Heidi Breaux didn’t want to send her two daughters back to school. Her eldest, who is thirteen, has asthma, putting her at greater risk of getting sick from COVID-19. But, with no childcare and facing eviction, Breaux had no choice but to return to work.
“I’m stuck because I should keep my kids home for the safety of my child, but for me to be able to pay bills and make money, I have to work,” Breaux tells The Progressive. “It’s scary because every three days you’re getting a text message or a letter from the school telling you a teacher got exposed to COVID-19 or somebody tested positive. What if my child catches it because I sent her to school?”
“Real estate prices and incomes have not kept pace with one another.”
Last spring, Breaux, a thirty-five-year-old single mother, was working two jobs: entering data at the Louisiana Department of Revenue and clerking at a local grocery store. She worked 7:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Friday but made well over enough to cover the $750-a-month rent for her family’s two-bedroom apartment in East Baton Rouge Parish in Louisiana.
But Breaux, fearing the risk of exposing her daughter, quit the grocery store job at the end of May. A month later, after her babysitter got COVID-19, Breaux was forced to quit her second job. The unemployment she received was nowhere near enough to cover her costs. Eventually, she found a job as a custodian at a nonprofit ministry making $10 an hour. But by then, she’d fallen behind on rent.
“I’m paying as I can, but I’m playing catch-up with everybody,” Breaux says. “I’m behind on my car note, my electric bill—everything is behind.” Even with the temporary eviction moratorium established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Breaux says she’s being threatened with losing her apartment.
“I try not to let my kids know,” she says. “I don’t want them knowing anything of what we’re going through. I’m over $4,600 in the hole with my landlord, including all the late fees and everything else they added in. There’s really no way. I don’t know how I’m going to do it.”
Renters across the nation, who account for an increasing share of the population in recent years, are in similar situations. In August, the Aspen Institute reported that thirty to forty million Americans are at risk of being evicted. By late October, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 16 percent of tenants were behind on rent, and half of tenants had less than full confidence in their ability to pay the next month’s rent on time. Economists estimate that the amount of back rent owed throughout the nation could already top $70 billion.
This is a problem for both renters and landlords, especially mom-and-pop operations. An October survey found that more than a third of landlords did not receive full rent payments from the month before.
The United States has been struggling to keep its residents stably housed since long before the advent of COVID-19. Urban, suburban, and rural communities alike are suffering from a lack of affordable housing.
In 2019, nearly half of all renters were cost-burdened, meaning they spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing, and almost a quarter spent more than 50 percent. This lack of affordability has fueled evictions—3.7 million are filed every year—and exacerbated a homelessness crisis in which more than 500,000 people are homeless on any given night.
“We have an abdication of the federal government’s commitment to its role in affordable housing.”
“Real estate prices and incomes have not kept pace with one another,” says Priya Jayachandran, who previously served at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under President Barack Obama and is now president of the National Housing Trust, a nonprofit focused on affordable housing development and policy. “You’ve had—just like you’ve seen with COVID-19—some people doing really well and others falling further and further behind.”
At the same time, Jayachandran adds, the federal government’s investment in housing has stayed “relatively flat or gone down as a percentage of GDP over the last thirty years.”
Indeed, three out of four low-income renters who qualify for federal rental assistance don’t get it because of budget constraints. Meanwhile, the United States is short millions of homes, and the situation is far worse for those who earn the least. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, for every 100 extremely low-income renter households, there are only thirty-six affordable and available rental homes.
The good news is that housing has finally started to garner the national attention it has long deserved, becoming a top priority for voters and, as a consequence, politicians. Every major candidate in the Democratic presidential primaries released a housing plan, and the topic came up regularly on the campaign trail and debate stages.
President Joe Biden has repeatedly committed to making housing a priority, and Vice President Kamala Harris worked to tackle the issue as a California Senator and attorney general.
And while Biden’s pick of Representative Marcia Fudge, Democrat of Ohio, to lead HUD has alarmed some housing advocates, given her lack of experience in the field, others are comforted by her commitment to racial justice and poverty eradication.
Overall, Biden’s housing platform reveals a progressive vision that echoes much of what housing advocates have been calling for, including its declaration that “housing should be a right, not a privilege.”
This concept—that housing is as essential to life as food or education—has not been a key part of federal policy since President Franklin D. Roosevelt included the “right of every family to a decent home” as part of an “economic bill of rights” in 1944. Housing justice advocates and grassroots campaigns, led in large part by people of color, have pushed the idea back into the mainstream.
“Changing the framing from ‘housing is just a good, a commodity’ to ‘housing is a human right’ lays the rhetorical base to get the policies that actually implement that right,” says Eric Tars, legal director of the National Homelessness Law Center. “It changes the conversation from one where every year housing advocates are feeling lucky if they’re able to maintain the existing HUD budget at its severely inadequate levels to one where it’s up to the federal government to make sure that that need is met.”
Tars compares this to Obama’s framing of health care access as a right. “Several years later we got Obamacare, which is not a full right to health care, but it was a major step beyond what had been done for decades prior,” he says. “That’s the kind of shift we need.”
To that end, Biden wants to make rental assistance an entitlement, like food stamps or Medicaid, by guaranteeing Section 8 housing choice vouchers—which subsidize a portion of low-income tenants’ rent—to every eligible household.
The Section 8 program, as it stands, is flawed. Millions of eligible participants are shut out due to the program’s underfunding, and those that do get vouchers often face discrimination (only fourteen states ban landlords from discriminating based on rental income source). Still, by fully funding the program, outcomes could be drastically improved, experts say.
And, for renters who don’t quite qualify for Section 8 but still struggle to cover housing costs, Biden has proposed a new renter’s tax credit that would limit their rent and utilities to 30 percent of their income.
Ever since President Ronald Reagan slashed federal housing assistance in the 1980s, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have consistently underfunded HUD and housing programs managed by other agencies.
Today, public housing is in shambles. More than 10,000 units are demolished or offloaded to the private market every year because the government can’t afford to keep up with maintenance, a backlog that’s reached $70 billion. (For comparison, HUD’s entire annual budget was $49 billion for 2020.) The waiting list for public housing stretches 1.6 million families long, and the wait can take years.
To compensate, policymakers have increasingly entrusted housing to the market, incentivizing developers to step in. But private developers are largely “filling the gap at the top,” according to Noëlle Porter, director of government affairs for the National Housing Law Project. (Luxury units accounted for nearly 90 percent of new apartment construction in 2017 and 2018.)
“The deregulation of housing in America has led to a real boon for developers, and alongside that, we have an abdication of the federal government’s commitment to its role in affordable housing,” Porter says. “It’s a continued investment in the rich with this belief in some sort of trickle down and a continued belief that the private market will do what the government stops doing, which we’ve proven is just not true.”
In contrast, advocates say, reinvestment in the lowest-income housing will reduce competition for middle-income housing and alleviate costs for Americans across the board. Biden has outlined a $100 billion Affordable Housing Fund, including $65 billion for state housing authorities and a $20 billion boost for affordable housing production and preservation.
Importantly, Biden’s housing platform also takes aim at the structural racism baked into U.S. housing policy. The racial wealth gap in this country can be traced back in part to a history of state-sanctioned discriminatory housing practices, like redlining, which shut Black people out of the housing market.
In a perverse twist, leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, banks and mortgage lenders explicitly targeted communities of color for exploitative loans (“reverse redlining”), leaving them with much higher foreclosure rates than their white counterparts. The ensuing mass buy-up by real estate conglomerates of foreclosed homes in predominantly low-income and Black and brown neighborhoods has been pointed to as a major factor in displacement and gentrification.
The legacy of these policies is also inextricably linked to health outcomes, in direct and indirect ways, as the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare.
“Think about the after-effects of redlining,” says Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “It really took away wealth and development in communities, which caused communities to lack the infrastructure in health care for people to be able to maintain their health. It took away jobs, and because they don’t have jobs in their community, they have to travel to their jobs, which means they’re on public transportation and more exposed to COVID-19.”
On top of being more likely to both contract COVID-19 and die from it, Black and Latinx Americans have suffered higher rates of unemployment and housing instability than their white counterparts during the pandemic.
Biden, as part of his housing plan, wants to require any state or municipality receiving certain federal dollars to replace exclusionary zoning laws that discourage low-income housing with inclusive strategies to promote such development. The Administration also backs legislation introduced last year by Representative James Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, and Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, that would provide low-income tenants facing eviction with free legal assistance. (Roughly 90 percent of landlords have legal representation during eviction proceedings compared to only 10 percent of renters.)
Much of Biden’s ambitious housing agenda will require the cooperation of a sharply divided Congress. Most recently, it took Congressional lawmakers eight months to pass a second desperately needed stimulus package. In the interim, city and state revenues plunged, and millions of Americans lost jobs, faced housing insecurity, and contracted COVID-19.
Still, there are steps Biden can take through executive action and other avenues, including closing loopholes in the CDC eviction moratorium and reversing the Trump Administration’s policies to strip formerly incarcerated, undocumented, transgender, and Black and brown people of housing protections.
While housing advocates are mostly buoyed by Biden’s plans, they’re well aware that a political platform is far from a guaranteed reality. In the midst of an economic recession, a public health disaster, and a climate crisis, housing may once again be relegated to a secondary issue with the administration opting for stopgap solutions instead of a complete overhaul.
The Biden housing agenda would cost an estimated $640 billion over ten years, a huge sum commensurate with the scope of the problem (and far less than Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cuts). For advocates and many struggling Americans, reimagining the nation’s approach to housing is an essential investment.
Back in Baton Rouge, Heidi Breaux constantly fears she’ll return home to another eviction letter on her door. “I break down daily,” she says quietly. “I don’t know if tomorrow we’ll be living in my car . . . and there’s no help, and no way to even get it.”