The Real Housing Crisis

The availability of affordable housing in America's cities is only getting worse.  It's easy to blame NIMBY gentrification in a country where 90% of your wealth is tied up in your home (and the rest of us are just stuck being 10% as wealthy at max) and while local zoning regulations and homeowners voting to make housing as expensive as possible in order to raise home prices are both serious issues, let's not forget landlords and homebuilders looking to make as much money as possible on rents and scarcity.

One morning last year, Michele Carter woke up to find an eviction notice slipped under her apartment door. She had to move, she was later told, to make way for the renovation of her high-rise and the higher-paying tenants it would bring.

Ms. Carter, 66, an Air Force veteran who lives on a small monthly disability check, did not panic, at least not at first. She considered herself one of the lucky handful of her building’s tenants who had what they called a “golden lottery ticket” — a voucher from the federal government’s Section 8 housing program that would allow them to move anywhere in Philadelphia with a guaranteed subsidy paying 70 percent of the rent.

But she quickly discovered that her Section 8 voucher, for decades an essential way of providing low-income people with affordable housing, had diminishing value.

“I saw this flier for an apartment up on the wall in the building. It looked perfect. Then I get to the bottom, and in big black letters was written, ‘No Vouchers,’” said Ms. Carter, who ended up moving in with relatives for 13 months before being placed in a senior supportive living complex earlier this year. “That kind of thing happened over and over. I wore my eyes out looking at ads.”

For most of its existence, the main shortcoming of the Section 8 program, created in 1974 as an alternative to ghettoizing public housing projects, was its inability to keep up with demand. But the recent economic boom in Philadelphia, long one of the most affordable big cities in the Washington-to-Boston corridor, has led to rent increases even in poor and working-class neighborhoods, and many landlords are now refusing to accept the vouchers when they can get higher rents, without the bureaucratic red tape that plagues the program, on the open market.

A survey by the nonpartisan Urban Institute, commissioned by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and released in August, documented the problem in stark terms. It found that 67 percent of Philadelphia’s landlords refused to even consider voucher holders, some candidly citing the low subsidies and their desire to cash in on a hot market. The rejection rates were even higher in Fort Worth and Los Angeles, where three-quarters of landlords turned away Section 8 tenants.

Put at risk by these market forces is the future of a core federal housing program that now serves 2.2 million low-income families and was started with a simple goal: to enable those families to escape neighborhoods increasingly segregated along racial and economic lines for a place with decent housing and better schools, stores and transportation.

“It is a crisis,” said Rasheedah Phillips, managing attorney at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia’s housing unit, which defends tenants in court. “It used to be that Section 8 was basically a guarantee of shelter for families, for the elderly, for disabled people, but now it’s becoming much harder for tenants to get landlords to take the vouchers. And it’s only getting worse as the market heats up.”

Remember, under the Trump regime and HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Section 8 housing has already taken a big funding hit.  With the coming economic recession caused by Trump's trade war, we're going to see homelessness explode exponentially across the country.  It's going to be bad.

Remember the reasons why.