Would a universal housing program be a disincentive to work? It is a fair and important question. One study has shown that housing assistance leads to a modest reduction in work hours and earnings, but others have found no effect.51 In truth, the status quo is much more of a threat to self-sufficiency than any housing program could be. Families crushed by the high cost of housing cannot afford vocational training or extra schooling that would allow them to acquire new skills; and many cannot stay in one place long enough to hold down the same job. Affordable housing is a human-capital investment, just like job programs or education, one that would strengthen and steady the American workforce. By and large, the poor do not want some small life. They don’t want to game the system or eke out an existence; they want to thrive and contribute: to become nurses (that was Vanetta’s dream) or run their own charities (that was Arleen’s). A stable home would extend to them the opportunity to realize those dreams.
Landlords in most states are not obligated to accept families with housing vouchers, and many don’t because they shun extra building-code mandates or the administrative hassle. A universal voucher program would take their concerns seriously. Some building codes are critical to maintaining safe and decent housing; others are far less so. Enforcing a strict building code in apartments where voucher holders live can be an unnecessary burden on landlords and drive up costs.52 But even if code enforcement and program administration were made much more reasonable and landlord-friendly, some property owners—particularly those operating in prosperous areas—would still turn away voucher holders. They simply don’t want to house “those people.” If we continue to permit this kind of discrimination, we consign voucher holders to certain landlords who own property in certain neighborhoods. Doing so denies low-income families the opportunity to move into economically healthy and safe neighborhoods and hobbles our ability to promote integration through social policy. Accordingly, a universal voucher program would not only strive to make participation attractive to landlords, it would also mandate participation. Just as we have outlawed discrimination on the basis of race or religion, discrimination against voucher holders would be illegal under a universal voucher program.
A well-designed program would ensure a reasonable rent that rose at the rate of inflation and include flexible provisions allowing landlords to receive a modest rate of return. It would also provide them with steadier rental income, less turnover, and fewer evictions. If we are going to house most low-income families in the private rental market, then that market must remain profitable. “The business of housing the poor,” Jacob Riis wrote 125 years ago, “if it is to amount to anything, must be a business, as it was business with our fathers to put them where they are. As charity, pastime, or fad, it will miserably fail, always and everywhere.”53 And yet, housing is too fundamental a human need, too central to children’s health and development, too important to expanding economic opportunities and stabilizing communities to be treated as simply a business, a crude investment vehicle, something that just “cashes out.”
Making a universal housing program as efficient as possible would require regulating costs. Expanding housing vouchers without stabilizing rent would be asking taxpayers to subsidize landlords’ profits.54 Today, landlords overcharge voucher holders simply because they can. In distressed neighborhoods, where voucher holders tend to live, market rent is lower than what landlords are allowed to charge voucher holders, according to metropolitan-wide rent ceilings set by program administrators. So the Housing Choice Voucher Program likely costs not millions but billions of dollars more than it should, resulting in the unnecessary denial of help to hundreds of thousands of families. In fact, economists have argued that the current housing voucher program could be expanded to serve all poor families in America without additional spending if we prevented overcharging and made the program more efficient.55
Even if we did nothing to make the voucher program more cost-effective, we still could afford to offer this crucial benefit to all low-income families in America. In 2013, the Bipartisan Policy Center estimated that expanding housing vouchers to all renting families below the 30th percentile in median income for their area would require an additional $22.5 billion, increasing total spending on housing assistance to around $60 billion. The figure is likely much less, as the estimate does not account for potential savings the expanded program would bring in the form of preventing homelessness, reducing health-care costs, and curbing other costly consequences of the affordable-housing crisis.56 It is not a small figure, but it is well within our capacity.
We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners.57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined.58 Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion.
Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes.59 If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent—at least when it comes to housing—we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians’ canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.
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A universal voucher program is but one potential policy recommendation. Let others come. Establishing the basic right to housing in America could be realized in any number of ways—and probably should be. What works best in New York might fail in Los Angeles. The solution to housing problems in booming Houston or Atlanta or Seattle is not what is most needed in the deserted metropolises of the Rust Belt or Florida’s impoverished suburbs or small towns dotting the landscape. One city must build; another must destroy. If our cities and towns are rich in diversity—with unique textures and styles, gifts and problems—so too must be our solutions.
Whatever our way out of this mess, one thing is certain. This degree of inequality, this withdrawal of opportunity, this cold denial of basic needs, this endorsement of pointless suffering—by no American value is this situation justified. No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
When I was growing up, my father was a preacher, and my industrious mother worked everywhere. Money was always tight. Sometimes the gas got shut off, and Mom cooked dinner on top of our wood-burning stove. She knew how to make do, having grown up across from a junkyard in Columbus, Georgia, and, later, in San Francisco’s infamous Ford Hotel. She had done better for herself and expected us kids to do the same, to go off to college even if she and my father weren’t able to help pay for it. My father drilled this point home in his own way. Whenever we drove past a line of bent-over people, sweating in the sun for some lousy job, my father would turn to us and ask, “Do you want to do that for the rest of your life?”
“No.”
“Then go to college.”