Who Deserves Affordable Housing?

I remember the first day of my housing-policy class in graduate school. I was late. I had just left the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority where I was helping a family activate the housing-choice voucher they had recently been granted.

I found a seat near the door in the back of the classroom. After welcoming us, the professor opened with what seemed like a simple request: “Raise your hand if you have ever lived in subsidized housing.” In a class of about 40 students, only three or four hands went up. I kept mine down.

He followed with a second question: “How many of you have lived in a house either you or your parents owned?” I raised my hand—along with a majority of my classmates. “Congratulations,” he responded. “You too have lived in subsidized housing.”

He used the rest of class to describe the two major types of housing assistance offered by the U.S. government.

The first type is public housing and housing-choice vouchers that limit what a household pays for rent to 30 percent of their income. This is what most of us think of when we hear the phrase “subsidized housing.” The Department of Housing and Urban Development runs these programs, which are meant to benefit mainly households that earn 30 percent or less of median income for an area. This might be $12,750 for a family of four in Mississippi or $27,600 in California. Congress allots about $38 billion per year for these programs.

The second form of government-funded financial assistance for housing is the mortgage-interest tax deduction, which allows homeowners who itemize deductions to deduct the interest they pay on their home loans. The deduction can be applied to both primary and second residences, including boats with bathrooms. Most households that benefit from the mortgage-interest tax deduction earn between $100,000 and $500,000 a year. This, the largest housing subsidy program in the country, costs the federal government upward of $100 billion a year.

Learning about these two programs changed my narrative about housing subsidies in the United States.

Race, place, poverty, and privilege

I grew up in a middle-income suburban enclave of St. Paul, Minn. My parents, from India, moved to Minneapolis in the 1960s, rented for a few years in the central city, and soon bought a house in the suburbs. Our neighborhood was mostly single-family houses, a small cluster of apartment buildings and townhomes for rent, and one manufactured-housing park. Looking back, I can honestly say that I did not have a single friend whose parents did not own the house they lived in. None of my friends lived in the apartment buildings or the manufactured-housing park. St. Paul was a mostly white community back then, but class lines separated owners from renters.

Halfway through my senior year in college, I moved into the south Minneapolis neighborhood where my parents had first lived when they arrived in Minnesota. The neighborhood was struggling, scarred by years of disinvestment, poverty, and institutional and structural racism. As I built relationships with neighborhood residents, I began to learn about the issues of race, place, and poverty that my suburban privilege made invisible to me.

After college, I worked for a nonprofit affordable-housing developer in Minneapolis, supporting families on their way to economic and family stability. I witnessed the benefits provided by a stable, affordable place to live. Access to healthy, safe, high quality, and financially sustainable housing empowered people to be better parents, students, employees, and neighbors.

Unfortunately, I saw the flip side as well.

The common calculation for housing affordability is that no more than 30 percent of household income should go toward rent. But in most neighborhoods, the number of affordable housing units is a small percentage of the overall housing stock.

A vast majority of low-income households in Minneapolis—and across the country—simply don’t have access to affordable housing subsidized by government programs because there isn’t any available. Instead, families rent units offered via the private market, often paying more (often much more) than 30 percent of their income.

Housing quality at the bottom of the market is often substandard, in part because the business model creates a financial disincentive for landlords to maintain or improve their properties.

A slumlord business model

Leaders of the Minneapolis-based tenant rights organization Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia (United Renters for Justice) have written that the slumlord business model creates huge profits for landlords across the country. “The term ‘slumlord’ is applied to landlords ... who manage their properties with the least possible investment, ignoring problems until infestations become unmanageable and the building falls into disrepair,” the group wrote in a June 2016 blog post. “But the word slumlord means something more than ‘a bad apple in the landlord barrel.’ It is actually a business model, one that is excessively profitable, used across the country, and is widely legal because of a lack of protections for tenants and because existing housing laws are only loosely enforced.”

The rise of the renter population following the housing market crash has allowed landlords to increase rents and push profits higher. Slumlords, according to Inquilinxs Unidxs, rent to vulnerable populations and then foster a culture of fear that allows them to maximize profits by exploiting, abusing, and neglecting their tenants.

In Minneapolis, I knew parents who went to school and took care of their kids while working multiple jobs to pay for rent, food, and other essentials. As time went on, I began to see that the unstable housing situations of so many of these families were the result of a combination of public, private, and institutional failures, past and present. I knew families who were paying almost everything they earned to avoid eviction from apartments that were not safe, healthy, or secure.

The eviction snowball

As of 2015, more than 20 million renters—more than half of all renters in the U.S.—were “cost burdened,” meaning they spent at least at least 30 percent of their income on rent, according to a recent survey. That’s an increase from almost 15 million in 2001. While rents have risen 66 percent since 2000, household incomes have only risen 35 percent.

More than 3,000 evictions are filed in Minneapolis each year. As in most other cities, eviction filings cluster in neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of poverty, immigrants, and people of color. In north Minneapolis, where I now live, between 45 and 48 percent of renter households have experienced an eviction filing in the past three years.

According to research done in Minneapolis in 2016, an eviction can “lead to long-term instability and barriers to access. Frequently, property owners will screen out potential tenants if they have a prior eviction. An eviction remains on a tenant’s rental record for seven years and can be found in court records indefinitely. Even just a filing can lead to limitations in future access, as this is also part of a standard rental report. This barrier may restrict a renter’s available options to lower-quality or otherwise less-desirable housing.”

Eviction can begin a snowball effect that disrupts a family’s well-being by limiting access to education, employment, and quality housing.

In his Pulitzer-winning book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, sociologist Matthew Desmond describes experiences of renters in Milwaukee that reveal in painful detail what life is like for the urban poor:

• 1 out of 4 poor families spend more than 70 percent of their income on rent and utilities.

• 3 out of 4 families who qualify for government housing assistance do not receive it.

• 1 out of 8 families expect to be evicted soon.

“The persistence and brutality of American poverty can be disheartening, leaving us cynical about solutions,” Desmond writes.

According to Desmond’s research, three out of four people in a typical Milwaukee eviction court are black. Of those, three of four are women. In Milwaukee’s poorest black neighborhoods, one female renter in 17 is evicted through the court system each year, twice as often as men and nine times as often as women from the city’s poorest white areas. Desmond writes, “If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.”

“Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty,” Desmond told The Huffington Post. “One way we can interpret eviction is like, ‘Oh, it’s a result of irresponsibility, it’s bad spending habits.’ But if ... you’re spending 80 percent of your income on rent, eviction is much more of an inevitability than an irresponsibility.”

Desmond makes a strong case for a universal housing-voucher program as an effective intervention to guarantee that no low-income households would pay more than 30 percent of their income for rent.

The problem is not a lack of resources, but rather a lack of will to target resources so that they benefit low-income people, especially low-income people of color.

Who gets to live here in 2020?

During more than 15 years of living and working in Minneapolis, I have seen the housing market change dramatically—from boom to bust and now to a time of diminishing affordable housing, stagnant wages, and rising real estate values in some historically disinvested communities of color where higher-educated white households are moving in.

The question I have been asking—along with other organizers, advocates, residents, and policymakers—is this: “Who gets to live in Minneapolis in 2020?”

Preventing displacement and promoting equitable community development will require targeted policies and programs explicitly designed to benefit low-wealth communities of color. We will need to use criteria that measure “Who benefits?” and “To what extent?” as we work to allocate resources to the people who are less well off.

Thinking back to my first day in housing-policy class, I see a lot of self-interest tangled up in the ways our government funds housing subsidies. Let’s be honest: Debates about programs and policies meant to benefit low-income households often are about more than just housing; they’re also debates about value and “deservedness.” To have meaningful, long-term impact, we must combine efforts to advance good policy with efforts to expand the circle of human concern and change the narrative of who is deserving or undeserving of communal support.

Right now, as a country, we have a value gap between homeowners and renters, between whites and people of color, between low-income and upper-income folks. The truth is, we allocate resources to people we value. The more you are valued by society, the more resources you are given.

No matter what we say we believe, white people and wealthier people are valued more than others in America. If you are a middle- or upper-income homeowner, our policies communicate that you deserve support from the government for the cost of housing through the mortgage-interest tax deduction. If you are a low-income renter of color, policies imply that you should work harder and pull yourselves up by your bootstraps and stop asking the government to subsidize your housing costs.

Families living in our cities face many challenges. Race, place, and well-being are highly correlated in America. Cities are experiencing demographic inversion and gentrification pressures as more affluent people choose to live in the center of town. Wages remain stagnant while rents rise. Evictions and forced displacements threaten all too many families. Within this context, we must begin to prioritize and advance policies and practices explicitly to benefit low-income households and families of color.

In her book Responsibility for Justice, feminist scholar Iris Marion Young says real progress in addressing racial inequality and poverty depends on acknowledging that life is not fair, background conditions are not equal, and we are not all starting at the same point. We must challenge the myth of meritocracy, which says that anyone who works hard enough can make it in America. And maybe most important, we need to look at the behavior of the “rest of us”—middle class and wealthy—when addressing issues of poverty in the U.S.

It Starts With Affordable Housing

Three strategies for revitalizing a neighborhood.

1. Preserve affordable housing as a strong percentage of a neighborhood’s housing stock by developing an affordable housing trust fund in your city dedicated to the production and preservation of affordable housing. Institute a “no net loss” policy requiring that all affordable housing units lost through renovation, conversion, or demolition be replaced within the same neighborhood. Establish inclusionary zoning policies requiring that a percentage of units in future market-rate developments be affordable housing units.
2. Prevent involuntary displacement of a neighborhood’s lower-income residents by passing a just-cause eviction ordinance that prevents unfair evictions. These ordinances typically spell out “just causes” for eviction and legal rights for tenants who are faced with eviction, including a clear legal process to be followed by landlords.
3. Support community wealth-building strategies that increase residents’ economic resources, such as rent control policies that set maximum annual rent increases, worker-owned cooperatives, real estate investment cooperatives, community land trusts that provide perpetually affordable home ownership opportunities, and increases in the minimum wage. —NM