T what? Biden wants a class war? That's news to me!
Also, if our boy nicky got out of his social media hole they'd see that - surprisingly, if you can believe this - inflation isn't just happening in the United States. But politics!
I’m not on social media. I’d appreciate if you’d keep me out of your posts or address me directly.
I'd say the board definitely falls under the realm of social media. And if your perception is what's said here then I'd say that's even much more narrowed and myopic than one would even get on many platforms. And, man, I can't think of anything more direct than addressing you by name. Shall I DM you next time?
Yes
and it couldn’t be more indirect. Unless you @ me or dm then there’s a chance I’ll never see it.
T what? Biden wants a class war? That's news to me!
Also, if our boy nicky got out of his social media hole they'd see that - surprisingly, if you can believe this - inflation isn't just happening in the United States. But politics!
Yup and he is tweeting about it all day today again. He is nothing but a politician, always looking who else to blame for their issues. Joe was never the solution to our real problems, he is part of it. Just was a solution to the bat shit crazy GOP of today.
OK more than anything I'm here for the class warfare and I'm still shocked to hear he's the one carrying it out. Good ol' middle of the road Joe is now a leading revolutionary of class warfare. Again, news to me.
It's become the Dems platform. Surprised you didn't know that already.
I mean you said so so it must be true. I know they've been trying to increase minimum wage, very much class warfare I guess. I saw ol Joe tweeted about unions today and the minimum wage. Is that the class warfare you're referring?
In more related news, Fed hike coming of 75 bp. That's a big deal.
Well I mean it fits the definition...but it's cuter to just say stuff like "I mean if you said so so it must be true".
And yes the rate hike is a huge deal. As I have been reading, many feel the fed has been acting too slow to avoid a recession from their now actions to curb inflation. They mentioned expecting another point over the course of the year. Seems like many think this will certainly curb inflation and just wondering how low and how long the recession it triggers goes/lasts.
Bring on the recession. It's time.
Hey @EdsonNascimento remind me again what I think a recession is please!
Just to challenge you on this - why would you think it's time? If anything this is like worst case scenario right now. We needed the Fed to start hiking rates a loooonnnng time ago and now they're going to be in uncharted territory because of it. At least they're finally doing it. But unless they start hiking very high very soon, and very quickly, then there's no runway left to drop the rate when you're actually in a recession.
IMO I don't think there will be a recession though, but that's just me.
Why do you not think there will be a recession?
I edited my response above, but I just don't see it. Though I could see the very tool to fight inflation to end up causing a recession. If Covid blows up again massively then I think there will be a recession, or if Russia plans to go to war with the world and China goes after Taiwan, that kind of stuff. But outside of that, the labor market is too hot, all the fundamentals that were pointing in the wrong direction last time (housing) are strong this time and not in that territory. I just don't see it. The only thing that could do is if things like credit card debt and student loans all of a sudden are so far out of swing that they bankrupt people. And at least I don't think that's currently the issue.
And I think once China gets humming again with shipping, since edit: sorry Shaghai opened back up, that's a plus.
So I hear you on the job market but with things getting more expensive people have to tighten their belts and less gets spent, less things get bought, less things get built, companies make less than expected and start laying off. The spiral begins...
T what? Biden wants a class war? That's news to me!
Also, if our boy nicky got out of his social media hole they'd see that - surprisingly, if you can believe this - inflation isn't just happening in the United States. But politics!
Yup and he is tweeting about it all day today again. He is nothing but a politician, always looking who else to blame for their issues. Joe was never the solution to our real problems, he is part of it. Just was a solution to the bat shit crazy GOP of today.
OK more than anything I'm here for the class warfare and I'm still shocked to hear he's the one carrying it out. Good ol' middle of the road Joe is now a leading revolutionary of class warfare. Again, news to me.
It's become the Dems platform. Surprised you didn't know that already.
I mean you said so so it must be true. I know they've been trying to increase minimum wage, very much class warfare I guess. I saw ol Joe tweeted about unions today and the minimum wage. Is that the class warfare you're referring?
In more related news, Fed hike coming of 75 bp. That's a big deal.
Well I mean it fits the definition...but it's cuter to just say stuff like "I mean if you said so so it must be true".
And yes the rate hike is a huge deal. As I have been reading, many feel the fed has been acting too slow to avoid a recession from their now actions to curb inflation. They mentioned expecting another point over the course of the year. Seems like many think this will certainly curb inflation and just wondering how low and how long the recession it triggers goes/lasts.
Bring on the recession. It's time.
Hey @EdsonNascimento remind me again what I think a recession is please!
Just to challenge you on this - why would you think it's time? If anything this is like worst case scenario right now. We needed the Fed to start hiking rates a loooonnnng time ago and now they're going to be in uncharted territory because of it. At least they're finally doing it. But unless they start hiking very high very soon, and very quickly, then there's no runway left to drop the rate when you're actually in a recession.
IMO I don't think there will be a recession though, but that's just me.
Why do you not think there will be a recession?
I edited my response above, but I just don't see it. Though I could see the very tool to fight inflation to end up causing a recession. If Covid blows up again massively then I think there will be a recession, or if Russia plans to go to war with the world and China goes after Taiwan, that kind of stuff. But outside of that, the labor market is too hot, all the fundamentals that were pointing in the wrong direction last time (housing) are strong this time and not in that territory. I just don't see it. The only thing that could do is if things like credit card debt and student loans all of a sudden are so far out of swing that they bankrupt people. And at least I don't think that's currently the issue.
And I think once China gets humming again with shipping, since edit: sorry Shaghai opened back up, that's a plus.
So I hear you on the job market but with things getting more expensive people have to tighten their belts and less gets spent, less things get bought, less things get built, companies make less than expected and start laying off. The spiral begins...
In a hot job market wages should be increasing. Also, that's what the Fed rate hike is for - to tamp down inflation by tamping down demand. And also this is predicated on my opinion that inflation is a short-term problem, which I believe it is. So, technically, I can very well see a recession happening but nothing close to what we've seen the past 2 or 3 times. Again, I preface all of that goes out the window if war or Covid heats up.
I go to this guy a lot for overall feedback on what's going on, and this is what I was feeling and much better articulates my thoughts (he's threaded within the tweet):
I go to this guy a lot for overall feedback on what's going on, and this is what I was feeling and much better articulates my thoughts (he's threaded within the tweet):
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
lol that chart looks pretty sketchy. How did they arrive at those numbers. How do they know increased money supply didn't indirectly impact them. It looks more like a wishlist.. .lol.
In regards to the 75bps increase. Isn't anything below a 2% overnight rate considered expansionary? Ergo if you don't want to be pour gas on a hot fire, you need to at least get it over 2% so it's neutral, and no longer expansionary?
I think it's also going to be hard. I'm not going to feel the brunt of those interest rate increases for about 3.5 years when my mortgage comes up for renewal. Lots of other people are in similar boats. The US (I wish we had this here) even has 30 year mortgages where the rate is locked in the whole time, so all the people on those would be uneffected by rates.
IE I think it takes a while to see the impact of increased rates because only a percentage of the population is in variable rate mortgages... it takes years to see the impact on fixed mortgages. Ergo having people spend more money on debt, and less on goods, to quiet down economy probably isn't going to be seen much at the short intervals between fed/boc meetings?
Their stuff is subscription-based so I'm not paying for it atm. But you could also dig up BLS data if you wish.
Are you one of those "printing money is stupid" people that thinks it causes, or is one of the greatest causes, of inflation? Because this has been disproven time and time again, look into papers re: velocity of money.
No quarter over quarter rate hike has been over 2%, at least not in a long long time. That is a shock to the system. You go from calming demand with the effect of lowering the rate of inflation increases, to antagonizing - and basically wanting to cause - a recession.
I contend they should have raised rates much quicker coming out of the prior recession (like between 2012 and 2017). And that Trump shgould have never directed the Fed to drop the rate in 2018.
And we're talking about the US-strictly here. Most people in this country do have 30, or 15, year mortgages. Not sure how your country works, but I first assumed that you did live here and when you said you mortgage is up for renewal you were talking about an ARM mortgage. Which, for those people especially, it will be very very bad. Those mortgages started to bubble up again but are no where near where they were ala 2007. But for those people it will be bad. People here really took advantage of extremely low mortgage rates within the past couple years and re-fi'ed their mortgages.
My main concern is personal debt, followed by housing. It looks like people overall have been flush with savings during this expansion (which is weird in itself to say we've been in during a global pandemic), but those are now starting to be tapped into. And with the Fed going with such a large increase so quickly that is going to affect the banks and credit card companies, which will then in turn affect the people with that debt. That and student loans, or any debt with a variable rate, is my greatest concern.
Then housing supply is already historically scarce and only getting worse. And now, yes, housing prices SHOULD come down with higher rates, but with supply so low I'm not sure if that's actually going to happen. Plus getting that mortgage will only cost more now. Those are my longer-term concerns.
I go to this guy a lot for overall feedback on what's going on, and this is what I was feeling and much better articulates my thoughts (he's threaded within the tweet):
"It is premature for the Fed to become resigned to a recession to get inflation back in the box."
I like Zandi a lot. When I worked for a large Corp, he would come and advise us on macro issues which would drive our loss forecasting strategies. Very smart and easy to understand.
I am resigned to a recession, but it doesn't need to be steep. He certainly could be right that a half point was enough.
Their stuff is subscription-based so I'm not paying for it atm. But you could also dig up BLS data if you wish.
Are you one of those "printing money is stupid" people that thinks it causes, or is one of the greatest causes, of inflation? Because this has been disproven time and time again, look into papers re: velocity of money.
No quarter over quarter rate hike has been over 2%, at least not in a long long time. That is a shock to the system. You go from calming demand with the effect of lowering the rate of inflation increases, to antagonizing - and basically wanting to cause - a recession.
I contend they should have raised rates much quicker coming out of the prior recession (like between 2012 and 2017). And that Trump shgould have never directed the Fed to drop the rate in 2018.
And we're talking about the US-strictly here. Most people in this country do have 30, or 15, year mortgages. Not sure how your country works, but I first assumed that you did live here and when you said you mortgage is up for renewal you were talking about an ARM mortgage. Which, for those people especially, it will be very very bad. Those mortgages started to bubble up again but are no where near where they were ala 2007. But for those people it will be bad. People here really took advantage of extremely low mortgage rates within the past couple years and re-fi'ed their mortgages.
My main concern is personal debt, followed by housing. It looks like people overall have been flush with savings during this expansion (which is weird in itself to say we've been in during a global pandemic), but those are now starting to be tapped into. And with the Fed going with such a large increase so quickly that is going to affect the banks and credit card companies, which will then in turn affect the people with that debt. That and student loans, or any debt with a variable rate, is my greatest concern.
Then housing supply is already historically scarce and only getting worse. And now, yes, housing prices SHOULD come down with higher rates, but with supply so low I'm not sure if that's actually going to happen. Plus getting that mortgage will only cost more now. Those are my longer-term concerns.
Yah here in Canada we don't really get mortgages the length of a mortgage. The common practice is to renew 5 years a time, so whatever you chose, variable or fixed, really only makes a difference until the next time we renew.
The advantage (I suppose because of less risk to the banks when it resets every 5 years) is I believe our rates are a bit lower than the US, but the drawback is your exposed to interest rate increases when you renew. So up here where everyone has a 5 year mortgage, anyone who has a fixed rate mortgage will feel the pain as they renew over the next 4 to 5 years.
It's definitely a shame you can't get 30 years mortgages here. It would completely remove the risk of people defaulting on their homes if there was no risk of the payments ever going up from where you started.
Yeah, that's interesting, made me look it up and now I'm reading a few articles about it. Looks like homeowner default during the great recession was by far much lower for you guys in 2008. But, yeah, I'd say when I'm talking about the stock market and other economic issues - though, they are very much macro issues, and if anything proves the point that inflation isn't the cause of a president of one nation - I'm talking about the US (we're dummies and very much think we're the only ones who count, hee hee). So the root and issues at play in the US for inflation would line up with what I put above, and my concerns are about US loan/credit debt & US housing policy.
Yeah, that's interesting, made me look it up and now I'm reading a few articles about it. Looks like homeowner default during the great recession was by far much lower for you guys in 2008. But, yeah, I'd say when I'm talking about the stock market and other economic issues - though, they are very much macro issues, and if anything proves the point that inflation isn't the cause of a president of one nation - I'm talking about the US (we're dummies and very much think we're the only ones who count, hee hee). So the root and issues at play in the US for inflation would line up with what I put above, and my concerns are about US loan/credit debt & US housing policy.
Yeah, that's interesting, made me look it up and now I'm reading a few articles about it. Looks like homeowner default during the great recession was by far much lower for you guys in 2008. But, yeah, I'd say when I'm talking about the stock market and other economic issues - though, they are very much macro issues, and if anything proves the point that inflation isn't the cause of a president of one nation - I'm talking about the US (we're dummies and very much think we're the only ones who count, hee hee). So the root and issues at play in the US for inflation would line up with what I put above, and my concerns are about US loan/credit debt & US housing policy.
I bet Canada didn't have stated income loans, 3 year ARMS, balloons and other clever loan products that put people IMHO homes they could not afford.
Yes, every other country doesn't sell its soul for the ideology of unfettered capitalism with the ability to view people strictly under the scope of being a consumer. I would agree with this.
And to further light a political fire, imo as amazing as we in this country think it is to have homeownership be the greatest point of increasing one's wealth it is also an incredibly exclusive club that is only getting harder and harder to attain. The rest of the world basically sees land ownership as not a high priority, or no more important than housing of any other kind. Very much a topic that doesn't get enough chatter here, nor in the overall discourse of US policy nearly enough (along with zoning laws). We should be upzoning any and everywhere, we have written too many exclusionary laws when it comes to giving people a way and place to live.
Yeah, that's interesting, made me look it up and now I'm reading a few articles about it. Looks like homeowner default during the great recession was by far much lower for you guys in 2008. But, yeah, I'd say when I'm talking about the stock market and other economic issues - though, they are very much macro issues, and if anything proves the point that inflation isn't the cause of a president of one nation - I'm talking about the US (we're dummies and very much think we're the only ones who count, hee hee). So the root and issues at play in the US for inflation would line up with what I put above, and my concerns are about US loan/credit debt & US housing policy.
I bet Canada didn't have stated income loans, 3 year ARMS, balloons and other clever loan products that put people IMHO homes they could not afford.
Yes, every other country doesn't sell its soul for the ideology of unfettered capitalism with the ability to view people strictly under the scope of being a consumer. I would agree with this.
And to further light a political fire, imo as amazing as we in this country think it is to have homeownership be the greatest point of increasing one's wealth it is also an incredibly exclusive club that is only getting harder and harder to attain. The rest of the world basically sees land ownership as not a high priority, or no more important than housing of any other kind. Very much a topic that doesn't get enough chatter here, nor in the overall discourse of US policy nearly enough (along with zoning laws). We should be upzoning any and everywhere, we have written too many exclusionary laws when it comes to giving people a way and place to live.
Well people need a place to live. So what's better, personal ownership of land that increases your wealth, or apartments that are owned by people like Fred Trump? The third option is gov't owned buildings like the Soviet Union. So in the various options that are available, I much prefer personal ownership. Maybe it's a terrible system but better than the rest.
Yeah, that's interesting, made me look it up and now I'm reading a few articles about it. Looks like homeowner default during the great recession was by far much lower for you guys in 2008. But, yeah, I'd say when I'm talking about the stock market and other economic issues - though, they are very much macro issues, and if anything proves the point that inflation isn't the cause of a president of one nation - I'm talking about the US (we're dummies and very much think we're the only ones who count, hee hee). So the root and issues at play in the US for inflation would line up with what I put above, and my concerns are about US loan/credit debt & US housing policy.
I bet Canada didn't have stated income loans, 3 year ARMS, balloons and other clever loan products that put people IMHO homes they could not afford.
Yes, every other country doesn't sell its soul for the ideology of unfettered capitalism with the ability to view people strictly under the scope of being a consumer. I would agree with this.
And to further light a political fire, imo as amazing as we in this country think it is to have homeownership be the greatest point of increasing one's wealth it is also an incredibly exclusive club that is only getting harder and harder to attain. The rest of the world basically sees land ownership as not a high priority, or no more important than housing of any other kind. Very much a topic that doesn't get enough chatter here, nor in the overall discourse of US policy nearly enough (along with zoning laws). We should be upzoning any and everywhere, we have written too many exclusionary laws when it comes to giving people a way and place to live.
Well people need a place to live. So what's better, personal ownership of land that increases your wealth, or apartments that are owned by people like Fred Trump? The third option is gov't owned buildings like the Soviet Union. So in the various options that are available, I much prefer personal ownership. Maybe it's a terrible system but better than the rest.
Or ya know, in a practical sense we have multiple options and not speak in any absolutes. There's government housing in many 1st world countries and they're shockingly not the Soviet Union. Sure, you can own land, but you can also have the option to go to your government and find a place to put a roof over your head to sleep, and take a hot shower. So, yes, you're right, people do need a place to live.
Also, the US Fed Gov is the greatest buyer and efficiently-driven project manager (uh oh now I did it!). While we're jerking off about every other thing in this country I'd love if my tax dollars went toward housing expansion, while also making it easier to attain said ownership. I would much more would prefer my tax dollars going toward that over defense.
Yeah, that's interesting, made me look it up and now I'm reading a few articles about it. Looks like homeowner default during the great recession was by far much lower for you guys in 2008. But, yeah, I'd say when I'm talking about the stock market and other economic issues - though, they are very much macro issues, and if anything proves the point that inflation isn't the cause of a president of one nation - I'm talking about the US (we're dummies and very much think we're the only ones who count, hee hee). So the root and issues at play in the US for inflation would line up with what I put above, and my concerns are about US loan/credit debt & US housing policy.
I bet Canada didn't have stated income loans, 3 year ARMS, balloons and other clever loan products that put people IMHO homes they could not afford.
Yes, every other country doesn't sell its soul for the ideology of unfettered capitalism with the ability to view people strictly under the scope of being a consumer. I would agree with this.
And to further light a political fire, imo as amazing as we in this country think it is to have homeownership be the greatest point of increasing one's wealth it is also an incredibly exclusive club that is only getting harder and harder to attain. The rest of the world basically sees land ownership as not a high priority, or no more important than housing of any other kind. Very much a topic that doesn't get enough chatter here, nor in the overall discourse of US policy nearly enough (along with zoning laws). We should be upzoning any and everywhere, we have written too many exclusionary laws when it comes to giving people a way and place to live.
Well people need a place to live. So what's better, personal ownership of land that increases your wealth, or apartments that are owned by people like Fred Trump? The third option is gov't owned buildings like the Soviet Union. So in the various options that are available, I much prefer personal ownership. Maybe it's a terrible system but better than the rest.
Or ya know, in a practical sense we have multiple options and not speak in any absolutes. There's government housing in many 1st world countries and they're shockingly not the Soviet Union. Sure, you can own land, but you can also have the option to go to your government and find a place to put a roof over your head to sleep, and take a hot shower. So, yes, you're right, people do need a place to live.
Also, the US Fed Gov is the greatest buyer and efficiently-driven project manager (uh oh now I did it!). While we're jerking off about every other thing in this country I'd love if my tax dollars went toward housing expansion, while also making it easier to attain said ownership. I would much more would prefer that to my dollars going toward defense.
We have public housing in this country. I know Canada does as well. My understanding is that Canada's problems are similar to ours. They have high drug use and crime. So even public housing there is essentially low income housing. We have plenty of that, and it's not pretty. If there are first world countries with public housing that is high quality, I'd like to see the model. I'm not aware of it (but admittedly haven't researched it either).
What used to be called Section 8 Public Housing is now called Mixed Use Affordable Housing. Some people are getting rich on developing these types of properties while low income people are getting nice places to live in safe micro communities. Perfect? Far from it but it seems to work out pretty well.
Yeah, that's interesting, made me look it up and now I'm reading a few articles about it. Looks like homeowner default during the great recession was by far much lower for you guys in 2008. But, yeah, I'd say when I'm talking about the stock market and other economic issues - though, they are very much macro issues, and if anything proves the point that inflation isn't the cause of a president of one nation - I'm talking about the US (we're dummies and very much think we're the only ones who count, hee hee). So the root and issues at play in the US for inflation would line up with what I put above, and my concerns are about US loan/credit debt & US housing policy.
I bet Canada didn't have stated income loans, 3 year ARMS, balloons and other clever loan products that put people IMHO homes they could not afford.
Yes, every other country doesn't sell its soul for the ideology of unfettered capitalism with the ability to view people strictly under the scope of being a consumer. I would agree with this.
And to further light a political fire, imo as amazing as we in this country think it is to have homeownership be the greatest point of increasing one's wealth it is also an incredibly exclusive club that is only getting harder and harder to attain. The rest of the world basically sees land ownership as not a high priority, or no more important than housing of any other kind. Very much a topic that doesn't get enough chatter here, nor in the overall discourse of US policy nearly enough (along with zoning laws). We should be upzoning any and everywhere, we have written too many exclusionary laws when it comes to giving people a way and place to live.
Well people need a place to live. So what's better, personal ownership of land that increases your wealth, or apartments that are owned by people like Fred Trump? The third option is gov't owned buildings like the Soviet Union. So in the various options that are available, I much prefer personal ownership. Maybe it's a terrible system but better than the rest.
Or ya know, in a practical sense we have multiple options and not speak in any absolutes. There's government housing in many 1st world countries and they're shockingly not the Soviet Union. Sure, you can own land, but you can also have the option to go to your government and find a place to put a roof over your head to sleep, and take a hot shower. So, yes, you're right, people do need a place to live.
Also, the US Fed Gov is the greatest buyer and efficiently-driven project manager (uh oh now I did it!). While we're jerking off about every other thing in this country I'd love if my tax dollars went toward housing expansion, while also making it easier to attain said ownership. I would much more would prefer that to my dollars going toward defense.
We have public housing in this country. I know Canada does as well. My understanding is that Canada's problems are similar to ours. They have high drug use and crime. So even public housing there is essentially low income housing. We have plenty of that, and it's not pretty. If there are first world countries with public housing that is high quality, I'd like to see the model. I'm not aware of it (but admittedly haven't researched it either).
The UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Australia, etc etc all have a form of government/public housing. All models we could learn something from.
I think an error is correlating public housing with high drug use and crime. So this is where Dems within the party divide, which I can see is happening here. So do you agree people need a roof over their head or not? Because it's also been proven again and again that homelessness doesn't have a causation/correlation with crime and drug use.
And this is where zoning comes in, and the carnal version of humans - especially in this country - rears its ugly head. IMO an ideal neighborhood is a dense, mixed income neighborhood. Everything else is a result of highway expansion and turning the country into suburban divisions, which I believe are inherently toxic and detrimental to solving larger issues. Not In My Back Yard (NIMBYs) are a natural wedge just like the use of "choice" in education. When it comes to public housing people somehow always relate drugs and crime and then all of a sudden it can't be built anywhere, yet we want to talk in platitudes that people definitely need a roof over their heads and we need to do something about homelessness. But the practical answer isn't one anyone wants to accept. When it comes to public goods, which I believe housing, food, and education are should not be given a "choice" as it's interpreted in the Libertarian (read: those who don't like to be called Republicans anymore) sense and other so-called "Progressives" think of it as. Choice should mean go do whatever the hell you want, or fall back on tax dollars and robust system in place - not handing out vouchers. That's definitely not a shot at you, nor a need to start a Progressive Purity Pissing Contest. But I bring it up for people to be aware of how zoning works (or who it's suppose to work for) and how it detracts from the need to give people a place to live. And that problems are usually deeper than "welp just own a house, it's better than living in the USSR."
1) Build more housing with tax/gov dollars 2) Decrease barriers to home ownership 3) Have an easy and readily available option for those who are homeless.
Houston just put 25k homeless people into homes, and their numbers are down by 63% (!!) since 2011 by providing places to live directly. Not only that, a year later those same people went on to be able to provide for themselves and rent without assistance. And that shouldn't be a fractured process that has to be doled out by each municipality. People need help, full stop. So the greatest power to do so is the federal government.
Yeah, that's interesting, made me look it up and now I'm reading a few articles about it. Looks like homeowner default during the great recession was by far much lower for you guys in 2008. But, yeah, I'd say when I'm talking about the stock market and other economic issues - though, they are very much macro issues, and if anything proves the point that inflation isn't the cause of a president of one nation - I'm talking about the US (we're dummies and very much think we're the only ones who count, hee hee). So the root and issues at play in the US for inflation would line up with what I put above, and my concerns are about US loan/credit debt & US housing policy.
I bet Canada didn't have stated income loans, 3 year ARMS, balloons and other clever loan products that put people IMHO homes they could not afford.
Yes, every other country doesn't sell its soul for the ideology of unfettered capitalism with the ability to view people strictly under the scope of being a consumer. I would agree with this.
And to further light a political fire, imo as amazing as we in this country think it is to have homeownership be the greatest point of increasing one's wealth it is also an incredibly exclusive club that is only getting harder and harder to attain. The rest of the world basically sees land ownership as not a high priority, or no more important than housing of any other kind. Very much a topic that doesn't get enough chatter here, nor in the overall discourse of US policy nearly enough (along with zoning laws). We should be upzoning any and everywhere, we have written too many exclusionary laws when it comes to giving people a way and place to live.
Well people need a place to live. So what's better, personal ownership of land that increases your wealth, or apartments that are owned by people like Fred Trump? The third option is gov't owned buildings like the Soviet Union. So in the various options that are available, I much prefer personal ownership. Maybe it's a terrible system but better than the rest.
Or ya know, in a practical sense we have multiple options and not speak in any absolutes. There's government housing in many 1st world countries and they're shockingly not the Soviet Union. Sure, you can own land, but you can also have the option to go to your government and find a place to put a roof over your head to sleep, and take a hot shower. So, yes, you're right, people do need a place to live.
Also, the US Fed Gov is the greatest buyer and efficiently-driven project manager (uh oh now I did it!). While we're jerking off about every other thing in this country I'd love if my tax dollars went toward housing expansion, while also making it easier to attain said ownership. I would much more would prefer that to my dollars going toward defense.
We have public housing in this country. I know Canada does as well. My understanding is that Canada's problems are similar to ours. They have high drug use and crime. So even public housing there is essentially low income housing. We have plenty of that, and it's not pretty. If there are first world countries with public housing that is high quality, I'd like to see the model. I'm not aware of it (but admittedly haven't researched it either).
The UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Australia, etc etc all have a form of government/public housing. All models we could learn something from.
I think an error is correlating public housing with high drug use and crime. So this is where Dems within the party divide, which I can see is happening here. So do you agree people need a roof over their head or not? Because it's also been proven again and again that homelessness doesn't have a causation/correlation with crime and drug use.
And this is where zoning comes in, and the carnal version of humans - especially in this country - rears its ugly head. IMO an ideal neighborhood is a dense, mixed income neighborhood. Everything else is a result of highway expansion and turning the country into suburban divisions, which I believe are inherently toxic and detrimental to solving larger issues. Not In My Back Yard (NIMBYs) are a natural wedge just like the use of "choice" in education. When it comes to public housing people somehow always relate drugs and crime and then all of a sudden it can't be built anywhere, yet we want to talk in platitudes that people definitely need a roof over their heads and we need to do something about homelessness. But the practical answer isn't one anyone wants to accept. When it comes to public goods, which I believe housing, food, and education are should not be given a "choice" as it's interpreted in the Libertarian (read: those who don't like to be called Republicans anymore) sense and other so-called "Progressives" think of it as. Choice should mean go do whatever the hell you want, or fall back on tax dollars and robust system in place - not handing out vouchers. That's definitely not a shot at you, nor a need to start a Progressive Purity Pissing Contest. But I bring it up for people to be aware of how zoning works (or who it's suppose to work for) and how it detracts from the need to give people a place to live. And that problems are usually deeper than "welp just own a house, it's better than living in the USSR."
1) Build more housing with tax/gov dollars 2) Decrease barriers to home ownership 3) Have an easy and readily available option for those who are homeless.
Houston just put 25k homeless people into homes, and their numbers are down by 63% (!!) since 2011 by providing places to live directly. Not only that, a year later those same people went on to be able to provide for themselves and rent without assistance. And that shouldn't be a fractured process that has to be doled out by each municipality. People need help, full stop. So the greatest power to do so is the federal government.
The reality is that people who migrate to public housing are people that can't afford better housing. Unfortunately there is a correlation between crime, under-education and other factors that connect to income. There is a second reality that people tend to take better care of things that they own, rather than rent and rather than given to them. This is human nature.
You also have to remember that there is at least a little causation between the mortgage collapse and the Fannie Freddie Affordable Housing requirements that started in 1992 and continued to grow until 2007 or so. If you're not familiar, the gov't required these GSEs to underwrite 40% of their loans to people who are below the median income levels in their area. That number continued to rise all the way into Bush's second term. When you do that, there is no option but to lower lending standards. That's why of the bad books that were traded, half were full of GSE sub prime mortgages. So the gov't did try to put people into more homes and this was the result.
Yeah, that's interesting, made me look it up and now I'm reading a few articles about it. Looks like homeowner default during the great recession was by far much lower for you guys in 2008. But, yeah, I'd say when I'm talking about the stock market and other economic issues - though, they are very much macro issues, and if anything proves the point that inflation isn't the cause of a president of one nation - I'm talking about the US (we're dummies and very much think we're the only ones who count, hee hee). So the root and issues at play in the US for inflation would line up with what I put above, and my concerns are about US loan/credit debt & US housing policy.
I bet Canada didn't have stated income loans, 3 year ARMS, balloons and other clever loan products that put people IMHO homes they could not afford.
Yes, every other country doesn't sell its soul for the ideology of unfettered capitalism with the ability to view people strictly under the scope of being a consumer. I would agree with this.
And to further light a political fire, imo as amazing as we in this country think it is to have homeownership be the greatest point of increasing one's wealth it is also an incredibly exclusive club that is only getting harder and harder to attain. The rest of the world basically sees land ownership as not a high priority, or no more important than housing of any other kind. Very much a topic that doesn't get enough chatter here, nor in the overall discourse of US policy nearly enough (along with zoning laws). We should be upzoning any and everywhere, we have written too many exclusionary laws when it comes to giving people a way and place to live.
Well people need a place to live. So what's better, personal ownership of land that increases your wealth, or apartments that are owned by people like Fred Trump? The third option is gov't owned buildings like the Soviet Union. So in the various options that are available, I much prefer personal ownership. Maybe it's a terrible system but better than the rest.
Or ya know, in a practical sense we have multiple options and not speak in any absolutes. There's government housing in many 1st world countries and they're shockingly not the Soviet Union. Sure, you can own land, but you can also have the option to go to your government and find a place to put a roof over your head to sleep, and take a hot shower. So, yes, you're right, people do need a place to live.
Also, the US Fed Gov is the greatest buyer and efficiently-driven project manager (uh oh now I did it!). While we're jerking off about every other thing in this country I'd love if my tax dollars went toward housing expansion, while also making it easier to attain said ownership. I would much more would prefer that to my dollars going toward defense.
We have public housing in this country. I know Canada does as well. My understanding is that Canada's problems are similar to ours. They have high drug use and crime. So even public housing there is essentially low income housing. We have plenty of that, and it's not pretty. If there are first world countries with public housing that is high quality, I'd like to see the model. I'm not aware of it (but admittedly haven't researched it either).
The UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Australia, etc etc all have a form of government/public housing. All models we could learn something from.
I think an error is correlating public housing with high drug use and crime. So this is where Dems within the party divide, which I can see is happening here. So do you agree people need a roof over their head or not? Because it's also been proven again and again that homelessness doesn't have a causation/correlation with crime and drug use.
And this is where zoning comes in, and the carnal version of humans - especially in this country - rears its ugly head. IMO an ideal neighborhood is a dense, mixed income neighborhood. Everything else is a result of highway expansion and turning the country into suburban divisions, which I believe are inherently toxic and detrimental to solving larger issues. Not In My Back Yard (NIMBYs) are a natural wedge just like the use of "choice" in education. When it comes to public housing people somehow always relate drugs and crime and then all of a sudden it can't be built anywhere, yet we want to talk in platitudes that people definitely need a roof over their heads and we need to do something about homelessness. But the practical answer isn't one anyone wants to accept. When it comes to public goods, which I believe housing, food, and education are should not be given a "choice" as it's interpreted in the Libertarian (read: those who don't like to be called Republicans anymore) sense and other so-called "Progressives" think of it as. Choice should mean go do whatever the hell you want, or fall back on tax dollars and robust system in place - not handing out vouchers. That's definitely not a shot at you, nor a need to start a Progressive Purity Pissing Contest. But I bring it up for people to be aware of how zoning works (or who it's suppose to work for) and how it detracts from the need to give people a place to live. And that problems are usually deeper than "welp just own a house, it's better than living in the USSR."
1) Build more housing with tax/gov dollars 2) Decrease barriers to home ownership 3) Have an easy and readily available option for those who are homeless.
Houston just put 25k homeless people into homes, and their numbers are down by 63% (!!) since 2011 by providing places to live directly. Not only that, a year later those same people went on to be able to provide for themselves and rent without assistance. And that shouldn't be a fractured process that has to be doled out by each municipality. People need help, full stop. So the greatest power to do so is the federal government.
Would you please post the salient parts of the HOW Houston is accomplishing this? Or provide your own synopsis? I’m paywalled out and interested in how they’re doing it, who’s involved, state/feds, combination and what “rules” if any there might be for the occupants.
”Warehousing” any population in any setting is not a good thing, except maybe prisons but even there it might not be best.
The points are to do the pound the pavement work, coordinate the pertinent agencies, and flat out first and foremost going forward with housing first. Not wait till they test negative on a drug test, provide employment resources, etc. Just flat out get homeless people into dignified living conditions, and offer mental & physical health resources.
Who used the words "warehousing", outside of yourself? Housing is not impisonment. Like Russell said, people need somewhere to live. That's step 1.
Yeah, that's interesting, made me look it up and now I'm reading a few articles about it. Looks like homeowner default during the great recession was by far much lower for you guys in 2008. But, yeah, I'd say when I'm talking about the stock market and other economic issues - though, they are very much macro issues, and if anything proves the point that inflation isn't the cause of a president of one nation - I'm talking about the US (we're dummies and very much think we're the only ones who count, hee hee). So the root and issues at play in the US for inflation would line up with what I put above, and my concerns are about US loan/credit debt & US housing policy.
I bet Canada didn't have stated income loans, 3 year ARMS, balloons and other clever loan products that put people IMHO homes they could not afford.
Yes, every other country doesn't sell its soul for the ideology of unfettered capitalism with the ability to view people strictly under the scope of being a consumer. I would agree with this.
And to further light a political fire, imo as amazing as we in this country think it is to have homeownership be the greatest point of increasing one's wealth it is also an incredibly exclusive club that is only getting harder and harder to attain. The rest of the world basically sees land ownership as not a high priority, or no more important than housing of any other kind. Very much a topic that doesn't get enough chatter here, nor in the overall discourse of US policy nearly enough (along with zoning laws). We should be upzoning any and everywhere, we have written too many exclusionary laws when it comes to giving people a way and place to live.
Well people need a place to live. So what's better, personal ownership of land that increases your wealth, or apartments that are owned by people like Fred Trump? The third option is gov't owned buildings like the Soviet Union. So in the various options that are available, I much prefer personal ownership. Maybe it's a terrible system but better than the rest.
Or ya know, in a practical sense we have multiple options and not speak in any absolutes. There's government housing in many 1st world countries and they're shockingly not the Soviet Union. Sure, you can own land, but you can also have the option to go to your government and find a place to put a roof over your head to sleep, and take a hot shower. So, yes, you're right, people do need a place to live.
Also, the US Fed Gov is the greatest buyer and efficiently-driven project manager (uh oh now I did it!). While we're jerking off about every other thing in this country I'd love if my tax dollars went toward housing expansion, while also making it easier to attain said ownership. I would much more would prefer that to my dollars going toward defense.
We have public housing in this country. I know Canada does as well. My understanding is that Canada's problems are similar to ours. They have high drug use and crime. So even public housing there is essentially low income housing. We have plenty of that, and it's not pretty. If there are first world countries with public housing that is high quality, I'd like to see the model. I'm not aware of it (but admittedly haven't researched it either).
The UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Australia, etc etc all have a form of government/public housing. All models we could learn something from.
I think an error is correlating public housing with high drug use and crime. So this is where Dems within the party divide, which I can see is happening here. So do you agree people need a roof over their head or not? Because it's also been proven again and again that homelessness doesn't have a causation/correlation with crime and drug use.
And this is where zoning comes in, and the carnal version of humans - especially in this country - rears its ugly head. IMO an ideal neighborhood is a dense, mixed income neighborhood. Everything else is a result of highway expansion and turning the country into suburban divisions, which I believe are inherently toxic and detrimental to solving larger issues. Not In My Back Yard (NIMBYs) are a natural wedge just like the use of "choice" in education. When it comes to public housing people somehow always relate drugs and crime and then all of a sudden it can't be built anywhere, yet we want to talk in platitudes that people definitely need a roof over their heads and we need to do something about homelessness. But the practical answer isn't one anyone wants to accept. When it comes to public goods, which I believe housing, food, and education are should not be given a "choice" as it's interpreted in the Libertarian (read: those who don't like to be called Republicans anymore) sense and other so-called "Progressives" think of it as. Choice should mean go do whatever the hell you want, or fall back on tax dollars and robust system in place - not handing out vouchers. That's definitely not a shot at you, nor a need to start a Progressive Purity Pissing Contest. But I bring it up for people to be aware of how zoning works (or who it's suppose to work for) and how it detracts from the need to give people a place to live. And that problems are usually deeper than "welp just own a house, it's better than living in the USSR."
1) Build more housing with tax/gov dollars 2) Decrease barriers to home ownership 3) Have an easy and readily available option for those who are homeless.
Houston just put 25k homeless people into homes, and their numbers are down by 63% (!!) since 2011 by providing places to live directly. Not only that, a year later those same people went on to be able to provide for themselves and rent without assistance. And that shouldn't be a fractured process that has to be doled out by each municipality. People need help, full stop. So the greatest power to do so is the federal government.
The reality is that people who migrate to public housing are people that can't afford better housing. Unfortunately there is a correlation between crime, under-education and other factors that connect to income. There is a second reality that people tend to take better care of things that they own, rather than rent and rather than given to them. This is human nature.
You also have to remember that there is at least a little causation between the mortgage collapse and the Fannie Freddie Affordable Housing requirements that started in 1992 and continued to grow until 2007 or so. If you're not familiar, the gov't required these GSEs to underwrite 40% of their loans to people who are below the median income levels in their area. That number continued to rise all the way into Bush's second term. When you do that, there is no option but to lower lending standards. That's why of the bad books that were traded, half were full of GSE sub prime mortgages. So the gov't did try to put people into more homes and this was the result.
OK but this my point - there are underlying issues to things. Again, we like to speak platitudes that this is a problem, and that's a problem, but don't actually want to face the issues head-on on resolving them. Or certainly not put policy into place that drastically changes things.
Also, the idea to rent rather than own is a negative falls into the Broken Windows Theory. And, man, that shit has been disproven time and time again. Everyone is deserving to be treated with equal dignity. All this kind of stuff does is divide people up and separate classes either by income, ethnic, and/or religious (beyond other demos) class. So, again, imo the only good war is a class war. Because that shit isn't perpetuated by those trying their best to get by each day.
If you want to decrease barrier to home ownership then you need to detangle the housing market from an open market. High level macro imo is to detangle personal wealth to having a roof over one's head. But people can't handle that.
At the very, very, very least a housing expansion/building program should be implemented to increase supply.
One steamy morning last July, Ana Rausch commandeered a shady corner of a parking lot on the northwest side of Houston. Downing a jumbo iced coffee, she issued brisk orders to a dozen outreach workers toting iPads. Her attention was fixed on a highway underpass nearby, where a handful of people were living in tents and cardboard lean-tos. As a vice president of Houston’s Coalition for the Homeless, Ms. Rausch was there to move them out.
I had come to watch the process and, more broadly, to see Houston’s approach to homelessness, which has won a lot of praise. At first, I couldn’t figure out why this particular underpass had been colonized. The sound of trucks revving their engines ricocheted against the concrete walls like rifle shots; and most of Houston’s homeless services were miles away. But then Ms. Rausch’s team, and a few camp residents, pointed out the nearby fast food outlets, the Shell station with a convenience store, and the Planet Fitness, where a $10 monthly membership meant access to showers and outlets for charging phones.
It also wasn’t initially visible what distinguished this encampment clearance from the ones in cities like Los Angeles and Austin, where the number of homeless people has been skyrocketing along with frustrations. The difference couldn’t be seen because it had already happened. For more than a month, Ms. Rausch and her colleagues had been coordinating with Harris County officials, as well as with the mayor’s office and local landlords. They had visited the encampment and talked to people living there, so that now, as tents were being dismantled, the occupants could move directly into one-bedroom apartments, some for a year, others for longer. In other words, the people living in the encampment would not be consigned to homeless shelters, cited for trespassing or scattered to the winds, but, rather, given a home.
During the last decade, Houston, the nation’s fourth most populous city, has moved more than 25,000 homeless people directly into apartments and houses. The overwhelming majority of them have remained housed after two years. The number of people deemed homeless in the Houston region has been cut by 63 percent since 2011, according to the latest numbers from local officials. Even judging by the more modest metrics registered in a 2020 federal report, Houston did more than twice as well as the rest of the country at reducing homelessness over the previous decade. Ten years ago, homeless veterans, one of the categories that the federal government tracks, waited 720 days and had to navigate 76 bureaucratic steps to get from the street into permanent housing with support from social service counselors. Today, a streamlined process means the wait for housing is 32 days.
Houston has gotten this far by teaming with county agencies and persuading scores of local service providers, corporations and charitable nonprofits — organizations that often bicker and compete with one another — to row in unison. Together, they’ve gone all in on “housing first,” a practice, supported by decades of research, that moves the most vulnerable people straight from the streets into apartments, not into shelters, and without first requiring them to wean themselves off drugs or complete a 12-step program or find God or a job.
There are addiction recovery and religious conversion programs that succeed in getting people off the street. But housing first involves a different logic: When you’re drowning, it doesn’t help if your rescuer insists you learn to swim before returning you to shore. You can address your issues once you’re on land. Or not. Either way, you join the wider population of people battling demons behind closed doors.
“Before I leave office, I want Houston to be the first big city to end chronic homelessness,” Sylvester Turner told me. In late January, Mr. Turner, who is serving his final term as mayor, joined Harris County leaders in unveiling a $100 million plan that would use a mix of federal, state, county and city funds to cut the local homeless count in half again by 2025.
Mr. Turner chose his words with care, and it’s important to parse his phrasing. “Chronic homelessness” is a term of art. It refers to those people, like many in the Houston encampment, who have been living on the streets for more than a year or who have been homeless repeatedly, and who have a mental or physical disability. Nationwide, most of those who experience homelessness do not fall into that narrow category. They are homeless for six weeks or fewer; 40 percent have a job. For them, homelessness is an agonizing but temporary condition that they manage to resolve, maybe by doubling up with relatives or friends.
There are at the same time many thousands of mothers and children, as well as couch-surfing teenagers and young adults who are ill-housed and at risk. These people are also poor and desperate. Finding a place to sleep may be a daily struggle for them. They might be one broken transmission or emergency room visit away from the streets. They’re in the pipeline to homelessness. But they are not homeless according to the bureaucratic definition. They are not sleeping on a sidewalk or in their cars or in shelters. Houston can offer these people a hand, but Mr. Turner is not promising to end the precariousness of their lives.
“We are not here to solve poverty. We aren’t here to fix the affordable housing problem” is how Ms. Rausch puts it, adding, “Think of the homeless system in America as an emergency room for a triaged slice of poverty. What Houston has achieved is to get itself far enough along in addressing the challenge that we can hope to begin to think about the pipeline to homelessness.”
Encampments like the one in the underpass lay bare decades of calamitous decisions by planners, politicians and health and housing authorities. One in every 14 Americans experiences homelessness at some point, a population that is disproportionately Black. Eradicating homelessness would involve tackling systemic racism, reconstituting the nation’s mental health, family support and substance abuse systems, raising wages, expanding the federal housing voucher program and building millions more subsidized homes.
The goal in Houston and among other cities attacking the problem is different: to make homelessness only “rare and brief,” to cite Rosanne Haggerty, the housing advocate. Five states — California, New York, Florida, Washington and Texas — now account for 57 percent of the people experiencing homelessness. Not coincidentally, it is worst in those big cities where affordable housing is in short supply, the so-called NIMBYs are powerful, and the yawning gap between median incomes and the cost of housing keeps growing. Houston fits that description. The scale of its woes does not approach what is happening in San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles. But the progress it has made in housing people is instructive and replicable. It constitutes a fragile, compelling success.
By midafternoon on that July day, Ms. Rausch’s team had transferred those living in the encampment to their new residences. Among the people relocated was a shy, 39-year-old woman named Terri Harris. Ms. Harris had leaped at the prospect of an apartment when outreach workers approached her in the camp. She was tired of living on the streets, but, above all, she was desperate to reunite with her three-year-old daughter, Blesit, whom she had had to leave with her sister.
Two outreach workers packed Ms. Harris into a white van, along with a Hefty trash bag stuffed with household supplies and a Bible. Ms. Harris looked nervous but smiled as the van drove off.
At the end of the ride was a one-bedroom apartment.
Half a century ago, America invented modern homelessness.
The stage was set with the shuttering of psychiatric hospitals in the wake of abuse scandals and the introduction of new psychotropic medications. Then cities started offering tax incentives to owners of flop houses, or single-room-occupancy hotels, to convert their properties into market-rate rentals, condos and co-ops. In New York City alone, more than 100,000 S.R.O. units that had housed substance abusers, elderly singles, former inmates and the mentally ill were lost.
During the 1980s, back-to-back recessions, combined with the Reagan administration’s severe federal cutbacks targeting low-income housing and poverty assistance programs, forced more and more Americans — including large numbers of families — into homelessness. At the same time, well-paid manufacturing jobs moved overseas, and steelworkers had to start pushing brooms at McDonald’s. An oil crisis drove up fuel prices, which bumped up rents, as did a new generation of gentrifiers discovering the architectural pleasures of historic neighborhoods.
On top of all that, Reagan-era tax reforms encouraged the construction of high-end, single-family homes but not of affordable multifamily rentals. There were 515,000 multifamily homes built in America in 1985, but just 140,000 built in 1991. As people began competing for fewer and fewer apartments, the affordable housing market turned into a game of musical chairs played by low-income Americans. Someone always lost.
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A decade ago, Houston had one of the highest per capita homeless counts in the country. Its homeless response system was in shambles. The city was squandering millions of public dollars and police officers’ time by jailing homeless Houstonians for intoxication. Residents living on the streets, under bridges and along the bayous were using ambulances to get basic medical care because they had no other way to do so.
And, as in other cities, dozens of local aid organizations, public and private, were operating in silos — competing for federal funds, duplicating services, not sharing information or goals, housing precious few people.
Jessica Preheim, the vice president for strategic planning at Houston’s Coalition for the Homeless and one of Ms. Rausch’s colleagues, remembers that every five or six years the Houston Housing Authority would announce a lottery for anyone hoping to get on the waiting list for federal housing vouchers. As Ms. Preheim recalls, if you wanted to enter the lottery, you needed first to hear the announcement, then submit an application in writing within a few days, before the lottery closed. If, by some miracle, your name were drawn, you would receive notification by snail mail, which, of course, required a street address.
It was a recipe for not housing homeless people.
Thao Costis, who runs a homeless service provider in Houston called SEARCH, said that back then her organization, like many in the city, was trying to do everything: outreach, case management, child services, employment training, paying rent to landlords to house clients. “SEARCH was $1 million in the hole,” Ms. Costis remembers, “and the people who most needed help weren’t getting it.”
What started to bring about change was the passage in 2009 of the Hearth Act, which stipulated that, in order to receive federal dollars, cities had to adopt a “housing first” policy and, crucially, that homeless organizations had to work together in “continuums of care” under a single lead agency, coordinating their programs and sharing data. The federal government had recommended these continuums of care since 1994, but not until the Hearth Act was funding tied to specific metrics of effectiveness.
With the new regulations set to take effect in 2012, the Obama administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development offered money and expertise to 10 cities where homelessness was a particular problem. Houston was among them.
Annise Parker was Houston’s mayor at the time. I went to see her earlier this year. She lives with her wife, Kathy Hubbard, in a three-story gabled house built in 1904 on a pretty, tree-lined street in the Montrose neighborhood. Hanging in Ms. Parker’s foyer are framed photographs of the three daughters she and Ms. Hubbard adopted out of foster care, as well as of a teenage boy, now a man in his mid-40s — “a runaway from grandparents who tried to force the ‘gay’ out of him,” Ms. Parker says — who was living on the streets when they took him in.
Ms. Parker is the opposite of a slick politician: blunt, wonky, unassuming. A software analyst in the oil and gas industry for 20 years, she became city controller, managing Houston’s money, before being elected America’s first openly lesbian, big-city mayor in 2009.
Image
She won with bipartisan support as a Democrat on a centrist platform of fiscal responsibility. “Through our son, I had an up close and personal look at what life was like for somebody on the streets who was treated as disposable,” Ms. Parker told me. “Different organizations were all working in their own lanes, according to their own rules and procedures, doing what they wanted to do. There might be 100 open shelter beds on a given night designated for mothers with kids, but we didn’t have mothers with kids who needed beds.”
The White House offered an expert on homeless aid, Mandy Chapman-Semple, to help Ms. Parker herd the cats. They invited dozens of the city’s homeless-service providers to a meeting. “We started talking to each other” is how Ms. Preheim remembers that moment. “Sometimes it is as simple as that.”
The continuum was given a name, The Way Home, and the nonprofit Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County was appointed its lead agency. Some food banks and religious and other service providers that made prayer or sobriety conditions for housing did not join. But more than 100 local and regional organizations eventually signed on.
Houston started collecting real-time data, as opposed to relying solely on a once-a-year census. At first, the goal was to house 100 homeless veterans in 100 days, and after that was achieved, 300 more in another 100 days. “Then we thought, if we can do that, we can do something really big,” Ms. Parker told me.
It may seem surprising that, of all cities, Houston — built on a go-it-alone oil business culture — decided to tackle homelessness by, in effect, collectivizing its homeless relief system. Houston is a business-friendly city in a purple county in a red state, with more than its share of neighborhood housing covenants. But Houstonians will tell anyone willing to listen that they are nothing if not pragmatic.
The Houston Housing Authority joined the continuum. It agreed that 250 homeless clients a year could jump to the top of the waiting list for vouchers. Since that change, thousands have received vouchers and been housed.
SEARCH also joined. Coordination meant that Ms. Costis’ group could focus on case management, leaving job training, child care and other services to fellow continuum members. That, in turn, allowed it to avoid financial collapse and to hire more case managers, a critical need.
“People were suddenly being housed with lightning speed,” Ms. Costis recalled. “It was a phenomenal difference.”
It helped, Ms. Parker says, “that back then we still had slack in our housing market and reasonably priced land. It also helped that we created a center for sobriety, stopped arresting 20,000 people a year for public intoxication and started handing out taxi vouchers to homeless people so they wouldn’t use ambulances as personal taxis. All that saved us a fortune and made sense. But the bottom line is that nearly everybody in Houston involved in homelessness got together around what works. That’s our secret sauce.”
I struggled with this explanation. Housing first is not a new idea, after all. Other cities receive federal funds and have continuums of care. They don’t achieve the same results.
“You can meet the letter of the law without embracing its true intent” is how Ms. Chapman-Semple put it to me. San Diego, for example, another of the 10 cities targeted by the Obama administration, created a continuum; but unlike Houston, which cut its homeless count by nearly two-thirds, San Diego was able to reduce the number by only 19 percent, a 2020 city audit concluded, because of a piecemeal approach to housing first and “ineffective” strategic planning.
Atlanta, too, was adrift until neighboring counties dropped out of a joint continuum and the city set up its own, modeling its approach on Houston’s. Atlanta has since cut its homeless numbers by 40 percent and gained increasing corporate support — a vital source of additional funding. “When you get the public sector aligned, it becomes much easier to go to the private sector and say, ‘Join us,’” Cathryn Vassell, who runs Atlanta’s continuum, told me.
Getting businesses squarely behind solutions to homelessness, beyond their usual token contributions, is clearly a challenge in other places. In 2020, city councilors in Seattle approved a tax on businesses to support homeless housing. But the councilors rescinded the tax less than a month later in the face of opposition from big employers, including Amazon, which temporarily halted construction of a downtown tower in protest. Corporate leaders explained that they didn’t trust the city to spend the money effectively. As a consequence of Houston’s more united front, city officials were able to channel private money and federal emergency relief dollars in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, in 2017, to help supercharge the housing of unhoused Houstonians. And now Covid money, which other cities have spent on temporary shelters and hotel rooms, is paying the rent for thousands of apartments for the continuum’s homeless clients.
The
apartment to which outreach workers drove Terri Harris from the underpass in
July was in a low-rise, garden-style development from the 1980s. Brenda
Salinas, a case manager from a service provider called Baker Ripley, helped Ms.
Harris sign a lease in the front office and walked her to a ground-floor
one-bedroom with a red front door. Ms. Salinas then captured a video of Ms.
Harris, in flip-flops and a blue tank top, taking a couple of deep breaths,
rising excitedly onto her tiptoes and turning the key.
Just
a week earlier, the outreach team had found Ms. Harris in her tent under the
highway. Now, as if by magic, here she was, shellshocked after five years on
the streets. Opening the apartment’s door revealed an empty, white-walled
living room with a tidy galley kitchen, which the outreach workers began to
stock with basic supplies. The coalition would send furniture and other
household items in a few days. Ms. Harris pulled open one kitchen drawer, then
another. Her expression recalled Tom Hanks’s character in “Cast Away,” when
he’s finally back home, staring with disbelief at the simple sight of ice in a
glass. The walk-in closet in the bedroom was bigger and nicer than any place
Ms. Harris had lived with her daughter, Blesit. Ms. Harris hugged the
caseworkers. Then she collapsed onto the carpet and wept.
She
was lucky. The vast majority of the 50,000 people in the Houston area who
sought some type of homelessness service in 2021 did not qualify for an
apartment. Most were “diverted”: they received rental assistance, or were given
help signing up for food stamps or Social Security benefits. Part of the job of
the continuum is to identify and assess people according to a federal
“vulnerability index,” which uses a series of standard questions to determine
who on the streets is most vulnerable. Meant to systematize a selection process
historically rife with discrimination and random decision-making, the index has
its own racial and gender biases, critics say. One study, for example, showed that while
white and Black women have the same odds of experiencing homelessness because
of trauma, white women are much more likely to report trauma and thus score
higher on the index. Houston has cooked up a version that aspires to be more
sensitive and tailored to conditions specific to the city.
Those
who receive the highest scores on Houston’s index — the chronically homeless —
become eligible for what is known as permanent supportive housing. “Supportive”
means that, in addition to receiving housing, the person is given money for
rent, utilities, bus fare and other necessities, and is assigned a case manager
who helps with access to employment programs, psychiatric and substance abuse
treatment.
That
housing first gets people off the street is undisputed. Critics do question whether it does a better
job than programs mandating substance-abuse treatment or other behavioral
interventions at improving the long-term health of chronically homeless individuals.
Some skeptics argue that, in a universe of limited resources like vouchers,
prioritizing the most challenging cases can disadvantage housing-insecure
families, those in substandard housing and others who
need help. But these arguments miss the point of housing first, proponents
respond.
“The
homeless guy on your doorstep who spits on you when you leave your house and is
always spouting from Revelations may be the least sympathetic character in the
world, so you may not like the idea of paying to house him,” Ms. Parker, the
former mayor, says. “But you can’t complain about him being on the street and
also complain about getting him off it.”
Economists
disagree about how to measure the costs of housing first to taxpayers.
Estimates point to significant savings — from $4,800 to more than $60,000 per
year per person in supportive housing. But advocates contend that programs to
reduce homelessness should not be measured by whether they save taxpayers
money, particularly given that government subsidies are heavily tilted toward homeowners.
Because
she didn’t have a disability, Terri Harris didn’t qualify for permanent
supportive housing. But she did score high enough on Houston’s version of the
index for what was called rapid rehousing, which is what most people who
qualify for housing in the city — 4,233 of them in 2021 — are offered. The
continuum pays for an apartment leased in a client’s name for a year and for
help from a case manager. The client has that year to get on his or her feet
and find either the means to pay the rent or some other place to live. It’s a
respite, a chance, not a guarantee. There are critics of rapid rehousing who
contend it’s just kicking the can down the road. In Houston, nearly
three-quarters of those who have been rapidly rehoused remain housed afterward
— a lot, albeit not everyone.
When
I first encountered Ms. Harris, following the encampment’s dismantling, she
responded to questions only with yes or no answers. Six months later, I visited
her again, in her apartment. It was a blustery morning. She curled up on a dark
gray sofa that now occupied a corner of her living room. Blesit slept under a
sheet on a mattress in the bedroom. With Ms. Salinas, her case manager, and
another worker from Baker Ripley on hand, Ms. Harris seemed more at ease.
She
told me that she was born in Decatur, Ill., and that her parents were drug
addicts and alcoholics. At age 12, while her mother was visiting relatives in
Texas, she was abused by her father and uncle. Her mother brought Terri to
Houston.
There,
a high school counselor helped her get therapy. She graduated and enrolled in a
community college but had to quit to care for a wheelchair-bound relative and
started spiraling toward “a whole new level of depression.” Twice, she said,
she tried to kill herself: “When I looked in the mirror,” she told me, “I saw
my father’s face.” Her tragedies multiplied. Her mother lost a job in a
warehouse, and Ms. Harris’s meager wage as a caretaker was all that sustained
them. Unable to pay rent, the two were evicted. They moved into their car. Then
the car broke down.
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Eventually,
Ms. Harris ended up on the streets, where a relationship left her pregnant.
After Blesit was born, Ms. Harris and the baby lived in a tent until someone
living in a house nearby threatened to call child services. That’s when Ms.
Harris left her daughter with her sister and found the encampment under the
highway.
A
manager in one of the nearby fast food restaurants gave Ms. Harris something to
eat now and then. In search of a bed, she trekked a few times to Star of Hope,
a first-come-first-served women’s shelter on the other side of town. She was
willing to take Bible lessons, as that shelter required, but there was never an
open spot.
She
had been welcomed in the new apartment complex, Ms. Harris told me. One
neighbor offered her a ride to a grocery store. “But I have nothing to give her
back, so I don’t like to ask for help,” Ms. Harris said. She had not told
anyone she had been homeless. “My neighbors are upscale people. I want them to
see me like a regular person. People look at you with disgust when they think
you’re homeless.”
It
was January, and she was scraping by on $443 a month in food stamps.
Not
far from Ana Rausch’s house in a leafy, middle-class suburb northwest of
downtown Houston, a community of people camped for years unnoticed. Then an
AutoZone arrived and cleared away the brush that hid them. “Suddenly, my
neighbors complained about homeless people moving in,” Ms. Rausch recalled.
“They talked about the ‘dangerous tent people,’ as if these people hadn’t been
living there quietly, and without trouble, all that time.”
This
is one reason Mayor Turner, who has gradually leaned into his predecessor’s
homeless agenda, has prioritized clearing encampments while also proclaiming
his commitment to housing the unhoused. Perception shapes policy. Homelessness
nationwide has been rising since 2016, mostly because of a few big,
affordable-housing-starved, shelter-dependent coastal cities. Before then it
had been declining,
and the number of people experiencing homelessness across the country was still
lower at last count, in 2020, than it was a decade earlier. But decline is not
what many people perceive, even in places like Houston. The grinding,
day-to-day efforts to interview unhoused people, find them suitable apartments,
help them get food stamps and bus fare, happen largely unnoticed, easily
overshadowed by the sight of even one person sleeping on a sidewalk or beside a
busy highway. And sentiments have changed. “Housing the homeless used to be
something everybody agreed on,” Ms. Chapman-Semple says. “But there’s something
new in America — an intolerance, a cultural shift.”
That
shift is partly fueled by violence like the killings this year of Christina
Yuna Lee in her apartment in
Manhattan’s Chinatown and of Michelle Alyssa Go, who was shoved from
a Times Square subway platform into an oncoming train. In each case, the police
arrested a homeless man with a history of mental illness. Ms. Rausch
understands why people fear someone who appears mentally ill or out of control.
She was raised by a single mother who struggled to pay the bills, and she
sometimes wrestles with what is owed to, say, an unhoused man who rejects a
spot in one of Houston’s new single-room-occupancy projects because he says he
wants to hold out for a one-bedroom.
“There
was a time my mom struggled to buy food,” she recalls. “Some of the places
where my mother and I lived are where we now place homeless clients. ”
The
Houston that Ms. Rausch grew up in has changed. A once-abundant inventory of
affordable housing has shrunk drastically. New construction focuses
overwhelmingly on the top of the market. As elsewhere, giant investment firms
like Blackstone have been gobbling up housing stock, pricing out middle-class
and lower-income residents. Making matters harder, eviction filings
in Harris County are now soaring: they’re higher than they were before
the pandemic.
“Meanwhile,
housing costs are rising faster than incomes,” points out Bill Fulton, the
director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, a think tank in the city,
“And, as a result, a large majority of Houstonians have been shut out of
homeownership and become renters, half of them rent-burdened, meaning they pay
more than a third, and often more than half, of their income in rent.”
Jeremy
Sanders, a caseworker whose job is to help homeless people, told me that he has
struggled to stay housed. Married, with two children, Mr. Sanders earns $43,000
a year. “For a while, when my wife wasn’t working, I needed grace from our
landlord,” he said. “It was tough coming to work every day, smiling with my
colleagues and the clients, because I really wasn’t sure whether we would have
a place to live next month.” As it happened, Mr. Sanders’s wife found a job the
day before I met him. “It was a good thing,” he said, “because we had spent our
last savings.”
Mr.
Fulton says that this compression at the lower end of the housing market means
that rent-burdened Houstonians — people like Mr. Sanders — are competing with
“the homeless for a shrinking stock of deteriorating apartments that are
charging increasingly higher rents.” Housing vouchers from the federal
government barely make a dent in the problem. In 2010, some 220,000 people in
Houston qualified for 20,000 vouchers. Today, 600,000 people meet the
requirements for just 40,000 vouchers.
“For
most of my life, Houston was a place where anybody could find an affordable
home if they were willing to drive far enough from downtown,” says Lance
Gilliam, the chairman of the Coalition for the Homeless. “Partly, we’ve become
victims of our own success. Because the coalition was filling these sorts of
places with tenants, they became more attractive to investors,” Mr. Gilliam
said. “Some started saying they didn’t want to rent to us anymore.”
I
met with a landlord whose buildings house some 200 formerly homeless clients of
the continuum. She asked to remain anonymous so as not to stigmatize her
company’s properties in the minds of other tenants or potential renters. She
explained the calculus that landlords now make: During the last year, she said
occupancy rates in the city reached 95 percent, and rents rose by 17 percent.
Government rental vouchers guarantee monthly payments, but there is often more
money to be made — and less red tape — when renting to unsubsidized tenants.
I
learned this spring that 200 formerly homeless clients were told they might
have to move from a complex run by a different landlord. The complex was sold
last year, and the new owners were reconsidering the relationship with the
continuum. The same was happening at six other properties in the area.
In
response, Marc Eichenbaum, the mayor’s special assistant for homeless
initiatives, starting holding weekly meetings with the continuum and with local
housing authorities and county commissioners. They pondered converting derelict
motel rooms into apartments as well as building new, subsidized properties, so
that the continuum would not always be beholden to private landlords. But doing
those things would take years.
To
address the immediate problem, Mr. Eichenbaum reached out to landlords and, as
he put it, “let them know that finding one-bedrooms for homeless Houstonians
was a top priority for Mayor Turner.” Then “we organized a handoff to Mike
Nichols and his team at the coalition to close the deal.”
Mike
Nichols is the president of the Coalition for the Homeless. A former corporate
executive who served two terms as a Democrat in Georgia’s House of
Representatives, Mr. Nichols picked up the story: “I asked the landlords, ‘What
do you need?’” Landlords, he said, complained about the maze of agencies they had
to navigate when there was a problem with a tenant. “Now we’re meeting with the
owners of properties about providing better service and moving out the few
troublesome residents.”
Instead
of losing apartments this year, Mr. Eichenbaum told me, “we’re hopeful we may
gain up to 1,000 more than we had.” It’s not nearly enough to solve the city’s
one-bedroom shortage but enough to stanch the bleeding and inch forward.
This
was Houston’s homelessness story in a nutshell, I realized. “Housing people is
a slow, extremely complicated, incremental process that requires all hands on
deck, all the time, if you don’t want to settle for the status quo, much less
go backward,” Mr. Eichenbaum said. “Everyone has to come together around the
table.”
Nearly
a year after watching people being moved out of the encampment in the
underpass, that was still the city’s message and I still had a lot of
questions. I wondered about the uncounted couch-surfing families and youth;
about the underpaid, overtaxed caseworkers who cannot provide enough help;
about the landlords refusing to house tenants with vouchers, and people like
Ms. Harris and her daughter, Blesit, judged not quite desperate enough for more
permanent housing.
But
mostly I wondered what individuals would extract from Houston’s example.
Homelessness is a calamity millions reckon with each day — a calamity provoking
a mix of rage, fear and powerlessness in the housed and unhoused alike. For me,
the big reveal after a year was not that Houston had solved the problem. It hasn’t.
There is no one-time fix to homelessness.
The
reveal was something different. It was that in broken America it’s still
possible for adversaries to share facts and come together around something
contentious and difficult. Public and private, county and city, businesses and
nonprofits, conservatives and liberals, the housed and unhoused: In Houston,
enough of them have agreed on a goal that seems worth striving for. Working in
concert, they have made genuine progress in housing previously unhoused people.
And, so far, the benefits of collaboration have fended off the usual forces of
entropy. That was an eye-opener and a sign of hope.
Two Months to Come Up With $886 for Rent
Image
The
other day, I talked to Ms. Harris on the phone. After several months, she had
finally come up with the $12 to replace her Texas identification card that had
been stolen while she was living on the streets, as well as a Social Security
card. With her new IDs, she could apply for jobs. A job listed at a Whataburger
paid $9.53 an hour. But after dropping off Blesit with her sister and traveling
across town, she was told by the restaurant manager that the position had been
filled. A human resources firm was offering to help her with child care, but
Ms. Harris hadn’t gotten around to arranging it, she told me, because it
required she register online and only recently had she gotten access to a
computer. Blesit’s father had found work at a Family Dollar across town, and,
when he could, he took the bus to lend Ms. Harris a hand. Ms. Harris is now
waiting to hear back about a job as a janitor.
She
can’t sleep some nights out of fear of losing the apartment. “It’s the first
time I have had my own place,” she said. “My neighbors watch out for me. I’ve
learned how to save money, how to be an adult — how to be a mother. I want to
finish college and watch my baby go to school and graduate.” But she has no
housing voucher, and her lease will expire at the end of July unless she can
come up with the $886 a month the continuum now pays in rent.
Anticipating
that Ms. Harris may need to move, Ms. Salinas has reached out to a program
called Shelters to Shutters, which provides an apartment and job training in
return for work.
Yeah, that's interesting, made me look it up and now I'm reading a few articles about it. Looks like homeowner default during the great recession was by far much lower for you guys in 2008. But, yeah, I'd say when I'm talking about the stock market and other economic issues - though, they are very much macro issues, and if anything proves the point that inflation isn't the cause of a president of one nation - I'm talking about the US (we're dummies and very much think we're the only ones who count, hee hee). So the root and issues at play in the US for inflation would line up with what I put above, and my concerns are about US loan/credit debt & US housing policy.
I bet Canada didn't have stated income loans, 3 year ARMS, balloons and other clever loan products that put people IMHO homes they could not afford.
Yes, every other country doesn't sell its soul for the ideology of unfettered capitalism with the ability to view people strictly under the scope of being a consumer. I would agree with this.
And to further light a political fire, imo as amazing as we in this country think it is to have homeownership be the greatest point of increasing one's wealth it is also an incredibly exclusive club that is only getting harder and harder to attain. The rest of the world basically sees land ownership as not a high priority, or no more important than housing of any other kind. Very much a topic that doesn't get enough chatter here, nor in the overall discourse of US policy nearly enough (along with zoning laws). We should be upzoning any and everywhere, we have written too many exclusionary laws when it comes to giving people a way and place to live.
Well people need a place to live. So what's better, personal ownership of land that increases your wealth, or apartments that are owned by people like Fred Trump? The third option is gov't owned buildings like the Soviet Union. So in the various options that are available, I much prefer personal ownership. Maybe it's a terrible system but better than the rest.
Or ya know, in a practical sense we have multiple options and not speak in any absolutes. There's government housing in many 1st world countries and they're shockingly not the Soviet Union. Sure, you can own land, but you can also have the option to go to your government and find a place to put a roof over your head to sleep, and take a hot shower. So, yes, you're right, people do need a place to live.
Also, the US Fed Gov is the greatest buyer and efficiently-driven project manager (uh oh now I did it!). While we're jerking off about every other thing in this country I'd love if my tax dollars went toward housing expansion, while also making it easier to attain said ownership. I would much more would prefer that to my dollars going toward defense.
We have public housing in this country. I know Canada does as well. My understanding is that Canada's problems are similar to ours. They have high drug use and crime. So even public housing there is essentially low income housing. We have plenty of that, and it's not pretty. If there are first world countries with public housing that is high quality, I'd like to see the model. I'm not aware of it (but admittedly haven't researched it either).
The UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Australia, etc etc all have a form of government/public housing. All models we could learn something from.
I think an error is correlating public housing with high drug use and crime. So this is where Dems within the party divide, which I can see is happening here. So do you agree people need a roof over their head or not? Because it's also been proven again and again that homelessness doesn't have a causation/correlation with crime and drug use.
And this is where zoning comes in, and the carnal version of humans - especially in this country - rears its ugly head. IMO an ideal neighborhood is a dense, mixed income neighborhood. Everything else is a result of highway expansion and turning the country into suburban divisions, which I believe are inherently toxic and detrimental to solving larger issues. Not In My Back Yard (NIMBYs) are a natural wedge just like the use of "choice" in education. When it comes to public housing people somehow always relate drugs and crime and then all of a sudden it can't be built anywhere, yet we want to talk in platitudes that people definitely need a roof over their heads and we need to do something about homelessness. But the practical answer isn't one anyone wants to accept. When it comes to public goods, which I believe housing, food, and education are should not be given a "choice" as it's interpreted in the Libertarian (read: those who don't like to be called Republicans anymore) sense and other so-called "Progressives" think of it as. Choice should mean go do whatever the hell you want, or fall back on tax dollars and robust system in place - not handing out vouchers. That's definitely not a shot at you, nor a need to start a Progressive Purity Pissing Contest. But I bring it up for people to be aware of how zoning works (or who it's suppose to work for) and how it detracts from the need to give people a place to live. And that problems are usually deeper than "welp just own a house, it's better than living in the USSR."
1) Build more housing with tax/gov dollars 2) Decrease barriers to home ownership 3) Have an easy and readily available option for those who are homeless.
Houston just put 25k homeless people into homes, and their numbers are down by 63% (!!) since 2011 by providing places to live directly. Not only that, a year later those same people went on to be able to provide for themselves and rent without assistance. And that shouldn't be a fractured process that has to be doled out by each municipality. People need help, full stop. So the greatest power to do so is the federal government.
The reality is that people who migrate to public housing are people that can't afford better housing. Unfortunately there is a correlation between crime, under-education and other factors that connect to income. There is a second reality that people tend to take better care of things that they own, rather than rent and rather than given to them. This is human nature.
You also have to remember that there is at least a little causation between the mortgage collapse and the Fannie Freddie Affordable Housing requirements that started in 1992 and continued to grow until 2007 or so. If you're not familiar, the gov't required these GSEs to underwrite 40% of their loans to people who are below the median income levels in their area. That number continued to rise all the way into Bush's second term. When you do that, there is no option but to lower lending standards. That's why of the bad books that were traded, half were full of GSE sub prime mortgages. So the gov't did try to put people into more homes and this was the result.
OK but this my point - there are underlying issues to things. Again, we like to speak platitudes that this is a problem, and that's a problem, but don't actually want to face the issues head-on on resolving them. Or certainly not put policy into place that drastically changes things.
Also, the idea to rent rather than own is a negative falls into the Broken Windows Theory. And, man, that shit has been disproven time and time again. Everyone is deserving to be treated with equal dignity. All this kind of stuff does is divide people up and separate classes either by income, ethnic, and/or religious (beyond other demos) class. So, again, imo the only good war is a class war. Because that shit isn't perpetuated by those trying their best to get by each day.
If you want to decrease barrier to home ownership then you need to detangle the housing market from an open market. High level macro imo is to detangle personal wealth to having a roof over one's head. But people can't handle that.
At the very, very, very least a housing expansion/building program should be implemented to increase supply.
The govt already circumvented the open market and it didn't work.
Yeah, that's interesting, made me look it up and now I'm reading a few articles about it. Looks like homeowner default during the great recession was by far much lower for you guys in 2008. But, yeah, I'd say when I'm talking about the stock market and other economic issues - though, they are very much macro issues, and if anything proves the point that inflation isn't the cause of a president of one nation - I'm talking about the US (we're dummies and very much think we're the only ones who count, hee hee). So the root and issues at play in the US for inflation would line up with what I put above, and my concerns are about US loan/credit debt & US housing policy.
I bet Canada didn't have stated income loans, 3 year ARMS, balloons and other clever loan products that put people IMHO homes they could not afford.
Yes, every other country doesn't sell its soul for the ideology of unfettered capitalism with the ability to view people strictly under the scope of being a consumer. I would agree with this.
And to further light a political fire, imo as amazing as we in this country think it is to have homeownership be the greatest point of increasing one's wealth it is also an incredibly exclusive club that is only getting harder and harder to attain. The rest of the world basically sees land ownership as not a high priority, or no more important than housing of any other kind. Very much a topic that doesn't get enough chatter here, nor in the overall discourse of US policy nearly enough (along with zoning laws). We should be upzoning any and everywhere, we have written too many exclusionary laws when it comes to giving people a way and place to live.
Well people need a place to live. So what's better, personal ownership of land that increases your wealth, or apartments that are owned by people like Fred Trump? The third option is gov't owned buildings like the Soviet Union. So in the various options that are available, I much prefer personal ownership. Maybe it's a terrible system but better than the rest.
Or ya know, in a practical sense we have multiple options and not speak in any absolutes. There's government housing in many 1st world countries and they're shockingly not the Soviet Union. Sure, you can own land, but you can also have the option to go to your government and find a place to put a roof over your head to sleep, and take a hot shower. So, yes, you're right, people do need a place to live.
Also, the US Fed Gov is the greatest buyer and efficiently-driven project manager (uh oh now I did it!). While we're jerking off about every other thing in this country I'd love if my tax dollars went toward housing expansion, while also making it easier to attain said ownership. I would much more would prefer that to my dollars going toward defense.
We have public housing in this country. I know Canada does as well. My understanding is that Canada's problems are similar to ours. They have high drug use and crime. So even public housing there is essentially low income housing. We have plenty of that, and it's not pretty. If there are first world countries with public housing that is high quality, I'd like to see the model. I'm not aware of it (but admittedly haven't researched it either).
The UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Australia, etc etc all have a form of government/public housing. All models we could learn something from.
I think an error is correlating public housing with high drug use and crime. So this is where Dems within the party divide, which I can see is happening here. So do you agree people need a roof over their head or not? Because it's also been proven again and again that homelessness doesn't have a causation/correlation with crime and drug use.
And this is where zoning comes in, and the carnal version of humans - especially in this country - rears its ugly head. IMO an ideal neighborhood is a dense, mixed income neighborhood. Everything else is a result of highway expansion and turning the country into suburban divisions, which I believe are inherently toxic and detrimental to solving larger issues. Not In My Back Yard (NIMBYs) are a natural wedge just like the use of "choice" in education. When it comes to public housing people somehow always relate drugs and crime and then all of a sudden it can't be built anywhere, yet we want to talk in platitudes that people definitely need a roof over their heads and we need to do something about homelessness. But the practical answer isn't one anyone wants to accept. When it comes to public goods, which I believe housing, food, and education are should not be given a "choice" as it's interpreted in the Libertarian (read: those who don't like to be called Republicans anymore) sense and other so-called "Progressives" think of it as. Choice should mean go do whatever the hell you want, or fall back on tax dollars and robust system in place - not handing out vouchers. That's definitely not a shot at you, nor a need to start a Progressive Purity Pissing Contest. But I bring it up for people to be aware of how zoning works (or who it's suppose to work for) and how it detracts from the need to give people a place to live. And that problems are usually deeper than "welp just own a house, it's better than living in the USSR."
1) Build more housing with tax/gov dollars 2) Decrease barriers to home ownership 3) Have an easy and readily available option for those who are homeless.
Houston just put 25k homeless people into homes, and their numbers are down by 63% (!!) since 2011 by providing places to live directly. Not only that, a year later those same people went on to be able to provide for themselves and rent without assistance. And that shouldn't be a fractured process that has to be doled out by each municipality. People need help, full stop. So the greatest power to do so is the federal government.
The reality is that people who migrate to public housing are people that can't afford better housing. Unfortunately there is a correlation between crime, under-education and other factors that connect to income. There is a second reality that people tend to take better care of things that they own, rather than rent and rather than given to them. This is human nature.
You also have to remember that there is at least a little causation between the mortgage collapse and the Fannie Freddie Affordable Housing requirements that started in 1992 and continued to grow until 2007 or so. If you're not familiar, the gov't required these GSEs to underwrite 40% of their loans to people who are below the median income levels in their area. That number continued to rise all the way into Bush's second term. When you do that, there is no option but to lower lending standards. That's why of the bad books that were traded, half were full of GSE sub prime mortgages. So the gov't did try to put people into more homes and this was the result.
OK but this my point - there are underlying issues to things. Again, we like to speak platitudes that this is a problem, and that's a problem, but don't actually want to face the issues head-on on resolving them. Or certainly not put policy into place that drastically changes things.
Also, the idea to rent rather than own is a negative falls into the Broken Windows Theory. And, man, that shit has been disproven time and time again. Everyone is deserving to be treated with equal dignity. All this kind of stuff does is divide people up and separate classes either by income, ethnic, and/or religious (beyond other demos) class. So, again, imo the only good war is a class war. Because that shit isn't perpetuated by those trying their best to get by each day.
If you want to decrease barrier to home ownership then you need to detangle the housing market from an open market. High level macro imo is to detangle personal wealth to having a roof over one's head. But people can't handle that.
At the very, very, very least a housing expansion/building program should be implemented to increase supply.
The govt already circumvented the open market and it didn't work.
I'll say again - at the very, very, very least the gov should be sponsoring a housing expansion/building program to increase supply. The answer isn't to rely upon the market.
My favorite quotes in relation to what you've brought up:
·
“The homeless
guy on your doorstep who spits on you when you leave your house and is always
spouting from Revelations may be the least sympathetic character in the world,
so you may not like the idea of paying to house him,” Ms. Parker, the former
mayor, says. “But you can’t complain about him being on the street and also
complain about getting him off it.”
·
“My neighbors
are upscale people. I want them to see me like a regular person. People look at
you with disgust when they think you’re homeless.”
·
“Suddenly, my
neighbors complained about homeless people moving in,” Ms. Rausch recalled.
“They talked about the ‘dangerous tent people,’ as if these people hadn’t been
living there quietly, and without trouble, all that time.”
·
Perception
shapes policy. Homelessness nationwide has been rising since 2016, mostly
because of a few big, affordable-housing-starved, shelter-dependent coastal
cities. Before then it had been declining, and the number of people experiencing homelessness across
the country was still lower at last count, in 2020, than it was a decade earlier.
But decline is not what many people perceive, even in places like Houston. The
grinding, day-to-day efforts to interview unhoused people, find them suitable
apartments, help them get food stamps and bus fare, happen largely unnoticed,
easily overshadowed by the sight of even one person sleeping on a sidewalk or
beside a busy highway. And sentiments have changed. “Housing the homeless used
to be something everybody agreed on,” Ms. Chapman-Semple says. “But there’s
something new in America — an intolerance, a cultural shift.”
·
A once-abundant
inventory of affordable housing has shrunk drastically. New construction
focuses overwhelmingly on the top of the market. As elsewhere, giant investment
firms like Blackstone have been gobbling up housing stock, pricing out
middle-class and lower-income residents. Making matters harder, eviction filings in Harris County are now soaring: they’re higher than they
were before the pandemic.
·
“Meanwhile,
housing costs are rising faster than incomes,” points out Bill Fulton, the
director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, a think tank in the city,
“And, as a result, a large majority of Houstonians have been shut out of
homeownership and become renters, half of them rent-burdened, meaning they pay
more than a third, and often more than half, of their income in rent.”
·
Mr. Fulton says
that this compression at the lower end of the housing market means that
rent-burdened Houstonians — people like Mr. Sanders — are competing with “the
homeless for a shrinking stock of deteriorating apartments that are charging
increasingly higher rents.” Housing vouchers from the federal government barely
make a dent in the problem. In 2010, some 220,000 people in Houston qualified
for 20,000 vouchers. Today, 600,000 people meet the requirements for just
40,000 vouchers.
·
I met with a
landlord whose buildings house some 200 formerly homeless clients of the
continuum. She asked to remain anonymous so as not to stigmatize her company’s
properties in the minds of other tenants or potential renters. She explained
the calculus that landlords now make: During the last year, she said occupancy
rates in the city reached 95 percent, and rents rose by 17 percent. Government
rental vouchers guarantee monthly payments, but there is often more money to be
made — and less red tape — when renting to unsubsidized tenants.
Comments
and it couldn’t be more indirect. Unless you @ me or dm then there’s a chance I’ll never see it.
"It is premature for the Fed to become resigned to a recession to get inflation back in the box."
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
They also released this breakdown, which I mostly agree with:
Are you one of those "printing money is stupid" people that thinks it causes, or is one of the greatest causes, of inflation? Because this has been disproven time and time again, look into papers re: velocity of money.
No quarter over quarter rate hike has been over 2%, at least not in a long long time. That is a shock to the system. You go from calming demand with the effect of lowering the rate of inflation increases, to antagonizing - and basically wanting to cause - a recession.
I contend they should have raised rates much quicker coming out of the prior recession (like between 2012 and 2017). And that Trump shgould have never directed the Fed to drop the rate in 2018.
And we're talking about the US-strictly here. Most people in this country do have 30, or 15, year mortgages. Not sure how your country works, but I first assumed that you did live here and when you said you mortgage is up for renewal you were talking about an ARM mortgage. Which, for those people especially, it will be very very bad. Those mortgages started to bubble up again but are no where near where they were ala 2007. But for those people it will be bad. People here really took advantage of extremely low mortgage rates within the past couple years and re-fi'ed their mortgages.
My main concern is personal debt, followed by housing. It looks like people overall have been flush with savings during this expansion (which is weird in itself to say we've been in during a global pandemic), but those are now starting to be tapped into. And with the Fed going with such a large increase so quickly that is going to affect the banks and credit card companies, which will then in turn affect the people with that debt. That and student loans, or any debt with a variable rate, is my greatest concern.
Then housing supply is already historically scarce and only getting worse. And now, yes, housing prices SHOULD come down with higher rates, but with supply so low I'm not sure if that's actually going to happen. Plus getting that mortgage will only cost more now. Those are my longer-term concerns.
I am resigned to a recession, but it doesn't need to be steep. He certainly could be right that a half point was enough.
https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-xpm-2014-jan-16-la-fi-mh-canada-20140116-story.html
And to further light a political fire, imo as amazing as we in this country think it is to have homeownership be the greatest point of increasing one's wealth it is also an incredibly exclusive club that is only getting harder and harder to attain. The rest of the world basically sees land ownership as not a high priority, or no more important than housing of any other kind. Very much a topic that doesn't get enough chatter here, nor in the overall discourse of US policy nearly enough (along with zoning laws). We should be upzoning any and everywhere, we have written too many exclusionary laws when it comes to giving people a way and place to live.
Also, the US Fed Gov is the greatest buyer and efficiently-driven project manager (uh oh now I did it!). While we're jerking off about every other thing in this country I'd love if my tax dollars went toward housing expansion, while also making it easier to attain said ownership. I would much more would prefer my tax dollars going toward that over defense.
But you know, it takes a village.
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
I think an error is correlating public housing with high drug use and crime. So this is where Dems within the party divide, which I can see is happening here. So do you agree people need a roof over their head or not? Because it's also been proven again and again that homelessness doesn't have a causation/correlation with crime and drug use.
And this is where zoning comes in, and the carnal version of humans - especially in this country - rears its ugly head. IMO an ideal neighborhood is a dense, mixed income neighborhood. Everything else is a result of highway expansion and turning the country into suburban divisions, which I believe are inherently toxic and detrimental to solving larger issues. Not In My Back Yard (NIMBYs) are a natural wedge just like the use of "choice" in education. When it comes to public housing people somehow always relate drugs and crime and then all of a sudden it can't be built anywhere, yet we want to talk in platitudes that people definitely need a roof over their heads and we need to do something about homelessness. But the practical answer isn't one anyone wants to accept. When it comes to public goods, which I believe housing, food, and education are should not be given a "choice" as it's interpreted in the Libertarian (read: those who don't like to be called Republicans anymore) sense and other so-called "Progressives" think of it as. Choice should mean go do whatever the hell you want, or fall back on tax dollars and robust system in place - not handing out vouchers. That's definitely not a shot at you, nor a need to start a Progressive Purity Pissing Contest. But I bring it up for people to be aware of how zoning works (or who it's suppose to work for) and how it detracts from the need to give people a place to live. And that problems are usually deeper than "welp just own a house, it's better than living in the USSR."
1) Build more housing with tax/gov dollars 2) Decrease barriers to home ownership 3) Have an easy and readily available option for those who are homeless.
Houston just put 25k homeless people into homes, and their numbers are down by 63% (!!) since 2011 by providing places to live directly. Not only that, a year later those same people went on to be able to provide for themselves and rent without assistance. And that shouldn't be a fractured process that has to be doled out by each municipality. People need help, full stop. So the greatest power to do so is the federal government.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html
You also have to remember that there is at least a little causation between the mortgage collapse and the Fannie Freddie Affordable Housing requirements that started in 1992 and continued to grow until 2007 or so. If you're not familiar, the gov't required these GSEs to underwrite 40% of their loans to people who are below the median income levels in their area. That number continued to rise all the way into Bush's second term. When you do that, there is no option but to lower lending standards. That's why of the bad books that were traded, half were full of GSE sub prime mortgages. So the gov't did try to put people into more homes and this was the result.
”Warehousing” any population in any setting is not a good thing, except maybe prisons but even there it might not be best.
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Working on putting the article here. It's huge.
The points are to do the pound the pavement work, coordinate the pertinent agencies, and flat out first and foremost going forward with housing first. Not wait till they test negative on a drug test, provide employment resources, etc. Just flat out get homeless people into dignified living conditions, and offer mental & physical health resources.
Who used the words "warehousing", outside of yourself? Housing is not impisonment. Like Russell said, people need somewhere to live. That's step 1.
Also, the idea to rent rather than own is a negative falls into the Broken Windows Theory. And, man, that shit has been disproven time and time again. Everyone is deserving to be treated with equal dignity. All this kind of stuff does is divide people up and separate classes either by income, ethnic, and/or religious (beyond other demos) class. So, again, imo the only good war is a class war. Because that shit isn't perpetuated by those trying their best to get by each day.
If you want to decrease barrier to home ownership then you need to detangle the housing market from an open market. High level macro imo is to detangle personal wealth to having a roof over one's head. But people can't handle that.
At the very, very, very least a housing expansion/building program should be implemented to increase supply.
One steamy morning last July, Ana Rausch commandeered a shady corner of a parking lot on the northwest side of Houston. Downing a jumbo iced coffee, she issued brisk orders to a dozen outreach workers toting iPads. Her attention was fixed on a highway underpass nearby, where a handful of people were living in tents and cardboard lean-tos. As a vice president of Houston’s Coalition for the Homeless, Ms. Rausch was there to move them out.
I had come to watch the process and, more broadly, to see Houston’s approach to homelessness, which has won a lot of praise. At first, I couldn’t figure out why this particular underpass had been colonized. The sound of trucks revving their engines ricocheted against the concrete walls like rifle shots; and most of Houston’s homeless services were miles away. But then Ms. Rausch’s team, and a few camp residents, pointed out the nearby fast food outlets, the Shell station with a convenience store, and the Planet Fitness, where a $10 monthly membership meant access to showers and outlets for charging phones.
It also wasn’t initially visible what distinguished this encampment clearance from the ones in cities like Los Angeles and Austin, where the number of homeless people has been skyrocketing along with frustrations. The difference couldn’t be seen because it had already happened. For more than a month, Ms. Rausch and her colleagues had been coordinating with Harris County officials, as well as with the mayor’s office and local landlords. They had visited the encampment and talked to people living there, so that now, as tents were being dismantled, the occupants could move directly into one-bedroom apartments, some for a year, others for longer. In other words, the people living in the encampment would not be consigned to homeless shelters, cited for trespassing or scattered to the winds, but, rather, given a home.
During the last decade, Houston, the nation’s fourth most populous city, has moved more than 25,000 homeless people directly into apartments and houses. The overwhelming majority of them have remained housed after two years. The number of people deemed homeless in the Houston region has been cut by 63 percent since 2011, according to the latest numbers from local officials. Even judging by the more modest metrics registered in a 2020 federal report, Houston did more than twice as well as the rest of the country at reducing homelessness over the previous decade. Ten years ago, homeless veterans, one of the categories that the federal government tracks, waited 720 days and had to navigate 76 bureaucratic steps to get from the street into permanent housing with support from social service counselors. Today, a streamlined process means the wait for housing is 32 days.
Houston has gotten this far by teaming with county agencies and persuading scores of local service providers, corporations and charitable nonprofits — organizations that often bicker and compete with one another — to row in unison. Together, they’ve gone all in on “housing first,” a practice, supported by decades of research, that moves the most vulnerable people straight from the streets into apartments, not into shelters, and without first requiring them to wean themselves off drugs or complete a 12-step program or find God or a job.
There are addiction recovery and religious conversion programs that succeed in getting people off the street. But housing first involves a different logic: When you’re drowning, it doesn’t help if your rescuer insists you learn to swim before returning you to shore. You can address your issues once you’re on land. Or not. Either way, you join the wider population of people battling demons behind closed doors.
“Before I leave office, I want Houston to be the first big city to end chronic homelessness,” Sylvester Turner told me. In late January, Mr. Turner, who is serving his final term as mayor, joined Harris County leaders in unveiling a $100 million plan that would use a mix of federal, state, county and city funds to cut the local homeless count in half again by 2025.
Mr. Turner chose his words with care, and it’s important to parse his phrasing. “Chronic homelessness” is a term of art. It refers to those people, like many in the Houston encampment, who have been living on the streets for more than a year or who have been homeless repeatedly, and who have a mental or physical disability. Nationwide, most of those who experience homelessness do not fall into that narrow category. They are homeless for six weeks or fewer; 40 percent have a job. For them, homelessness is an agonizing but temporary condition that they manage to resolve, maybe by doubling up with relatives or friends.
There are at the same time many thousands of mothers and children, as well as couch-surfing teenagers and young adults who are ill-housed and at risk. These people are also poor and desperate. Finding a place to sleep may be a daily struggle for them. They might be one broken transmission or emergency room visit away from the streets. They’re in the pipeline to homelessness. But they are not homeless according to the bureaucratic definition. They are not sleeping on a sidewalk or in their cars or in shelters. Houston can offer these people a hand, but Mr. Turner is not promising to end the precariousness of their lives.
“We are not here to solve poverty. We aren’t here to fix the affordable housing problem” is how Ms. Rausch puts it, adding, “Think of the homeless system in America as an emergency room for a triaged slice of poverty. What Houston has achieved is to get itself far enough along in addressing the challenge that we can hope to begin to think about the pipeline to homelessness.”
Encampments like the one in the underpass lay bare decades of calamitous decisions by planners, politicians and health and housing authorities. One in every 14 Americans experiences homelessness at some point, a population that is disproportionately Black. Eradicating homelessness would involve tackling systemic racism, reconstituting the nation’s mental health, family support and substance abuse systems, raising wages, expanding the federal housing voucher program and building millions more subsidized homes.
The goal in Houston and among other cities attacking the problem is different: to make homelessness only “rare and brief,” to cite Rosanne Haggerty, the housing advocate. Five states — California, New York, Florida, Washington and Texas — now account for 57 percent of the people experiencing homelessness. Not coincidentally, it is worst in those big cities where affordable housing is in short supply, the so-called NIMBYs are powerful, and the yawning gap between median incomes and the cost of housing keeps growing. Houston fits that description. The scale of its woes does not approach what is happening in San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles. But the progress it has made in housing people is instructive and replicable. It constitutes a fragile, compelling success.
By midafternoon on that July day, Ms. Rausch’s team had transferred those living in the encampment to their new residences. Among the people relocated was a shy, 39-year-old woman named Terri Harris. Ms. Harris had leaped at the prospect of an apartment when outreach workers approached her in the camp. She was tired of living on the streets, but, above all, she was desperate to reunite with her three-year-old daughter, Blesit, whom she had had to leave with her sister.
Two outreach workers packed Ms. Harris into a white van, along with a Hefty trash bag stuffed with household supplies and a Bible. Ms. Harris looked nervous but smiled as the van drove off.
At the end of the ride was a one-bedroom apartment.
“We Started Talking to Each Other”
Half a century ago, America invented modern homelessness.
The stage was set with the shuttering of psychiatric hospitals in the wake of abuse scandals and the introduction of new psychotropic medications. Then cities started offering tax incentives to owners of flop houses, or single-room-occupancy hotels, to convert their properties into market-rate rentals, condos and co-ops. In New York City alone, more than 100,000 S.R.O. units that had housed substance abusers, elderly singles, former inmates and the mentally ill were lost.
During the 1980s, back-to-back recessions, combined with the Reagan administration’s severe federal cutbacks targeting low-income housing and poverty assistance programs, forced more and more Americans — including large numbers of families — into homelessness. At the same time, well-paid manufacturing jobs moved overseas, and steelworkers had to start pushing brooms at McDonald’s. An oil crisis drove up fuel prices, which bumped up rents, as did a new generation of gentrifiers discovering the architectural pleasures of historic neighborhoods.
On top of all that, Reagan-era tax reforms encouraged the construction of high-end, single-family homes but not of affordable multifamily rentals. There were 515,000 multifamily homes built in America in 1985, but just 140,000 built in 1991. As people began competing for fewer and fewer apartments, the affordable housing market turned into a game of musical chairs played by low-income Americans. Someone always lost.
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A decade ago, Houston had one of the highest per capita homeless counts in the country. Its homeless response system was in shambles. The city was squandering millions of public dollars and police officers’ time by jailing homeless Houstonians for intoxication. Residents living on the streets, under bridges and along the bayous were using ambulances to get basic medical care because they had no other way to do so.
And, as in other cities, dozens of local aid organizations, public and private, were operating in silos — competing for federal funds, duplicating services, not sharing information or goals, housing precious few people.
Jessica Preheim, the vice president for strategic planning at Houston’s Coalition for the Homeless and one of Ms. Rausch’s colleagues, remembers that every five or six years the Houston Housing Authority would announce a lottery for anyone hoping to get on the waiting list for federal housing vouchers. As Ms. Preheim recalls, if you wanted to enter the lottery, you needed first to hear the announcement, then submit an application in writing within a few days, before the lottery closed. If, by some miracle, your name were drawn, you would receive notification by snail mail, which, of course, required a street address.
It was a recipe for not housing homeless people.
Thao Costis, who runs a homeless service provider in Houston called SEARCH, said that back then her organization, like many in the city, was trying to do everything: outreach, case management, child services, employment training, paying rent to landlords to house clients. “SEARCH was $1 million in the hole,” Ms. Costis remembers, “and the people who most needed help weren’t getting it.”
What started to bring about change was the passage in 2009 of the Hearth Act, which stipulated that, in order to receive federal dollars, cities had to adopt a “housing first” policy and, crucially, that homeless organizations had to work together in “continuums of care” under a single lead agency, coordinating their programs and sharing data. The federal government had recommended these continuums of care since 1994, but not until the Hearth Act was funding tied to specific metrics of effectiveness.
With the new regulations set to take effect in 2012, the Obama administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development offered money and expertise to 10 cities where homelessness was a particular problem. Houston was among them.
Annise Parker was Houston’s mayor at the time. I went to see her earlier this year. She lives with her wife, Kathy Hubbard, in a three-story gabled house built in 1904 on a pretty, tree-lined street in the Montrose neighborhood. Hanging in Ms. Parker’s foyer are framed photographs of the three daughters she and Ms. Hubbard adopted out of foster care, as well as of a teenage boy, now a man in his mid-40s — “a runaway from grandparents who tried to force the ‘gay’ out of him,” Ms. Parker says — who was living on the streets when they took him in.
Ms. Parker is the opposite of a slick politician: blunt, wonky, unassuming. A software analyst in the oil and gas industry for 20 years, she became city controller, managing Houston’s money, before being elected America’s first openly lesbian, big-city mayor in 2009.
She won with bipartisan support as a Democrat on a centrist platform of fiscal responsibility. “Through our son, I had an up close and personal look at what life was like for somebody on the streets who was treated as disposable,” Ms. Parker told me. “Different organizations were all working in their own lanes, according to their own rules and procedures, doing what they wanted to do. There might be 100 open shelter beds on a given night designated for mothers with kids, but we didn’t have mothers with kids who needed beds.”
The White House offered an expert on homeless aid, Mandy Chapman-Semple, to help Ms. Parker herd the cats. They invited dozens of the city’s homeless-service providers to a meeting. “We started talking to each other” is how Ms. Preheim remembers that moment. “Sometimes it is as simple as that.”
The continuum was given a name, The Way Home, and the nonprofit Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County was appointed its lead agency. Some food banks and religious and other service providers that made prayer or sobriety conditions for housing did not join. But more than 100 local and regional organizations eventually signed on.
Houston started collecting real-time data, as opposed to relying solely on a once-a-year census. At first, the goal was to house 100 homeless veterans in 100 days, and after that was achieved, 300 more in another 100 days. “Then we thought, if we can do that, we can do something really big,” Ms. Parker told me.
It may seem surprising that, of all cities, Houston — built on a go-it-alone oil business culture — decided to tackle homelessness by, in effect, collectivizing its homeless relief system. Houston is a business-friendly city in a purple county in a red state, with more than its share of neighborhood housing covenants. But Houstonians will tell anyone willing to listen that they are nothing if not pragmatic.
The Houston Housing Authority joined the continuum. It agreed that 250 homeless clients a year could jump to the top of the waiting list for vouchers. Since that change, thousands have received vouchers and been housed.
SEARCH also joined. Coordination meant that Ms. Costis’ group could focus on case management, leaving job training, child care and other services to fellow continuum members. That, in turn, allowed it to avoid financial collapse and to hire more case managers, a critical need.
“People were suddenly being housed with lightning speed,” Ms. Costis recalled. “It was a phenomenal difference.”
It helped, Ms. Parker says, “that back then we still had slack in our housing market and reasonably priced land. It also helped that we created a center for sobriety, stopped arresting 20,000 people a year for public intoxication and started handing out taxi vouchers to homeless people so they wouldn’t use ambulances as personal taxis. All that saved us a fortune and made sense. But the bottom line is that nearly everybody in Houston involved in homelessness got together around what works. That’s our secret sauce.”
I struggled with this explanation. Housing first is not a new idea, after all. Other cities receive federal funds and have continuums of care. They don’t achieve the same results.
“You can meet the letter of the law without embracing its true intent” is how Ms. Chapman-Semple put it to me. San Diego, for example, another of the 10 cities targeted by the Obama administration, created a continuum; but unlike Houston, which cut its homeless count by nearly two-thirds, San Diego was able to reduce the number by only 19 percent, a 2020 city audit concluded, because of a piecemeal approach to housing first and “ineffective” strategic planning.
Atlanta, too, was adrift until neighboring counties dropped out of a joint continuum and the city set up its own, modeling its approach on Houston’s. Atlanta has since cut its homeless numbers by 40 percent and gained increasing corporate support — a vital source of additional funding. “When you get the public sector aligned, it becomes much easier to go to the private sector and say, ‘Join us,’” Cathryn Vassell, who runs Atlanta’s continuum, told me.
Getting businesses squarely behind solutions to homelessness, beyond their usual token contributions, is clearly a challenge in other places. In 2020, city councilors in Seattle approved a tax on businesses to support homeless housing. But the councilors rescinded the tax less than a month later in the face of opposition from big employers, including Amazon, which temporarily halted construction of a downtown tower in protest. Corporate leaders explained that they didn’t trust the city to spend the money effectively. As a consequence of Houston’s more united front, city officials were able to channel private money and federal emergency relief dollars in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, in 2017, to help supercharge the housing of unhoused Houstonians. And now Covid money, which other cities have spent on temporary shelters and hotel rooms, is paying the rent for thousands of apartments for the continuum’s homeless clients.
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A Reprieve, and the Clock Starts Ticking
The apartment to which outreach workers drove Terri Harris from the underpass in July was in a low-rise, garden-style development from the 1980s. Brenda Salinas, a case manager from a service provider called Baker Ripley, helped Ms. Harris sign a lease in the front office and walked her to a ground-floor one-bedroom with a red front door. Ms. Salinas then captured a video of Ms. Harris, in flip-flops and a blue tank top, taking a couple of deep breaths, rising excitedly onto her tiptoes and turning the key.
Just a week earlier, the outreach team had found Ms. Harris in her tent under the highway. Now, as if by magic, here she was, shellshocked after five years on the streets. Opening the apartment’s door revealed an empty, white-walled living room with a tidy galley kitchen, which the outreach workers began to stock with basic supplies. The coalition would send furniture and other household items in a few days. Ms. Harris pulled open one kitchen drawer, then another. Her expression recalled Tom Hanks’s character in “Cast Away,” when he’s finally back home, staring with disbelief at the simple sight of ice in a glass. The walk-in closet in the bedroom was bigger and nicer than any place Ms. Harris had lived with her daughter, Blesit. Ms. Harris hugged the caseworkers. Then she collapsed onto the carpet and wept.
She was lucky. The vast majority of the 50,000 people in the Houston area who sought some type of homelessness service in 2021 did not qualify for an apartment. Most were “diverted”: they received rental assistance, or were given help signing up for food stamps or Social Security benefits. Part of the job of the continuum is to identify and assess people according to a federal “vulnerability index,” which uses a series of standard questions to determine who on the streets is most vulnerable. Meant to systematize a selection process historically rife with discrimination and random decision-making, the index has its own racial and gender biases, critics say. One study, for example, showed that while white and Black women have the same odds of experiencing homelessness because of trauma, white women are much more likely to report trauma and thus score higher on the index. Houston has cooked up a version that aspires to be more sensitive and tailored to conditions specific to the city.
Those who receive the highest scores on Houston’s index — the chronically homeless — become eligible for what is known as permanent supportive housing. “Supportive” means that, in addition to receiving housing, the person is given money for rent, utilities, bus fare and other necessities, and is assigned a case manager who helps with access to employment programs, psychiatric and substance abuse treatment.
That housing first gets people off the street is undisputed. Critics do question whether it does a better job than programs mandating substance-abuse treatment or other behavioral interventions at improving the long-term health of chronically homeless individuals. Some skeptics argue that, in a universe of limited resources like vouchers, prioritizing the most challenging cases can disadvantage housing-insecure families, those in substandard housing and others who need help. But these arguments miss the point of housing first, proponents respond.
“The homeless guy on your doorstep who spits on you when you leave your house and is always spouting from Revelations may be the least sympathetic character in the world, so you may not like the idea of paying to house him,” Ms. Parker, the former mayor, says. “But you can’t complain about him being on the street and also complain about getting him off it.”
Economists disagree about how to measure the costs of housing first to taxpayers. Estimates point to significant savings — from $4,800 to more than $60,000 per year per person in supportive housing. But advocates contend that programs to reduce homelessness should not be measured by whether they save taxpayers money, particularly given that government subsidies are heavily tilted toward homeowners.
Because she didn’t have a disability, Terri Harris didn’t qualify for permanent supportive housing. But she did score high enough on Houston’s version of the index for what was called rapid rehousing, which is what most people who qualify for housing in the city — 4,233 of them in 2021 — are offered. The continuum pays for an apartment leased in a client’s name for a year and for help from a case manager. The client has that year to get on his or her feet and find either the means to pay the rent or some other place to live. It’s a respite, a chance, not a guarantee. There are critics of rapid rehousing who contend it’s just kicking the can down the road. In Houston, nearly three-quarters of those who have been rapidly rehoused remain housed afterward — a lot, albeit not everyone.
When I first encountered Ms. Harris, following the encampment’s dismantling, she responded to questions only with yes or no answers. Six months later, I visited her again, in her apartment. It was a blustery morning. She curled up on a dark gray sofa that now occupied a corner of her living room. Blesit slept under a sheet on a mattress in the bedroom. With Ms. Salinas, her case manager, and another worker from Baker Ripley on hand, Ms. Harris seemed more at ease.
She told me that she was born in Decatur, Ill., and that her parents were drug addicts and alcoholics. At age 12, while her mother was visiting relatives in Texas, she was abused by her father and uncle. Her mother brought Terri to Houston.
There, a high school counselor helped her get therapy. She graduated and enrolled in a community college but had to quit to care for a wheelchair-bound relative and started spiraling toward “a whole new level of depression.” Twice, she said, she tried to kill herself: “When I looked in the mirror,” she told me, “I saw my father’s face.” Her tragedies multiplied. Her mother lost a job in a warehouse, and Ms. Harris’s meager wage as a caretaker was all that sustained them. Unable to pay rent, the two were evicted. They moved into their car. Then the car broke down.
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Eventually, Ms. Harris ended up on the streets, where a relationship left her pregnant. After Blesit was born, Ms. Harris and the baby lived in a tent until someone living in a house nearby threatened to call child services. That’s when Ms. Harris left her daughter with her sister and found the encampment under the highway.
A manager in one of the nearby fast food restaurants gave Ms. Harris something to eat now and then. In search of a bed, she trekked a few times to Star of Hope, a first-come-first-served women’s shelter on the other side of town. She was willing to take Bible lessons, as that shelter required, but there was never an open spot.
She had been welcomed in the new apartment complex, Ms. Harris told me. One neighbor offered her a ride to a grocery store. “But I have nothing to give her back, so I don’t like to ask for help,” Ms. Harris said. She had not told anyone she had been homeless. “My neighbors are upscale people. I want them to see me like a regular person. People look at you with disgust when they think you’re homeless.”
It was January, and she was scraping by on $443 a month in food stamps.
“They Didn’t Want to Rent to Us Anymore”
Not far from Ana Rausch’s house in a leafy, middle-class suburb northwest of downtown Houston, a community of people camped for years unnoticed. Then an AutoZone arrived and cleared away the brush that hid them. “Suddenly, my neighbors complained about homeless people moving in,” Ms. Rausch recalled. “They talked about the ‘dangerous tent people,’ as if these people hadn’t been living there quietly, and without trouble, all that time.”
This is one reason Mayor Turner, who has gradually leaned into his predecessor’s homeless agenda, has prioritized clearing encampments while also proclaiming his commitment to housing the unhoused. Perception shapes policy. Homelessness nationwide has been rising since 2016, mostly because of a few big, affordable-housing-starved, shelter-dependent coastal cities. Before then it had been declining, and the number of people experiencing homelessness across the country was still lower at last count, in 2020, than it was a decade earlier. But decline is not what many people perceive, even in places like Houston. The grinding, day-to-day efforts to interview unhoused people, find them suitable apartments, help them get food stamps and bus fare, happen largely unnoticed, easily overshadowed by the sight of even one person sleeping on a sidewalk or beside a busy highway. And sentiments have changed. “Housing the homeless used to be something everybody agreed on,” Ms. Chapman-Semple says. “But there’s something new in America — an intolerance, a cultural shift.”
That shift is partly fueled by violence like the killings this year of Christina Yuna Lee in her apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown and of Michelle Alyssa Go, who was shoved from a Times Square subway platform into an oncoming train. In each case, the police arrested a homeless man with a history of mental illness. Ms. Rausch understands why people fear someone who appears mentally ill or out of control. She was raised by a single mother who struggled to pay the bills, and she sometimes wrestles with what is owed to, say, an unhoused man who rejects a spot in one of Houston’s new single-room-occupancy projects because he says he wants to hold out for a one-bedroom.
“There was a time my mom struggled to buy food,” she recalls. “Some of the places where my mother and I lived are where we now place homeless clients. ”
The Houston that Ms. Rausch grew up in has changed. A once-abundant inventory of affordable housing has shrunk drastically. New construction focuses overwhelmingly on the top of the market. As elsewhere, giant investment firms like Blackstone have been gobbling up housing stock, pricing out middle-class and lower-income residents. Making matters harder, eviction filings in Harris County are now soaring: they’re higher than they were before the pandemic.
“Meanwhile, housing costs are rising faster than incomes,” points out Bill Fulton, the director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, a think tank in the city, “And, as a result, a large majority of Houstonians have been shut out of homeownership and become renters, half of them rent-burdened, meaning they pay more than a third, and often more than half, of their income in rent.”
Jeremy Sanders, a caseworker whose job is to help homeless people, told me that he has struggled to stay housed. Married, with two children, Mr. Sanders earns $43,000 a year. “For a while, when my wife wasn’t working, I needed grace from our landlord,” he said. “It was tough coming to work every day, smiling with my colleagues and the clients, because I really wasn’t sure whether we would have a place to live next month.” As it happened, Mr. Sanders’s wife found a job the day before I met him. “It was a good thing,” he said, “because we had spent our last savings.”
Mr. Fulton says that this compression at the lower end of the housing market means that rent-burdened Houstonians — people like Mr. Sanders — are competing with “the homeless for a shrinking stock of deteriorating apartments that are charging increasingly higher rents.” Housing vouchers from the federal government barely make a dent in the problem. In 2010, some 220,000 people in Houston qualified for 20,000 vouchers. Today, 600,000 people meet the requirements for just 40,000 vouchers.
“For most of my life, Houston was a place where anybody could find an affordable home if they were willing to drive far enough from downtown,” says Lance Gilliam, the chairman of the Coalition for the Homeless. “Partly, we’ve become victims of our own success. Because the coalition was filling these sorts of places with tenants, they became more attractive to investors,” Mr. Gilliam said. “Some started saying they didn’t want to rent to us anymore.”
I met with a landlord whose buildings house some 200 formerly homeless clients of the continuum. She asked to remain anonymous so as not to stigmatize her company’s properties in the minds of other tenants or potential renters. She explained the calculus that landlords now make: During the last year, she said occupancy rates in the city reached 95 percent, and rents rose by 17 percent. Government rental vouchers guarantee monthly payments, but there is often more money to be made — and less red tape — when renting to unsubsidized tenants.
I learned this spring that 200 formerly homeless clients were told they might have to move from a complex run by a different landlord. The complex was sold last year, and the new owners were reconsidering the relationship with the continuum. The same was happening at six other properties in the area.
In response, Marc Eichenbaum, the mayor’s special assistant for homeless initiatives, starting holding weekly meetings with the continuum and with local housing authorities and county commissioners. They pondered converting derelict motel rooms into apartments as well as building new, subsidized properties, so that the continuum would not always be beholden to private landlords. But doing those things would take years.
To address the immediate problem, Mr. Eichenbaum reached out to landlords and, as he put it, “let them know that finding one-bedrooms for homeless Houstonians was a top priority for Mayor Turner.” Then “we organized a handoff to Mike Nichols and his team at the coalition to close the deal.”
Mike Nichols is the president of the Coalition for the Homeless. A former corporate executive who served two terms as a Democrat in Georgia’s House of Representatives, Mr. Nichols picked up the story: “I asked the landlords, ‘What do you need?’” Landlords, he said, complained about the maze of agencies they had to navigate when there was a problem with a tenant. “Now we’re meeting with the owners of properties about providing better service and moving out the few troublesome residents.”
Instead of losing apartments this year, Mr. Eichenbaum told me, “we’re hopeful we may gain up to 1,000 more than we had.” It’s not nearly enough to solve the city’s one-bedroom shortage but enough to stanch the bleeding and inch forward.
This was Houston’s homelessness story in a nutshell, I realized. “Housing people is a slow, extremely complicated, incremental process that requires all hands on deck, all the time, if you don’t want to settle for the status quo, much less go backward,” Mr. Eichenbaum said. “Everyone has to come together around the table.”
Nearly a year after watching people being moved out of the encampment in the underpass, that was still the city’s message and I still had a lot of questions. I wondered about the uncounted couch-surfing families and youth; about the underpaid, overtaxed caseworkers who cannot provide enough help; about the landlords refusing to house tenants with vouchers, and people like Ms. Harris and her daughter, Blesit, judged not quite desperate enough for more permanent housing.
But mostly I wondered what individuals would extract from Houston’s example. Homelessness is a calamity millions reckon with each day — a calamity provoking a mix of rage, fear and powerlessness in the housed and unhoused alike. For me, the big reveal after a year was not that Houston had solved the problem. It hasn’t. There is no one-time fix to homelessness.
The reveal was something different. It was that in broken America it’s still possible for adversaries to share facts and come together around something contentious and difficult. Public and private, county and city, businesses and nonprofits, conservatives and liberals, the housed and unhoused: In Houston, enough of them have agreed on a goal that seems worth striving for. Working in concert, they have made genuine progress in housing previously unhoused people. And, so far, the benefits of collaboration have fended off the usual forces of entropy. That was an eye-opener and a sign of hope.
Two Months to Come Up With $886 for Rent
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The other day, I talked to Ms. Harris on the phone. After several months, she had finally come up with the $12 to replace her Texas identification card that had been stolen while she was living on the streets, as well as a Social Security card. With her new IDs, she could apply for jobs. A job listed at a Whataburger paid $9.53 an hour. But after dropping off Blesit with her sister and traveling across town, she was told by the restaurant manager that the position had been filled. A human resources firm was offering to help her with child care, but Ms. Harris hadn’t gotten around to arranging it, she told me, because it required she register online and only recently had she gotten access to a computer. Blesit’s father had found work at a Family Dollar across town, and, when he could, he took the bus to lend Ms. Harris a hand. Ms. Harris is now waiting to hear back about a job as a janitor.
She can’t sleep some nights out of fear of losing the apartment. “It’s the first time I have had my own place,” she said. “My neighbors watch out for me. I’ve learned how to save money, how to be an adult — how to be a mother. I want to finish college and watch my baby go to school and graduate.” But she has no housing voucher, and her lease will expire at the end of July unless she can come up with the $886 a month the continuum now pays in rent.
Anticipating that Ms. Harris may need to move, Ms. Salinas has reached out to a program called Shelters to Shutters, which provides an apartment and job training in return for work.
Ms. Harris is housed. But she isn’t home yet.
· “The homeless guy on your doorstep who spits on you when you leave your house and is always spouting from Revelations may be the least sympathetic character in the world, so you may not like the idea of paying to house him,” Ms. Parker, the former mayor, says. “But you can’t complain about him being on the street and also complain about getting him off it.”
· “My neighbors are upscale people. I want them to see me like a regular person. People look at you with disgust when they think you’re homeless.”
· “Suddenly, my neighbors complained about homeless people moving in,” Ms. Rausch recalled. “They talked about the ‘dangerous tent people,’ as if these people hadn’t been living there quietly, and without trouble, all that time.”
· Perception shapes policy. Homelessness nationwide has been rising since 2016, mostly because of a few big, affordable-housing-starved, shelter-dependent coastal cities. Before then it had been declining, and the number of people experiencing homelessness across the country was still lower at last count, in 2020, than it was a decade earlier. But decline is not what many people perceive, even in places like Houston. The grinding, day-to-day efforts to interview unhoused people, find them suitable apartments, help them get food stamps and bus fare, happen largely unnoticed, easily overshadowed by the sight of even one person sleeping on a sidewalk or beside a busy highway. And sentiments have changed. “Housing the homeless used to be something everybody agreed on,” Ms. Chapman-Semple says. “But there’s something new in America — an intolerance, a cultural shift.”
· A once-abundant inventory of affordable housing has shrunk drastically. New construction focuses overwhelmingly on the top of the market. As elsewhere, giant investment firms like Blackstone have been gobbling up housing stock, pricing out middle-class and lower-income residents. Making matters harder, eviction filings in Harris County are now soaring: they’re higher than they were before the pandemic.
· “Meanwhile, housing costs are rising faster than incomes,” points out Bill Fulton, the director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, a think tank in the city, “And, as a result, a large majority of Houstonians have been shut out of homeownership and become renters, half of them rent-burdened, meaning they pay more than a third, and often more than half, of their income in rent.”
· Mr. Fulton says that this compression at the lower end of the housing market means that rent-burdened Houstonians — people like Mr. Sanders — are competing with “the homeless for a shrinking stock of deteriorating apartments that are charging increasingly higher rents.” Housing vouchers from the federal government barely make a dent in the problem. In 2010, some 220,000 people in Houston qualified for 20,000 vouchers. Today, 600,000 people meet the requirements for just 40,000 vouchers.
· I met with a landlord whose buildings house some 200 formerly homeless clients of the continuum. She asked to remain anonymous so as not to stigmatize her company’s properties in the minds of other tenants or potential renters. She explained the calculus that landlords now make: During the last year, she said occupancy rates in the city reached 95 percent, and rents rose by 17 percent. Government rental vouchers guarantee monthly payments, but there is often more money to be made — and less red tape — when renting to unsubsidized tenants.