Affordable housing in uncertain times
About 12 million Americans spend more than half of their annual income on rent or mortgage, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Affordable housing is of particular concern in urban centers, due to high population densities and costs of living. Even after the collapse of the housing bubble, paying rent remains difficult for many Americans, especially in light of current economic circumstances.
The U.S. government’s methods for dealing with the issue of affordable housing have come a long way since the 1970s, when the public projects it instituted became nests of crime and poverty. The ineffectiveness of the projects indicates the need for a new approach, one that many American cities have already embarked upon. Affordable housing can only be effectively addressed by a more multi-faceted approach that creates a variety of different affordable options, develops services that support working-class urban residents, and focuses on forging relationships between all the different entities grappling with this important issue.
Sustainability and a Broader Approach
The collapse of the public projects system highlights the question of sustainability. The problem with projects, Ezra Glenn, MIT professor of urban studies and planning, told the HPR, is the lack of diversity: “If everyone is poor and out of work, you lack some basic capacities and the little of bit of extra that you need to help each other. Then no one can rely on anybody.”
In place of projects, the federal government has now enacted a voucher program, Section Eight, referring to the original subsidy program in the Housing Act of 1937. The main advantage of Section Eight is flexibility, according to Kristine Foye, Deputy Regional Director at HUD. As she explained to the HPR, Section Eight “is not tied to particular units, but allows the voucher holder to search for housing that best serves her or his needs in terms of size, location, amenities and so on.”
Another federal project aimed at affordable housing is HUD’s HOPE VI, which not only identifies nonfunctional buildings and rebuilds them, but also promotes mixed-income communities. Indeed, diversity is now considered as necessary as the physical building itself in maintaining public housing. This shift in policy reflects a broader way of thinking about sustainable affordable housing.
But this multidirectional approach needs to be applied further. As Glenn puts it, “It’s not enough to give a roof over [a tenant’s] head. It’s a combination of things: between housing and education and jobs and healthcare and daycare and all these things put together.” Only with some combination of such services can public housing assistance be sustainable.
Cooperation: the Name of the Game
Implementing a network of services requires close cooperation between local and federal government. Local government knows people’s needs and the most effective methods to deliver the aid, while federal government has the financial resources to do so. The federal government plays an especially important role in smaller cities. Glenn pointed out that big cities such as New York have the resources to initiate their own housing assistance programs, but most other cities lack this capability.
In addition to intergovernmental cooperation, effective efforts require cooperation between government and nonprofits. The Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, a nonprofit that provides classes on homeownership, offers one example of the benefits of collaboration. MAHA and MassHousing, a quasi-public agency, have joint interest in the mortgage assistance program SoftSecond. While MassHousing tracks state funds and maintains relationships with banks, MAHA engages in the groundwork of educating homeowners. The relationship is symbiotic. As Thomas Callahan, MAHA’s Executive Director, notes, “It’s not that we can’t do what they do,” but “hiring people to punch in numbers in banks and work with data … detracts from our main mission.
Discovering opportunities for this sort of cooperation can only improve affordable housing initiatives. As Tony Ucciferri of the San Francisco Housing Authority commented to the HPR, the city’s Section Eight waiting list has more than halved since 2001, when the program first opened. This change is due to multidirectional thinking and the increasing awareness that cooperation with nonprofits is important, if still lacking. The problem of affordable housing will only become more urgent in this era of economic distress, but Americans have a far richer set of approaches to the problem at their disposal now than in the days of giant public housing projects.