Six Updates From Past Newsletter Posts

Image: A panel from the terrific “cartoon report,” The Tragedy and Tenacity of Public Housing, created by Eric Oner and published in The Nation.

This post originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog Housing Is A Human Right

Thank you to all of you who read this newsletter. Some of you have been around since our launch in November, 2022, while others jumped aboard during the 46 issues since. We are excited to now have well over 400 subscribers, with more being added each month.

The housing justice news we have shared and topics we have discussed continue to develop. So this issue is devoted to a half-dozen updates on past posts:

Public Housing Can Be Great, Actually (March 21, 2023)

It is a theme we have repeated often in the newsletter: when done right, public housing is a proven silver bullet for our affordable housing crisis.

·         The latest evidence of that approach working in other nations comes from a New York Times article this month, How Does Paris Stay Paris? By Pouring Billions Into Public Housing. One of every four Parisians lives in government-owned housing. This investment in keeping lower-income residents in the city is accompanied by a ban on short-term rentals, enacted after investors began buying up residential property to rent to tourists.  

From The Times article:

“Our guiding philosophy is that those who produce the riches of the city must have the right to live in it,” said Ian Brossat, a communist senator who served for a decade as City Hall’s head of housing. Teachers, sanitation workers, nurses, college students, bakers and butchers are among those who benefit from the program.

·         Sadly, our U.S. approach to public housing has not been nearly as wise as the commitments made in Paris or other locales such as Vienna and Singapore. A unique graphic portrayal of “The Tragedy and Tenacity of Public Housing in America” was published this month in The Nation. Eric Orner’s presentation is introduced as “a cartoon report on the only policy proven to actually address the housing shortage—and how racism, inept management, and systematic disinvestment led to long-term decline.” 

·      Fifty-five members of Congress and seven U.S. Senators aim to reverse this decline. This month, they reintroduced the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, which would invest up to $234 billion over ten years to transition the entire public housing stock in the United States into zero-carbon, highly energy-efficient homes. Importantly, it would also repeal the loathsome Faircloth Amendment, which blocks the construction of new public housing.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the bill’s cosponsors, described the crisis of public housing’s $70 billion maintenance backlog and our opportunity to do better. “For decades the federal government has allowed our limited public housing stock to fall into disrepair. Residents are dealing with mold growth, lead-based paint hazards, lack of central cooling and heating, failing water infrastructure, and numerous other safety concerns,” she said. “It is beyond time for the federal government to take responsibility and pass legislation that offers comprehensive, public solutions.”

Mansion Taxes on the Rise (September 1, 2023)

So, how do we pay for more subsidized housing? One promising approach has aimed squarely at the huge disparity in housing wealth, a disparity fueled by enormous tax benefits and subsidies to wealthy developers and homeowners. (See, Huge Profits, No Taxes: How We Reward Landlords and Punish Tenants , Jan. 1, 2023.)

In 2022, voters in Los Angeles overwhelmingly passed a  “mansion tax” imposing extra taxes on the sale of property worth over $5 million, with the revenue devoted to building more affordable housing. Santa Fe, New Mexico voters approved a similar measure.

Unfortunately, that momentum slowed this month when Chicago voters rejected the “Bring Chicago Home” referendum, a transfer tax on real estate properties over $1 million. Real estate groups campaigned heavily against the measure. But Chicago has an estimated 68,000 unhoused persons, so advocates say they will continue to fight for more investment in desperately-needed affordable housing.

Is the Biggest Producer of Reduced-Cost Housing “Better Than Nothing”? (December 1, 2023)

The indispensable non-profit publication Shelterforce (if you do not subscribe yet, please do so!) has followed up on last year’s multi-part text guide to the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program. LIHTC, usually pronounced lie-tek, is the largest U.S. financer of housing that is supposed to be affordable--but for too many households is not: “LIHTC: The Good, the Bad, and the Very Complicated.”

Anyone who teaches or advocates knows the enormous value of a brief and effective explainer. So Shelterforce deserves big credit for boiling down the problem with LIHTC into a clear, engaging five-minute video,  How Are LIHTC Rents Set—And Why So Many Renters Can't Afford Them.

How Wall Street Holds a Gun to the Head of Manufactured Home Residents (May 1, 2023)

Not all manufactured homes are in rural areas. But the struggle for manufactured home residents to stay housed illustrates that the eviction crisis reaches beyond areas of the country where one might expect to see housing insecurity.

So Carl Gershenson’s and Matthew Desmond’s new paper published in February: “Eviction and the Rental Housing Crisis in Rural America,” provides helpful context. From the paper: “There are over 17 million rural renters in the United States. These rural renters face the same stagnant incomes and inadequate supply of affordable housing that face so many urban renters.”

Letting Go of the Rope—A Sad Update (September 22, 2023)

This is actually an update of an update . . .  In December 2022, I wrote an article for Common Dreams (republished in this newsletter) called “Letting Go of the Rope.”  It talked about how CARES Act stimulus checks, extended unemployment benefits, expanded child tax credit, and maximized food stamps had kept most of our clients housed during the early months of the pandemic. By the end of 2022, most of the assistance had been withdrawn. The September 2023 update chronicled the end of yet another program, Emergency Rental Assistance, and the wave of evictions that followed.

This month, Bryce Covert in the New York Times linked that abdication of proven help to the conundrum that is so critical that it may lead to a second Trump presidency: With the U.S. economy seeming to be strong on paper, why are so many voters not at all happy about their financial situation?

The piece, titled Is This What Happens When You Build a Real Social Safety Net, Then Take It Away?, Covert wrote:

Why are the economic vibes off? There are most likely many answers. Obtaining the basics, like housing or child care, has become more difficult. Falling inflation is great, but prices have remained uncomfortably high . . .

Let me add another reason Americans may be doing well but feeling financially insecure: In the pandemic, the country created the most robust safety net we had seen in decades, buffering people against eviction, poverty, hunger and other suffering. Americans’ lives were materially and appreciably improved. Then we took it all away.

The message received is that the government could have done these things all along but had chosen not to — and has chosen once again to withdraw that kind of security.

There is no reason why that withdrawal should be permanent. So, a big thank you to all of you who keep up the fight for more and better subsidized housing, along with the other supports that our struggling sisters and brothers need and deserve.