51. Brian Jacob and Jens Ludwig, “The Effects of Housing Assistance on Labor Supply: Evidence from a Voucher Lottery,” American Economic Review 102 (2012): 272–304; Mark Shroder, “Does Housing Assistance Perversely Affect Self-Sufficiency? A Review Essay,” Journal of Housing Economics 11 (2002): 381–417; Sandra Newman, Scott Holupka, and Joseph Harkness, “The Long-Term Effects of Housing Assistance on Work and Welfare,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 28 (2009): 81–101.
52. Tellingly, countries with universal housing programs do not have minimum housing standards like America’s limited voucher program does. When everyone in the country can afford decent housing, you don’t need minimum standards because empowered renters can take their voucher elsewhere. Priemus et al., “Housing Vouchers in the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands,” 582.
53. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 201.
54. A universal voucher program would not solve all our problems. Especially in tight markets, vouchers cannot fully shield tenants from rent inflation. Only significant government regulation (like rent control) or market alterations (like expanding housing supply) can do that.
In fact, there is some evidence—it is thin—that our current voucher program might be driving up everybody’s rent: not only voucher holders’ but unassisted renters’ too. The main reason is simple. If millions of poor people opt out of the private market for public housing, that will lower demand and, thus, rent at the bottom of the market. If those people are reintroduced to the private market, voucher in hand, that will increase demand and, with it, rent. One study found that cities with more housing vouchers experienced steeper rent hikes and that, on the whole, vouchers have cost unassisted families more than they have saved assisted ones. (See Scott Susin, “Rent Vouchers and the Price of Low-Income Housing,” Journal of Public Economics 83 [2002]: 109–52.) And landlord how-to guides offer the following advice: “I also like to check the going rate for public housing, i.e., government funded rental subsidies, as a benchmark of what you can command in rent.” (Bryan M. Chavis, Buy It, Rent It, Profit! Make Money as a Landlord in Any Real Estate Market [New York: Touchstone, 2009], 70.) Studies also have found no relationship between the concentration of voucher holders and the overall price of rental housing. For example, the Experimental Housing Allowance Program (EHAP) found that housing vouchers had a negligible effect on marketwide rents. William Apgar has attributed this result to the fact that markets were insufficiently saturated with vouchers and that rents were artificially depressed during the study’s time period. Drawing on the EHAP’s findings, simulation studies conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Urban Institute “suggested that a housing allowance could indeed trigger significant price increases for both recipients and nonrecipients, as well as encourage disinvestment and abandonment of units that do not meet program standards.” See William Apgar Jr., “Which Housing Policy Is Best?,” Housing Policy Debate 1 (1990): 1–32, 9. See also Michael Eriksen and Amanda Ross, “Housing Vouchers and the Price of Rental Housing,” working paper, University of Georgia, 2015.
55. Matthew Desmond and Kristin Perkins, “Are Landlords Overcharging Voucher Holders?,” working paper, Harvard University, June 2015; Cutts and Olsen, “Are Section 8 Housing Subsidies Too High?”; Olsen, “Housing Programs for Low-Income Households.” On housing cost regulation, see Tommy Andersson and Lars-Gunnar Svensson, “Non-Manipulable House Allocation with Rent Control,” Econometrica 82 (2014): 507–39; Richard Arnott, “Time for Revisionism on Rent Control?,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 9 (1995): 99–120.
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development recently released a plan to provide voucher holders “with subsidies that better reflect the localized rental market” by proposing “Small Area Fair Market Rents” that “vary by ZIP code and support a greater range of payment standards than can be achieved under existing regulations.” See US Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Establishing a More Effective Fair Market Rent (FMR) System; Using Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs) in Housing Choice Voucher Program Instead of the Current 50th Percentile FMRs; Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking,” Federal Register 80 (June 2, 2015): 31332–36.
56. Bipartisan Policy Center, Housing America’s Future: New Directions for National Policy (Washington, DC: Bipartisan Policy Center, 2013), chapter 4. For technical documentation of projected cost estimates, see Larry Buron, Bulbul Kaul, and Jill Khadduri, Estimates of Voucher-Type and Emergency Rental Assistance for Unassisted Households (Cambridge, MA: Abt Associates, 2012). In 2012, federal expenditures to homeowners amounted to roughly $200 billion. See Will Fischer and Barbara Sard, Chart Book: Federal Housing Spending Is Poorly Matched to Need (Washington, DC: Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 2013). For another cost estimate of an open-enrollment housing voucher program, see William Grigsby and Steven Bourassa, “Section 8: The Time for Fundamental Program Change?,” Housing Policy Debate 15 (2004): 805–34. This study estimated that expanding housing vouchers to renting families below the 50th percentile in median income for their area would require an additional $43 billion, which at the time amounted to 2.5 percent of federal outlays.
57. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 45–47.
58. Ibid. Executive Office of the President, Budget of the United States Government: Fiscal Year 2008 (Washington, DC: Office of the President, 2008).
59. Harrington, The Other America, 157–58. A. Scott Henderson, Housing and the Democratic Ideal: The Life and Thought of Charles Abrams (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Peter Dreier, “Federal Housing Subsidies: Who Benefits and Why?,” in A Right to Housing: Foundation for a New Social Agenda, eds. Rachel Bratt, Michael Stone, and Chester Hartman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 105–38.
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
1. For a fuller explanation, see Matthew Desmond, “Relational Ethnography,” Theory and Society 43 (2014): 547–79. See also Mustafa Emirbayer, “Manifesto for Relational Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 103 (1997): 281–317; Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without a History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982); Stanley Lieberson, Making It Count: The Improvement of Social Research and Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985).
2. Mitchell Duneier, Sidewalk (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 337–39.
3. There’s this idea that ethnography is a “method.” When we see it this way, we tend to ask methodological questions about it. How do I get my project approved by the IRB? When should I write field notes? I tend to think of ethnography as a sensibility, a “way of seeing” as the anthropologist Harry Wolcott once put it. This means that ethnography isn’t something we go and do. It’s a fundamental way of being in the world. If we think of ethnography this way, then we begin to ask different questions. How can I get strangers to talk with me? How can I become more observant? If we approach ethnography as a sensibility, then we can begin cultivating a set of skills or disciplines long before we actually enter the field. It is possible to transform yourself into an ethnographer—day in, day out—so that when the time comes for you to set foot in the field, you already are one. (It also helps to get rid of your smartphone.) Harry Wolcott, Ethnography: A Way of Seeing (Lanham: Rowman Altamira, 1999). On the violence of interpretation, see Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 99.
4. When I lived in the trailer park, I didn’t know that Scott was so depressed that he was planning on killing himself via overdose. Once, he asked me for a large sum of money. I said no and shudder when I recall that I contemplated saying yes.
5. See Mustafa Emirbayer and Matthew Desmond, “Race and Reflexivity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 35 (2012): 574–99.