Category Archives: public housing

Housing as a Vaccine

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The 2016 Homelessness Awareness Day and Vigil was held at the Vermont State House in Montpelier on January 7th. Two House committees Housing, General and Military Affairs and Human Services had a joint hearing on homelessness, taking testimony on housing and homelessness issues. A number of other hearings regarding homelessness happened in the building during the course of the day.

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Opening the hearing was nationally recognized pediatrician Dr. Megan Sandel (principal investigator on Children’s Health Watch,  Associate professor at Boston University’s School of Medicine,  and Medical director, at  the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership at Boston Medical Center), who has done path-breaking work on the effects of housing insecurity and homelessness on children. She gave a brilliant presentation on “Housing as a Vaccine: A Prescription for Child Health.”

At that hearing, Representatives and attending members of the public also heard from Vermont homeless service providers Linda Ryan (Director of Samaritan House) and Sara Kobylenski (Executive Director of Upper Valley Haven) on the latest trends and some recommended solutions to end or decrease homelessness in Vermont.

At Noon, community members, legislative leaders, administration officials, and advocates took the State House steps for a vigil to remember our friends and neighbors who died without homes, and to bring awareness of the struggles of those still searching for safe and secure housing. U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy and other legislative representatives and advocates joined and spoke at the vigil.

How can Housing be a Vaccine?

Dr. Megan presented data to support her thesis that housing can be protective for health. The quality, stability and affordability are important determinants to heath of all people. That means improving housing can provide multiple benefits. According to Dr. Megan, timing and duration of housing insecurity matter greatly to a child’s health. By increasing availability, affordability, and quality of housing, the health effect of housing insecurity can be decreased. Dr. Megan also provided specific evidence regarding housing quality and children’s health. For example, developmental issues, worsening asthma and other conditions have been tied to specific housing conditions such as pests, mold, tobacco smoke, lead exposure and so forth, and tied to long term effect with poor health outcomes.

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According to Children’s Health Watch, “unstable housing, hunger and health are linked” because evidence shows that being behind on rent is strongly associated with negative health outcomes such as high risk of child food insecurity, children and mothers who are more likely in fair or poor health, children who are more likely at risk for development delay, mothers who are more likely experiencing depressive symptoms. Research conducted by the National Housing Conference from Children’s Healthwatch illustrates that there is no safe level of homelessness. The timing (pre-natal, post-natal) and duration of homelessness (more or less than six month) compound the risk of harmful childhood health outcomes. The younger and longer a child experiences homelessness, the greater the cumulative toll of negative health outcomes, which can have lifelong effects on the child, the family, and the community.

Several community representatives spoke in support of increasing housing affordability by targeting more public funding to support housing affordability and housing stability and adding to state housing directed funds with a $2 per night fee on hotel, motel and inn stays.

 

Not so easy

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A key goal of affirmatively furthering fair housing (AFFH), as it’s envisioned playing out around the country, is to break up concentrations of poverty and to promote socioeconomic and racial integration. That means ensuring opportunities for lower-income people and racial minorities to live in wealthier, “high opportunity” neighborhoods with access to jobs, goods schools and public services.

Two ways to facilitate those opportunities:

  • Promote regional mobility among people with Section 8 vouchers, enabling them to leave high-poverty areas and move into more well-to-do communities. This can require increasing their housing allowance so that they can afford higher suburban rents.
  • Build affordable, multifamily rental housing in those same, heretofor exclusive neighborhoods.

Both of these approaches deserve consideration around here, as Vermonters contemplate how to make their communities more socioeconomically inclusive. Meanwhile, it’s interesting to see how they’ve played out in an entirely different environment: metropolitan Baltimore.Baltimore1

First, some background: Baltimore has a long history of racial segregation (click here for a trenchant account), and in the mid-1990s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development was sued by city residents (Thompson vs. HUD) for its failure to eliminate segregation in public housing. In 2005, a federal judge found that HUD had violated the Fair Housing Act by maintaining existing patterns of impoverishment and segregation in the city and by failing to achieve “significant desegregation” in the Baltimore region.

Seven years later, a court-approved settlement resolved the case in a way that anticipated the AFFH rule that HUD issued this past summer.

The settlement called on HUD to continue the Baltimore Mobility Program, begun in 2003 in an earlier settlement phase. The program has provided housing vouchers to more than 2,600 families to move out of poor, segregated neighborhoods and into areas with populations that are less than 10 percent impoverished and less than 30 percent black. The program provides counseling before and after the move and has received high marks from evaluators who cite improved educational and employment outcomes for beneficiaries. A similar regional program is underway in Chicago.

The settlement also called for affordable-housing development in these “high-opportunity” suburban communities – 300 units a year through 2020. To make this happen, HUD was to provide new financial incentives for developers.

Here is where the story takes a dispiriting turn. Three years later, not a single developer has applied for the incentives. No affordable housing projects are even in the pipeline. That’s according to an eye-opening story the other day in the Baltimore Sun.Baltimore2

So, what happened? Why haven’t developers shown any interest? HUD had no explanation, according to the story, which suggested that perhaps the program hadn’t been well-enough publicized: a prominent builder of affordable housing admitted he didn’t even know about the incentives. Could it be that they weren’t generous enough?

Whatever the reason, the Baltimore experience reflects how difficult it can be to introduce affordable housing to privileged enclaves. No one should underestimate the AFFH challenge.

Here a crisis, there a crisis

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Never mind California or the Northeast. The housing-unaffordability problem can be found lots of other places, some of them rather unlikely. If you breeze through news coverage from around the country, you can find stories from all over that use the phrase “crisis” or “crunch” or “shortage” to describe the local or regional housing-unaffordability profile:

Just in the past few days, stories have bubbled up from Taos,  Taos Jackson Hole, Aspen, Madison, Asheville, Hawaii, and Austin — all in crisis mode.

Austin is an interesting case: There’s not only an affordability shortage, most of the supposedly affordable units aren’t really affordable after all, according to a rather scathing audit that just came in. From the report summary: “The City does not have an effective strategy to meet its affordable housing needs. Neighborhood Housing and Community Development has not adopted clear goals, established timelines, or developed affordable housing numerical targets to evaluate its efforts in fulfilling the City’s adopted core values. Key information needed to evaluate program effectiveness is incomplete, inaccurate or unavailable.” Austin3  This, in the latter-day birthplace of public housing that  the mayor pronounced the most economically segregated city in the country.

Among the places you might not expect to find a housing crisis: Minot, N.D., rural Iowa, IowaNorth Platte, Neb. (Say it ain’t so, North Platte!) And to think that this is not something the presidential candidates can even be bothered to talk about!

In fact, every county in the country can be said to be in crisis when it comes to housing extremely low-income households (that is, households with less than 30 percent of median income, 11.3 million nationwide). No county has enough units for such people, according to an analysis the Urban Institute did this summer. For an interactive map that will show you how many affordable units in each county for 100 poor households, click here. In Vermont, Orange, Windsor and Windham counties come out the best, with 49 affordable units for 100 households; Caledonia, Lamoille and Orleans have the fewest, at 29. The national average: 28.

Of course, the national challenge is not just to create plenty more affordable housing but to locate it judiciously. New housing options have to be provided for low-income people in low-poverty neighborhoods, otherwise known as “high-opportunity” areas. That’s what affirmatively furthering fair housing is about — breaking up historic settlement patterns of concentrated poverty and segregation and promoting integration.

Naturally, AFFH generates pushback. So, sprinkled among the wash of “housing crisis” stories are accounts of resistance to affordable housing projects in well-healed suburbs – such as Simsbury, Conn. (median household income$104,000) , and Wilmette, Ill. ($127,000).

Taller & brighter

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Once upon a time, believe it or not, planners of public housing in the United States believed high rises were a good thing. In the early ‘40s, we learn from J.A. Stoloff’s history of public housing, the thought high-rises “could provide a healthy, unique living environment that would contrast favorably with surrounding slum areas.”

Well, as we all know, high-rises for families didn’t work too well in the big metro areas. Two notorious examples in Chicago were Cabrini Green …

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and Robert Taylor Homes…

 

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drab, unsightly, unlivable in many ways, they unfortunately tainted the popular conception of public housing. No public-housing high-rises were built after the early ‘70s, and by the ‘90s many of these buildings were being torn down.

As it turned out, though, some public-housing high-rises did work pretty well – for elderly residents. One such example, built in 1971, is the tallest building in Vermont – 11-story Decker Towers in Burlington, operated by the Burlington Housing Authority for elderly and disabled residents:

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Granted, construction of ANY public housing is passe in this country, sadly, but before you stop thinking about high-rises, look at some examples in Singapore, where public-housing high-rises are home to a majority of the population. These shots are by Peter Steinhauer, a photographer:

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These photos make two things really clear: (1) High rises don’t have to be drab and dreary…sing3

 

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… and (2) no one should have any trouble finding the street address of these places.

 

 

 

The bright colors bring to mind some of the buildings in Burlington’s Old North End, many of them owned or developed by Stu McGowan …

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Now that we’ve drawn your attention back to Vermont, let’s consider building height on a Vermont scale as we also consider how to add to the state’s affordable housing stock. High rises are out of the question, of course, especially in our small towns. But what about adding a third story to buildings in town centers, here and there, for family apartments? Is that such an outrageous idea? This three-story building in the photo below doesn’t look a bit out of place.

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