housing

We have the money. We__e just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. 57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. 58 Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total ) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion. Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. 59 If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent__t least when it comes to housing__e should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians_ canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.

Poor families are living above their means, in apartments they cannot afford. The thing is, those apartments are already at the bottom of the market. 24 Our cities have become unaffordable to our poorest families, and this problem is leaving a deep and jagged scar on the next generation.

If you count all forms of involuntary displacement__ormal and informal evictions, landlord foreclosures, building condemnations__ou discover that between 2009 and 2011 more than 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced a forced move.

Often, evicted families also lose the opportunity to benefit from public housing because Housing Authorities count evictions and unpaid debt as strikes when reviewing applications. And so people who have the greatest need for housing assistance__he rent-burdened and evicted__re systematically denied it.

When tenants relinquished protections by falling behind in rent or otherwise breaking their rental agreement, landlords could respond_by neglecting repairs. Or as Sherrena put it to tenants: __f I give you a break, you give me a break._ Tenants could trade their dignity and children__ health for a roof over their head. 13 Between 2009 and 2011, nearly half of all renters in Milwaukee experienced a serious and lasting housing problem. 14 More than 1 in 5 lived with a broken window; a busted appliance; or mice, cockroaches, or rats for more than three days. One-third experienced clogged plumbing that lasted more than a day. And 1 in 10 spent at least a day without heat. African American households were the most likely to have these problems__s were those where children slept. Yet the average rent was the same, whether an apartment had housing problems or did_not. Tenants who fell behind either had to accept unpleasant, degrading, and sometimes dangerous housing conditions or be evicted. But from a business point of view, this arrangement could be lucrative.

I never doubted I would have a roof over my head, a school to go to, enough to to eat, books (and newspapers) to read, a safe neighborhood to play in and a doctor to see if I got sick.My parents and grandparents made sure I knew I was lucky.

A bachelor, a studio, those were the names for that kind of apartment. Separate entrance it would say in the ads, and that meant you could have sex, unobserved.

Arleen__ children did not always have a home. They did not always have food. Arleen was not always able to offer them stability; stability cost too much. She was not always able to protect them from dangerous streets; those streets were her streets. Arleen sacrificed for her boys, fed them as best she could, clothed them with what she had. But when they wanted more than she could give, she had ways, some subtle, others not, of telling them they didn__ deserve it.

There probably was a time when the idea of having a toilet inside a house was repulsive.

Housing without people, and people without housing.

Arleen thanked Pana. Getting off the phone, she thanked Jesus. She smiled. When she smiled she looked like a different person. The press had loosened its grip. From landlords, she had heard eighty-nine nos but one yes. Jori accepted his mother__ high five. He and his brother would have to switch schools. Jori didn__ care. He switched schools all the time. Between seventh and eighth grades, he had attended five different schools__hen he went at all. At the domestic-violence shelter alone, Jori had racked up seventeen consecutive absences. Arleen saw school as a higher-order need, something to worry about after she found a house.

For families to access affordable housing, they often need legal representation that takes their side against abusive landlords.

There is no sadder tale in the annals of architecture than the virtual disappearance of the defining architectural form of the Modern Movement - publicly sponsored housing.

Again, we find that the space standards of twenty-first century luxury are below the required minimum for dockworkers in 1962.

If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man _ and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages _ it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Myth: US housing market is in recovery. Fact: Big banks have been hiding their bloated home inventory, seized by virtue of home foreclosures.

Many people in Nixon__ camp had genuine faith in affirmative action. It wasn__ designed to fail, but it wasn__ designed to succeed, either; the intent behind it was not rooted in a desire to help black people attain equal standing in society. It was riot insurance. It was a financial incentive for blacks to stay in their own communities and out of the suburbs. (183)

It was the American middle class. No one's house cost more than two or three year's salary, and I doubt the spread in annual wages (except for the osteopath) exceeded more than five thousand dollars. And other than the doctor (who made house calls), the store managers, the minister, the salesman, and the banker, everyone belonged to a union. That meant they worked a forty-hour week, had the entire weekend off (plus two to four weeks' paid vacation in the summer), comprehensive medical benefits, and job security. In return for all that, the country became the most productive in the world and in our little neighborhood it meant your furnace was always working, your kids could be dropped off at the neighbors without notice, you could run next door anytime to borrow a half-dozen eggs, and the doors to all the homes were never locked -- because who would need to steal anything if they already had all that they needed?