Joshua K. Leon
“The cost of living in Oakland is outrageous,” Ieshia Moss says as she shows me around her community on Twenty-Fourth and Wood Street. She’s right. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland, California, is about $2,200 a month, well beyond r means. And so, like everyone else in her encampment, Moss has constructed a hut out of discarded junk.
“Just because we live on the street doesn’t mean we’re homeless,” Moss insists.
The encampment, which houses about two dozen people, has existed for nearly five years. During that time, homelessness has increased by the thousands in Alameda County, which includes Oakland, due in part to cuts in funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). According to a 2015 report, “the recent loss of redevelopment funds reduced the city’s annual affordable housing funds from $20–25 million to $5–7 million.”
The situation is not likely to improve anytime soon. HUD’s controversial secretary, Ben Carson, voices at best tepid support for his own department’s existence, let alone its mission of providing fair housing.
Lisa Rice, executive vice president of the National Fair Housing Alliance, faults Trump for tapping operatives to head federal agencies. “My fears are that there are people in Carson’s ear who don’t know anything about public housing or who fully understand and are working to undermine it,” she says.
Carson backed the President’s call to severely slash funding for HUD, but Congress refused to go along, restoring the proposed cuts and more in March. Undaunted, Carson proposed significantly raising the rents of families living in subsidized public housing. The Make Affordable Housing Work Act, which needs Congressional approval, would raise the share of rent paid by public housing residents from 30 percent to 35 percent of household income.
Carson’s apparent indifference to the plight of people barely able to afford housing comes as the nation faces a historic cost-of-living crisis. According to HUD’s own estimates, more than 550,000 people were homeless in the United States last year. And Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies estimated that 18.8 million U.S. households were severely burdened in 2015, meaning they devoted at least half of their incomes to housing expenses.
Ben Carson voices at best tepid support for his own department’s existence and its mission of providing fair housing.
“Oh my God, these prices are terrible,” Rachel Johnson tells me by phone about her housing search in the Miami area.
Johnson is an organizer for the Faces of HUD Housing Unity Project, which connects tenants in subsidized housing. She lodges with friends, helping them with their own housing struggles. Several years ago, she got in trouble when taking care of her routinely sick daughter made retaining jobs difficult. In greater Miami, more than half of families spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent, one of the highest rates in the nation.
Johnson lists the jobs she’s taken to afford rent, from secretarial work and bartending to collecting cans. Her income often isn’t enough. At one point, Johnson slept in her car in a Walmart parking lot while working shifts as a bartender.
“My life was a series of evictions,” Johnson says.
These experiences convinced her to join Right To The City Alliance, a national group that operates as a network of local movements. Now Johnson keeps track of buildings that receive Section 8 funding through HUD, which are subject to inspections but may pass even though they shouldn’t. She’s worked with tenants who are living with permanently broken appliances, mold, and infestations. If they complain, their landlords may retaliate.
“HUD lowered the standards,” Johnson argues. “If you have a hole in the wall, it could pass. This housing is unsafe, unsanitary, and harmful.”
Research by Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond found that displacements are common even in so-called affordable cities. In 2016, one in twenty-five renter households in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, had eviction judgments. In Richmond, Virginia, this figure was an astonishing one in nine. Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Evicted, presents in grave detail the transience facing low-income tenants in Milwaukee absent adequate public housing funds from sources like HUD.
And more people than ever are affected because renters now outnumber homeowners in the 100 largest U.S. cities. Nationally, they comprise 35 percent of the population. Today’s percentage of rent-burdened households is double what it was in 1960 and well over what it was in 2000, according to the NYU Furman Center.
Back at the Oakland encampment, Moss tells me of deaths that have occurred among residents, including one due to violence and another from a treatable respiratory illness. She warns about the “flesh eating disease” she says infects people living in tents. Health fears are a common concern here.
“My momma’s not gonna die out here,” Moss says, more to herself than to me.
Another encampment resident, an elderly woman named Darleen Bailey, laments rising rents in Oakland, which led to her eviction. “A long time ago, the rent was reasonable,” she tells me. Now she is on a potentially years-long waiting list for public housing. Recently, she toured a market-rate apartment. The monthly rent was $2,600.
The Trump Administration’s proposed 2019 budget would have eliminated 200,000 vouchers for low-income families, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. It would have cut HUD funding by $6.8 billion overall, or 14.2 percent, slashing public housing by nearly half.
In March, in a remarkable rebuke to the President, Congress passed an omnibus spending bill that gave HUD a $4.6 billion increase. This included hikes in money for housing vouchers, homeless assistance, and a public housing fund. Housing advocates were pleasantly surprised.
“That’s the result of advocacy,” argues Diane Yentel, president and chief executive officer of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a public policy group. “We needed to push to make sure HUD got its fair share, and it did this time around. We need to keep pushing.”
But the bigger picture is that HUD’s funding increased from disastrous to merely inadequate. The 2011 spending limits agreed to by President Barack Obama went hard on HUD, and housing assistance had declined sharply each year since. HUD has less than half the workforce it did in the pre-Reagan years. Funding for most of its programs has either stalled or declined.
“It really puts a lot of pressure on small housing authorities,” says Susan J. Popkin, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, noting that Cairo, Illinois, lost all of its public housing because repairs were too expensive. “People don’t even think about the implications beyond large cities.”
Prior to the budget bailout, HUD sent Congress a dire report showing that “severe housing problems are on the rise.” It said that, in 2015, 8.3 million households earned less than half their region’s median income, and shelled out more than half of that income in rent. “Nationwide,” the report found, “only sixty-six affordable units exist for every 100 extremely low-income renters.”
“The housing mismatch is profound, and the private market will never be able to meet that completely,” says Liz Ryan Murray, project director for the website CarsonWatch.
Most of the housing being built by for-profit developers is high-end. The smallest vacancy rates are in low-income housing. Between 2005 and 2015, the nation lost 260,000 units leasing at below $800 per month. During the same span, units leasing for more than $2,000 increased by 97 percent.
“We have a crisis in housing and people realize that,” says Hang Liu, who worked in the public affairs office at HUD before departing during the Trump Administration’s early months. Morale within the agency is “not good,” he says. “It’s probably difficult for [HUD employees] to stay, but they’re needed right now.”
Last year, an investigative piece by Alec MacGillis in New York magazine offered the most stunning details to date of the disarray under Carson’s leadership. It found, among other things, that the White House did not even have nominees to run major parts of HUD, while important positions were being filled by unqualified candidates. Career HUD employees described a demoralized, directionless workforce. Those trying to take initiative in Carson’s HUD reported discouragement from the leadership.
In the private sector, nonprofit fair housing organizations often rely on federal funds, explains Rice of the National Fair Housing Alliance. These groups investigate complaints of discrimination on the basis of gender, race, and disability. Rice says dysfunction in HUD’s grant funding system has forced some centers to downsize and others to close.
‘I think [Ben Carson] unfortunately takes his own story and applies that to everyone in the country, which is obviously very problematic.’
“They’re devastated and they’re desperate,” Rice says. “If HUD is not making sure funding for these organizations is there, they will not be able to assist.”
In March, Carson’s HUD removed the terms “discrimination” and “inclusivity” from its mission statement and replaced them with “self-sufficiency.” The agency also delayed the implementation of an Obama-era requirement that cities map housing segregation and submit integration plans, spurring a lawsuit in May by fair-housing advocates. Many cities had embraced the rule—Philadelphia, for instance, had already completed its report—while others breathed sighs of relief.
“If you’re living in a jurisdiction where the leaders don’t value civil rights, it’s more difficult,” Rice says. It’s unclear whether those cities who want to go forward with the rule “will get the technical assistance they need from HUD.”
Yentel, of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, worries about the bootstraps mentality championed by Carson, based on his personal history of having grown up poor to become a famed neurosurgeon. Carson, with whom she has met several times and appeared with in public, has described poverty as a “state of mind” that can be overcome by individual initiative. Hence, HUD is pushing to intensify work requirements in public housing where most tenants are elderly, disabled, or already working. Yentel sees this as a recipe for more evictions.
“I think he unfortunately takes his own story and applies that to everyone in the country, which is obviously very problematic,” she says.
The Trump tax cut made it less attractive for developers to use low-income-housing tax credits, the largest driver of low-income housing. This will keep an estimated 235,000 homes from being built or preserved over the next decade, one analysis found. Although funding for these programs rose by 12.5 percent, Yentel says it would have taken a 20 percent increase to recoup the loss.
And HUD inexplicably delayed a pilot program aimed at making higher-cost neighborhoods accessible to the poor. Vital as it is, Section 8 assistance potentially reinforces segregation because vouchers often aren’t worth enough for the most desirable neighborhoods. The new formula increases their value in these zip codes. Thanks to a judge’s intervention, the program will expand to two-dozen cities.
During my visit to the Oakland encampment, I am taken to see a well-regarded hut that belongs to a man named Greg. It has a patio, a full bedroom, even a second story, all made out of discarded materials. It will look better next time, Greg promises. He’s still fixing it up.
The hut reminds me of the slums I’ve seen in developing countries. In fact, around the time I toured it, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing had just visited the Bay Area and declared the United States in breach of Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the right to housing.
“There’s a cruelty here that I don’t think I’ve seen,” said the official, Leilani Farha, referring to tales of people in the encampment losing their few belongings to encampment sweeps.
Nearby, in San Francisco’s struggling Tenderloin district, the concierge in the Hotel Epik’s quirky designer lobby quotes me a rate of $150 per night. If I’m a business traveler, the Epik offers monthly rents starting at $1,595 plus an equivalent deposit. The units are 120 square feet with shared bathrooms and kitchens. And the rents, while not outlandish for big-city dwellings, are unaffordable to the people who used to live here.
This hotel was, until recently, called the New Pacific Hotel, which catered to the city’s poorest residents and served as a lifeline to the otherwise homeless.
“We need to expose Big Real Estate as a threat to democracy, like Big Tobacco and Big Oil,” says Tony Roshan Samara, who is on the steering committee of the Right to the City Alliance. “They have a stranglehold on local governments.”
The for-profit industry at the heart of the American housing system, Samara says, is buying local elections and ballot initiatives. The real estate lobby is among the biggest and most powerful in Washington, D.C., having rung up more than $100 million in lobby outlays in 2016.
“The real estate-backed politicians vote against us no matter what,” Samara says.“Our ability to change legislation in Washington is pretty negligible.”
So Samara and his group are focused on local networking, through its Homes For All Campaign. He calls the approach translocalism, because it involves partnering, sharing stories and knowledge. He works in the Bay Area suburbs, places like San Mateo, Fremont, and Redwood City.
Erin L. Leon
On the state and local level, housing advocates have chalked up some notable wins. San Jose’s city council recently passed new protections requiring just cause for evictions. California put up billions in new funding for housing, buffering the state from HUD cuts. Voters in Oakland passed a bond measure for affordable housing, alongside new tenant protections. And New York City is guaranteeing legal defense for tenants facing eviction.
Funding shortfalls and indifference from the top of the Trump Administration will continue to make progress on these issues difficult. And Americans will still have experiences like that of Kennetha Patterson.
The resident of Nashville, Tennessee, lived in subsidized affordable housing, able to support her family of seven on a $50,000 annual income from her health care job. But in 2016, she was involved in a head-on crash that caused her to miss work and fall behind on rent. She says management agreed to let her catch up but changed its mind and evicted her after she asked for repairs to a cracked bathtub.
Patterson couldn’t find another apartment in gentrifying Nashville, and lived with her husband’s parents for a year until finding housing an hour outside the city. She’s not alone. Half of the city’s renters live in what is considered unaffordable housing.
“So many families that are being pushed out have nowhere to go,” she says. “It’s like the city is just replacing everybody.”
Patterson is now a full-time organizer with Homes for All Nashville, training tenants to resist predatory landlords. She also fights for things like universal rent control across the South, where eviction rates tend to exceed even the expensive coasts. South Carolina’s eviction rate was ten times California’s in 2016. Almost all the top-twenty evicting cities are in the South and Midwest.
“I don’t want any other family to feel the pain I felt,” she says.
Yet in Nashville, Patterson says, HUD is pushing “mixed income” developments that prioritize market-rate units over badly needed affordable housing. As she puts it, “That spells displacement to us.”
Joshua K. Leon is an associate professor of political science and international studies at Iona College. His writing has appeared in outlets including the Chicago Tribune, Dissent, and Metropolis. His book is called The Rise of Global Health. He lives in Manhattan.