housing

In 2013, 1 percent of poor renters lived in rent-controlled units; 15 percent lived in public housing; and 17 percent received a government subsidy, mainly in the form of a rent-reducing voucher. The remaining 67 percent_2 of every 3 poor renting families__eceived no federal assistance. 32 This drastic shortfall in government support, coupled with rising rent and utility costs alongside stagnant incomes, is the reason why most poor renting families today spend most of their income on housing.

For almost a century, there has been broad consensus in America that families should spend no more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Until recently, most renting families met this goal. But times have changed__n Milwaukee and across America. Every year in this country, people are evicted from their homes not by the tens of thousands or even the hundreds of thousands but by the millions.

The year the police called Sherrena, Wisconsin saw more than one victim per week murdered by a current or former romantic partner or relative. 10 After the numbers were released, Milwaukee__ chief of police appeared on the local news and puzzled over the fact that many victims had never contacted the police for help. A nightly news reporter summed up the chief__ views: __e believes that if police were contacted more often, that victims would have the tools to prevent fatal situations from occurring in the future._ What the chief failed to realize, or failed to reveal, was that his department__ own rules presented battered women with a devil__ bargain: keep quiet and face abuse or call the police and face eviction.

It was an old tradition: landlords barring children from their properties. In the competitive postwar housing market of the late 1940s, landlords regularly turned away families with children and evicted tenants who got pregnant. This was evident in letters mothers wrote when applying for public housing. __t present,_ one wrote, __ am living in an unheated attic room with a one-year-old baby_ Everywhere I go the landlords don__ want children. I also have a ten-year-old boy_ I can__ keep him with me because the landlady objects to children. Is there any way that you can help me to get an unfurnished room, apartment, or even an old barn?_ I can__ go on living like this because I am on the verge of doing something desperate._ Another mother wrote, __y children are now sick and losing weight_ I have tried, begged, and pleaded for a place but [it__] always __oo late_ or __orry, no children.___ Another wrote, __he lady where I am rooming put two of my children out about three weeks ago and don__ want me to let them come back_ If I could get a garage I would take it.__hen Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, it did not consider families with children a protected class, allowing landlords to continue openly turning them away or evicting them.

Urban landlords quickly realized that piles of money could be made by creating slums: __aximum profits came, not from providing first-class accommodations for those who could well afford them_ but from crowded slum accommodations, for those whose pennies were scarcer than the rich man__ pounds._ Beginning in the sixteenth century, slum housing would be reserved not only for outcasts, beggars, and thieves but for a large segment of the population.

For many landlords, it was cheaper to deal with the expense of eviction than to maintain their properties; it was possible to skimp on maintenance if tenants were perpetually behind; and many poor tenants would be perpetually behind because their rent was too high.

The profits were staggering. In 1966, a Chicago landlord told a court that on a single property he had made $42,500 in rent but paid only $2,400 in maintenance. When accused of making excessive profits, the landlord simply replied, __hat__ why I bought the building.

Fewer and fewer families can afford a roof over their head. This is among the most urgent and pressing issues facing America today, and acknowledging the breadth and depth of the problem changes the way we look at poverty. For decades, we__e focused mainly on jobs, public assistance, parenting, and mass incarceration. No one can deny the importance of these issues, but something fundamental is missing. We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly all of them have a landlord.

The Hinkstons expected more of their landlord for the money they were paying her. Rent was their biggest expense by far, and they wanted a decent and functional home in return. They wanted things to be fixed when they broke. But if Sherrena wasn__ going to repair her own property, neither were they. The house failed the tenants, and the tenants failed the house.

In 1930, the death rate for Milwaukee__ blacks was nearly 60 percent higher than the citywide rate, due in large part to poor housing conditions.

Most poor people in America were like Arleen: they did not live in public housing or apartments subsidized by vouchers. Three in four families who qualified for assistance received nothing.

Families with children were turned away in as many as 7 in 10 housing searches.

But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality. Because black men were disproportionately incarcerated and black women disproportionately evicted, uniformly denying housing to applicants with recent criminal or eviction records still had an incommensurate impact on African Americans.

It was not that low-income renters didn__ know their rights. They just knew those rights would cost them.

Poor black families were __mmersed in a domestic web of a large number of kin and friends whom they [could] count on,_ wrote the anthropologist Carol Stack in All Our Kin. Those entwined in such a web swapped goods and services on a daily basis. This did little to lift families out of poverty, but it was enough to keep them afloat. But large-scale social transformations__he crack epidemic, the rise of the black middle class, and the prison boom among them__ad frayed the family safety net in poor communities. So had state policies like Aid to Families with Dependent Children that sought to limit __in dependence_ by giving mothers who lived alone or with unrelated roommates a larger stipend than those who lived with relatives.

Today, the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing, and at least one in four dedicates over 70 percent to paying the rent and keeping the lights on.

it is hard to argue that housing is not a fundamental human need. Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.

Universal housing programs have been successfully implemented all over the developed world. In countries that have such programs, every single family with an income below a certain level who meets basic program requirements has a right to housing assistance.