in 1937, to help provide affordable housing to lower-middle class working families of all races. Today most public housing tenants are single-parents, people who have a disability and cannot work or felons who cannot get a job, because of their criminal record. 

I agree with Husock that public housing does concentrate on welfare dependent, single parent households, because most lower working middle class individual only make enough to cover rent and utilities and sometimes are left with hardly any or no money to buy food. The problem is very simple problem in my opinion, there isn’t enough affordable housing to go around, because of the barriers of racism in this country. Historian Ed Goetz explains in his article, “The story of American public housing is one of quiet successes drowned out by loud failures”, that things started to go left after World War II.  The federal government pushed for people to become homeowners by increasing the authorization for Federal Housing Authority loans, mostly available to white families, which helped to create better job opportunities for them as well. Leaving minority residents with nothing. The whites began to move out of public housing and bought their own homes. Minorities were prevented from buying better homes in certain areas, and they were discriminated against in job applications. As the population of public-housing properties became more impoverished and blacker, white residents with jobs, even low-paying ones, hurried to move out of the projects.

This is a nice reaction essay because you have taken two long and detailed articles from two different points of view, one from a conservative (almost Libertarian) perspective (Husock), and another from a more liberal point-of-view (the Samuels article from the Atlantic Monthly).  Reading Husock's article reminded me of the frustration I had back in the 1980s when I read propaganda published from the Soviet Union or the so-called "communist" East Bloc.  It resembled those sources inasmuch as the article is full with truth and accurate observations and valid quotations from authorities, but it is all presented in a biased, unbalanced way, and leaves out important facts, ignores other truths, and simply gets a few things flat wrong. That is, it's a "half-true" article, mixing in lots of realistic material with assumptions and distortions that mislead.  For example, the "Moving to Opportunity" and other studies of what happened when poor youth were moved out of Chicago's dangerous neighborhoods and placed in less dangerous small town or suburban areas found that, yes, there was a slight deterioration (negative influence) in behavior initially among males, but over the long-term, the results of the most recent research shows that there were significant and substantial benefits to the youth who were moved out of bad neighborhoods, and trivial or non-existent negative consequences for the youth in the new areas where the relocated youth arrived.

You are wise to point to two main points, which are fairly indisputable: 1) there is not enough affordable housing in some housing markets; and 2) large public housing projects concentrated people in poverty, and the concentration of poor households was a harmful problem.  I think there is wide consensus on these two points, and has been nearly universal agreement for the past two decades.  Husock does challenge the idea that affordable apartments are difficult to find in New York City, but elsewhere in his article he admits that the residents of public housing: (mostly elderly, persons with disabilities, and single mothers with children) do pose a problem, because we as a society do want them to have decent housing, and we don't want them to become homeless.

The thing I found in my research on public housing in the 1990s in Saint Louis was that the reputation and the narrative about public housing became a perceived reality that everyone agreed about.  Almost everyone I interviewed who lived in public housing complained about it and said they were eager to get out of public housing, and those who were also poor, but lived in low-rent housing likewise said they did not want to live in public housing. And yet, when I asked about environmental stresses, or social connections, or quality of life, the respondents living in public housing reported a far better daily life experience in their lived environments than did the other poor who lived in non-subsidized low cost market-rate housing. I was especially struck by Husock's description of subsidized housing as being terrible compared to market-rate housing, since my experience in researching this issue in the 1990s in Saint Louis suggested that HUD's requirements for landlords to keep their apartments qualified for housing choice vouchers were strict, and set such high standards that the potential supply of low-cost subsidized housing was severely restricted. That is, lndlords found it easier to have apartments rented to low-income tenants without housing vouchers because the costs of upgrading their units to comply with HUD standards outweighed the advantages of having a more dependable rental payment from HUD-subsidized tenants.

Also, Husock is working with an assumption about which is better: having affordable (public subsidized or provide) housing or having no local affordable housing so that more valuable housing can earn higher tax revenues and profits for developers and landlords.  This is a value assumption, and many people would prefer that the public step in to ensure that there is some affordable housing in a city, rather than allowing the free market to make a city affordable only to the wealthy.  The HOPE VI policies that Husock so strongly detests tried to strike a balance, reducing the concentration of the poorest families while making available housing for a range of incomes. This seems to many observers a reasonable middle-ground, since the concentration of a solid block of poor households has some negative consequences, and the market tendency to create situations where only the wealthy can afford to live in some areas also seems undesirable.