Housing should be a right and not a privilege.
Every American deserves a safe and stable place to
call home. Rent growth is accelerated coast to coast
in big cities, rural areas, east, west, south,
north—it's across the entire economy.
A lot of jobs that require a bachelor's degree are
going to go away.
Our mortgage system is one of the main factors that
decides who has a stable financial life and it
needs to serve all of America.
And it's not doing that.
Mortgage rates are on the rise and they're not
showing any signs of slowing down.
Mortgage rates have now risen up above 5% for the
first time in a long time. And home prices have
also been rising.
If you look at predictions of where mortgage rates
may be, say, two or three years from now, most
people are looking at interest rates to 7% to 7
.5%.
A mortgage typically refers to a loan used to
buy a piece of real estate for which that
property serves as collateral.
Today, 63% of homeowners in America are paying off
their mortgages, according to Zillow.
Every percentage increase in a mortgage rate
significantly increases the monthly payment,
especially for low and moderate income families.
So there are good reasons in the broader economy for
raising rates. But this isn't good news for those
trying to purchase a home.
But experts say that high rates aren't the only
issue with mortgages that could hinder Americans
from achieving home ownership.
Our economy has totally transformed in the last 50
years, and mortgages have not.
If we update our system to better serve everyone
in America, it will profoundly advance us in
having a more equitable country.
How do mortgages make it more difficult to own a
home in the United States? And can anything
be done to solve it?
The price of a home often exceeds the amount of
money that most Americans save.
Mortgages exist to allow these individuals and
families to purchase a home with a small down
payment, receiving a loan for the remaining balance.
But cost still remains a big issue.
We have an affordability crisis in the United
States, and I would say COVID actually revealed an
exacerbated an existing crisis, but it's only
gotten worse.
So what we fundamentally have is a supply problem,
and that correlates with an affordability
challenge.
Americans today are forced to take larger loans to
finance a home.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that a
median income household would need to spend 34.9%
of its yearly income on a median priced home.
For reference, households that pay more than 30% of
their monthly income for housing are considered
cost burden, according to the Department of Housing
and Urban Development.
The cost factor is also why there is currently a
large percentage of renters wondering if
they'll even ever be able to move from renting to
owning. And even condos and townhouses are raising
in costs across cities for half a million dollars
and up, significantly raising the down payment
amount and mortgage loan debt.
Saving for a down payment is one of the biggest
barriers to homeownership. The Center
for Responsible Lending calculated that a typical
worker needs eight years to save for a 3% down
payment for a median priced home and 30 years
for 20%.
While certain programs like FHA loans allow homes
to be purchased with smaller down payment,
being able to afford a high down payment comes
with its own set of benefits.
If you come in with a lot of money down, it's easier
to qualify for a mortgage. It's also less
expensive to get a mortgage.
Something like 40% of families in America have
no financial margin. They couldn't even afford a
$400 medical bill or challenge.
So the idea of being able to save a 20% down payment
is almost unimaginable.
And again, it goes back to the fact.
Worse than ever right now is that food costs are
going up, energy costs are going up, rents are
skyrocketing so much faster than incomes right
now. All of those get in the way of families being
able to save for a down payment.
A number of state and local institutions also
offer what's known as down payment assistance
programs to combat this issue.
There is not nearly, though, enough money for
those down payment programs.
The other problem has been that the programs are
not standardized and it makes it harder for
lenders to use them and more reluctant to use
them. And it also makes it harder for people to
know about them and how they qualify for them.
Congress was considering a big package of downpayment
assistance for first generation homebuyers as
part of the debate over build back better last
year. But the Senate failed to enact the bill.
So we're still hoping that might be revived.
Another prominent issue is the lack of small dollar
mortgages or loans issued for less than $100,000.
Having smaller mortgages i s important because by
definition those are going to be affordable for
a family on a more modest income.
For first time homeowners, a lot of these
small dollar mortgages are available for
affordable, low cost properties in urban,
suburban or rural communities.
Prior to the pandemic, more than a quarter of
home sales nationwide were priced below
$100,000. Yet just 23.2% were purchased using a
mortgage, compared to 73.5% of homes priced at
or above $100,000, according to the Urban
Institute.
It is particularly hard for people who are buying
smaller houses with smaller mortgages to find
a lender and to get that mortgage.
And they also surprisingly are more
expensive.
And the issue has been getting worse.
The total value of mortgage loans between
$10,000 and $70,000 and between $70,000 and
$150,000 dropped by over 53% and over 21%,
respectively, from 2011 to 2021.
Meanwhile, values for loans exceeding $150,000
rose by a staggering 240% plus in the same period.
Another study found that denial rates for small
dollar loans were notably higher than denial rates
for larger loans.
And it's not because these loans are riskier.
Accompanying research found that applicants for
small dollar loans had similar credit profiles to
applicants for larger loans.
The real reason is profit.
It costs about the same amount of money to take an
application and run it through your system and
fund a mortgage and have it appraised and do all
those things regardless of how big the mortgage
is. So if it cost me the same amount of money to do
a $700,000 mortgage as it does to do a $70,000
mortgage, but I get all my fees and my interest
based on the loan amount, so I'm going to get a lot
less revenue on a $70,000 mortgage than I am on a
$700,000 mortgage.
The lack of small dollar mortgages then drives
these affordable homes into the hands of retail
investors looking for profit.
Small dollar homes that could represent the first
step on the path to homeownership for a family
of modest income are not being sold with mortgages,
which means they're probably being bought for
cash. That means somebody with deep pockets is able
to come in and offer to pay cash.
They often buy the homes through automated systems
where they buy them without even seeing the
house. They get an automated appraisal, a
remote inspection, and buy houses in bulk.
And that's pulling a lot of houses out of what's
already an overly scarce affordable housing market
for these smaller, less costly houses.
So a lot of harm coming out of the difficulty of
people being able to access small dollar
mortgages.
In response, home buyers may resort to dubious
methods to purchase a property.
One example that is surprisingly prevalent is
people end up into something they call
contract for deeds, where it's essentially you're
renting. And if you make every payment on the loan
on time, you eventually will own the house.
But if you miss any payment, you not only lose
the house, you have no equity in it either.
And there are millions of these transactions out
there in the country today. And it's because
people don't have the alternative.
They're being pushed into those mortgages.
On top of everything, it's generally become more
difficult to qualify for a mortgage.
The Housing Credit Availability Index, which
represents the lender's tolerance for risk, has
remained almost at the same level since the
aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
In response to the great foreclosure crisis,
lenders and investors got very tight about their
underwriting criteria and have kept them at this
sort of reactive level since then.
The deck is particularly stacked against borrowers
with low credit scores.
As millions of homeowners went into mortgage
forbearance programs at the start of the
pandemic, banks raised their borrowing standards
for protection.
During the fourth quarter of 2021, less than a
quarter of new mortgages originated to borrowers
with credit scores under 720.
An important part of the unfairness and the impact
of that is credit scores reflect to a great extent
how much family and personal wealth you have.
If you're a wealthy person, it is not
difficult to get a mortgage. But if you have
less wealth and a lower credit score, it's really
challenging right now.
And despite the many regulations designed to
prevent lending discrimination, racial
bias is still prevalent in the mortgage industry.
According to the most recent data from the Home
Mortgage Disclosure Act, denial rates for home
purchase applications were 18.1% for black
applicants and 12.5% for Hispanic white applicants,
compared to just 6.9% for non-Hispanic white
applicants and 9.7% for Asian applicants.
Lenders can look up additional debts of a
potential homebuyer, including that of medical
debt and student loan debt relative to the loans
that are in default, which can limit
opportunities for less established potential
homebuyers. Expecting communities that have not
historically had the privilege of financial
liberties to be financially secure when
making one of those important purchases of
their lifetime is like expecting an athlete with
no training or coaching to win a national
championship title.
It's just unrealistic and it's indeed a stretch and
has certainly added to the difficulty of home
buying in the U.S..
The easiest way to solve today's mortgage market is
resolving the supply of housing in America.
If we don't increase the supply of starter homes,
first time homes and homes that are accessible
for working families with low and moderate incomes,
then it's going to be really hard to solve it
just from a lending perspective. We've got to
have more housing.
If you just provide more credit, it drives up
housing prices even more without expanding the
supply.
Another important aspect is having a mortgage
market that supports the needs of all Americans.
If we have more supply, we also should work on
downpayment assistance and we think we're going
to need more subsidy there and financial
counseling and preparation to help
families clean up their credit and be well
prepared to be able to obtain loans.
Several measures can also be taken to overcome some
of the systemic barriers that prevent certain
subgroups from achieving home ownership.
Our mortgage system just has to work for today's
economy and people who are doing the right thing,
scrambling to put together a living, saving
as much money as they can.
But those are just tougher in this new
economy. And our mortgage system has to serve those
people who are playing by the rules and not getting
a chance to get ahead.
If we want to overcome some of the systemic
barriers to homeownership for households of color,
we really want to recognize that and think
really hard about unpacking those systemic
barriers and doing something to address them
directly, like looking for alternative ways to
assess credit, looking for ways to count income
from gig economy jobs, and second and third jobs,
and seasonal jobs, and from other household
members who are contributing, and looking
for ways to help people with down payment
assistance to establish that collateral.
Continuing to question and improve the mortgage
system in the United States is key to
preserving the ideals of the American Dream.
Our mortgage system is one of the main factors that
decides who has a stable financial life, who has a
secure place to live, who builds financial wealth,
and it needs to serve all of America.
And it's not doing that.
And so unless there are very deliberate,
significant interventions and changes in our system,
we're going to look back in 20 years and find that
we're even in a worse place than we were in
2022.
Rent in America is getting more expensive no matter
where you live.
Rent growth is accelerated coast to coast.
In big cities, rural areas, east, west, south,
north. It's across the entire economy.
The areas where we are seeing the strongest rent
growth are in places like Austin, Texas.
Yes, my name is Maria and I live in Austin, Texas.
During the pandemic, a lot of people began to
leave and actually the rent dropped that year by
$100. I am due to renew my rent and there was a
spike of $400.
Making matters worse, few of the new homes in
construction are affordable.
Rental demand continues to be extremely strong and
the rental units that are being built are the more
expensive ones. That is the higher end ones.
Meanwhile, workers pay isn't increasing enough to
match the new rent.
We had wage suppression for 40 years and then we
have the period now where wages are growing,
especially at the low end.
And so the question is how long will that
continue?
Experts say the rent increases will have an
impact on the economy.
A lot of the monthly expense for the typical
household is money that's going toward the rent or
to upkeep of the house.
So it is a very important part of all of consumer
expenditures.
In the most competitive markets.
Rents are creeping toward record highs.
Renters in smaller markets are feeling the
squeeze, too. For example, one bedroom
rentals in Gilbert, Arizona, spiked over 116%
in the past year.
Meanwhile, rent for a single family home is
growing at its fastest pace since 2005, according
to CoreLogic. So how did we get here?
One answer is the bounce back from the pandemic.
You saw tech companies, major firms moving to
smaller cities. Cities like Pittsburgh, Austin,
San Antonio, Charlotte.
These are cities that really started booming
because workers had more flexibility.
And when the city starts booming, of course, the
rents go up because it's a supply and demand issue.
But the story goes back further than that, all the
way back to the Great Recession.
President Obama, are you listening?
This has been building really since the end of
the financial crisis back a little over a decade
ago. A lot of communities have made it more
difficult to build more homes closer to the urban
core. Building materials, particularly lumber, has
been in short supply.
That's been a problem.
Labor. A lot of people left the construction
trades in the housing bust back a decade ago,
and because of changes in foreign immigration laws,
we have a lot fewer foreign immigrants coming
into the country. Many of those folks would work in
the construction trades. Also, a lot of smaller
builders, they rely on loans from banks.
And since the financial crisis, banks,
particularly smaller banks, mid-size banks have
been unable, to because of regulatory changes and
other reasons, unable to provide enough loans.
So there's a mélange of things going on here.
After the financial crash of 2008, house building
stalled. By the end of the '10s, renters had
fewer options, especially in real estate hotspots.
Pre-COVID, we saw a huge rush to urban centers.
Millennials love to live in cities longer.
They were actually living there longer than the
previous generations their age had because they
weren't able to get out and afford to buy homes
because home prices were so high.
So you had so much demand in the cities.
Then the pandemic hit.
So if you look at some of the high rise apartment
buildings in the really dense central business
districts, the big cities, rents were
actually declining in the first 12 months of the
pandemic.
But smaller cities like Phoenix and Austin
received more of those remote workers.
That sent prices upward for people like Maria.
Right now, I would say for a studio is probably
$2,000. But this place, it's a one bedroom, was
originally set at $1700 when I first moved in.
Maria is a teacher and needs to commute to work
every day. She and many other Americans don't have
the luxury to move further away from work to
save cash.
That's creating wider issues in the economy.
There's a lot of evidence that the lack of housing
closer to where the demand is in urban cores
is having a meaningful negative consequence on
long term economic growth. So if we can
figure out a way to change zoning rules and
laws and get the lumber and land and labor that we
need and able to build closer to where the jobs
are, you know, our economy will be able to
grow more quickly, more strongly in the longer
run.
Renters in the traditionally cheaper
suburbs are feeling the burn, too.
Economists say that finding any home to rent
right now is uniquely difficult.
Because the vacancy rates are really so low.
It's the lowest we've seen in a generation.
Coming out of the pandemic, it's likely for
rents to keep rising.
Fortunately, builders are ramping up their building.
They can make a lot of money with rents this high
and house prices this high.
So they have a lot of incentive to put up more
homes. And that's happening slowly but
surely. We are seeing more homes put up.
So that's a good sign.
And we've seen an increase in single family
housing starts. That's really important because
that's the preferred housing structure during
the pandemic. So having investors come in, buying
homes maybe puts a little upward pressure on home
prices, sure, maybe it does, But it does increase
the stock of single family rental homes
available in the market and should help to
moderate rent growth.
And in the cities, some realtors are weighing
whether to convert their less busy office districts
into residential neighborhoods.
The idea is to say that there are some empty
buildings, you know, brick and mortars already
established, but maybe one can repurpose it into
residential units.
For the short term, renters are dealing with
the market.
If I had signed the lease, it would be taking a lot
of my savings.
And so I decided to move to a new building.
I'm losing about 150 square feet.
These hikes are hitting U.S. citizens at an
inopportune time.
Over decades, wages for most workers have
stagnated.
The wages and benefits of a typical worker were
suppressed in the period four decades after 1979.
Growth was very slow.
There was growing inequality that worked
against the middle and against anybody in the
bottom 90%.
In 2019, Oregon became the first state to impose
statewide rent control.
They cap increases at about 7%.
Cities like New York, San Francisco and Washington,
D.C. also limit rent increases.
These policies have some benefits.
One study found that renters were about 20%
more likely to stay in their homes with rent
control. Other economists think that rent control
does more harm than good.
So what history has shown is that by putting a rent
control, yes, it benefits temporarily for people to
pay lower rent, but that deters incentive to build
more homes or provide money for maintenance.
So all the housing stock steadily deteriorates over
time. And one does not want to see that.
So we want to encourage more production.
The answer to rising rents may be in the job market.
Both Congress and the Fed have pumped stimulus into
the economy. It should eventually help some
workers earn higher wages.
There's been a huge increase in the demand for
goods and services.
So we're going to see a period of sustained low
unemployment, I think.
This has always led to faster wage growth for
those in the middle and the bottom.
The other related question is: will we see
the structural changes that will build this into
the economy rather than be an episode, a period of
low unemployment? And I think that will require
improving labor standards, putting in the
$15 minimum wage, rebuilding collective
bargaining. I think it will mean paying attention
to maintaining low unemployment.
Which means that the answer to rising rents
might be getting yourself a raise or finding
roommates.
They're not building enough affordable housing
right now because for builders, the cost of
construction is so high due to a high cost for
land, labor, materials, shortage for materials,
shortages of labor, that they can't build
affordable housing.
You know, it took us ten years to get into this
predicament. It's not going to be solved next
year or the year after. It's going to be ten years
before we solve this problem.
The homeless crisis in America is worsening
again. The COVID pandemic caused a surge in housing
costs and a rise in unemployment, leaving
nearly 600,000 Americans unhoused in 2020.
We have to shut down a piece of our own humanity
to be able to walk past another human being that
is in such a difficult situation.
Being homeless, your day is anywhere spent from
where I'm going to lay my head at tonight, where I'm
getting my next bite of food from.
And what people don't typically realize when
they walk past a person who is homeless, is that
this person is costing taxpayers a lot of money.
Cities across America are spending more than ever to
combat the crisis.
In 2019, New York spent a record breaking $3 billion
to support its homeless population.
California is also expected to break its
record, allocating $4.8 billion of its budget to
the same issue over the next two years.
And areas like that just don't seem to be getting
any better, despite the fact that every politician
claims that this is a top priority of theirs and the
budgets keep going up.
Overall, homelessness in America has only improved
10% compared to 2007.
It's even worse for certain subgroups, such as
individual homelessness, which dropped only a
percent in the same period. On the contrary,
2020 saw a 30% increase in the unsheltered
homeless, erasing over half a decade of work
since its dramatic rise in 2015.
Right now, we are trending in the wrong direction.
So the state of homelessness right now is
pretty tenuous and there are some small increases
that are taking place across the board.
So how is the U.S.
addressing the homeless crisis and can it ever be
solved? Homelessness is known to prey on some of
the most vulnerable populations in America.
In 2020, 20% of those who were unhoused suffered
from severe mental disorders, while 16%
suffered from chronic substance abuse.
In response, the U.S.
has long relied on a housing ready approach to
homelessness, where those who are unhoused had to
meet specific requirements such as
sobriety or completion of treatment in order to
qualify for a home.
That was until this man, Dr.
Sam Tsemberis, pioneered the Housing First
initiative.
At some point, myself and the people we were working
with realized that really insisting that people
changed, get sober, take medication, get your life
together in order to earn or be awarded housing was
not working.
It was just, you know, people couldn't.
People were on the street. They couldn't stay
sober. They were not interested in medication.
They were interested in being somewhere safe and
secure.
The Housing First initiative follows two
tenets. First, the most effective solution to
homelessness is permanent housing.
And second, all housing for the homeless should be
provided immediately without any preconditions.
Putting people in housing first, which is what they
were desperate to do, calms that survival thing.
People are safe, secure, and then they're saying to
us, I need more help here.
So then rather than having us pushing or
coercing people to get to treatment, people get
housing, and then they want to treat.
Under the George W.
Bush administration, the Housing First initiative
gained the spotlight as the key to ending
homelessness.
Related programs soon received billions of
dollars in support from government agencies such
as the United States Interagency Council on
Homelessness and the Department of Housing and
Urban Development.
Housing First's rise really begins in the
nineties, especially the late nineties, and I think
it really gained traction as the philosophy that
should dominate these dedicated homeless
services agencies and programs.
And so we're in a situation now where if you
meet people who work at HUD on homelessness or in
major agencies in California and New York,
it's relatively rare to not find them be committed
to Housing First.
If you really look at it, this year, the federal
government will give about $2.7 billion to
housing and service providers and towns and
cities across the country.
For decades, the Housing First policy has
successfully housed individuals that need it
the most. Shannon McGhee is one of them.
A nonprofit organization, Pathways to Housing,
helped Shannon move into his supportive housing in
2020 after staying unhoused for four years.
It started in 2008, losing my mom to lung cancer and
then not having a strong support system to support
me throughout the process, I ended up losing
the family house. They sold the family house and
didn't have anywhere to go. And that started the
stint of being homeless.
From being housed to now being unhoused, the
shelter for me was very hard.
It was a cultural shock.
It was very hard to adjust to the environment,
the living standards.
I finally got connected to the Veteran Affairs and
a social worker with them connected me to Pathways.
And since being connected to Pathways, everything
has turned around 360 degrees.
I'm housed, I'm looking for gainful employment.
I'm in school now.
So without having Pathways there to kind of be that
support and that coach to guide me into housing, I
wouldn't be where I'm at now.
A study in 2004 discovered that when individuals were
provided with stable, affordable housing, with
services under their control, 79% remained
stably housed at the end of six months.
Another study in 2000 found it to be more
effective than traditional programs.
88% of the participants in Housing First programs
remain housed, compared to just 47% in the city's
residential treatment program.
And it's not just in the United States.
A similar study conducted in Canada revealed similar
results, showing participants of Housing
First programs obtaining and retaining housing at a
much higher rate.
The evidence has shown that by getting people
housed immediately and eliminating the chaos of
homelessness created a space where people would
be more successful.
I don't have to be in that environment anymore where
I'm subjected to using drugs or to doing things
for money that I didn't want to do.
I can change my focus.
Because now I can say, Hey, you're housed.
How can we get you to your next level of finding
gainful employment?
What steps can we work on now?
Housing First not only supports those in need
with housing, but the assistance they need to
get back on their feet again.
It's Housing First, not Housing Only.
Because there are very rich services, like
there's a team of people, really, whether they're
social workers or social workers and nurses and
psychiatrists, people with lived experience.
It's like a support services team.
And then the team says to you, How can I help you?
They provide wraparound support for me.
So if I need assistance in getting things such as
my ID or birth certificate, they can help
with that. They support me through that process.
If I need to make appointments at the VA
hospital, they support me through that process.
With any and everything that I pretty much need
done, I have support through Pathways to
Housing.
Supporters of Housing First also argue that it's
cost efficient.
A comprehensive study in 2015 concluded that
shelter and emergency department costs decreased
with Housing First policies.
What people don't typically realize when
they walk past the person who's homeless is that
this person is costing taxpayers a lot of money.
People get very sick when they're homeless.
They have to be taken to the hospital.
Sometimes they steal food.
They have no money. They get arrested.
Court costs, police time, jail time.
When you tally up the annual costs of people who
are homeless and very vulnerable, it turns out
we're actually spending sometimes $50,000 a year
or $100,000 a year in some cases, and the person
is still homeless.
But perhaps the biggest advantage to Housing First
is the improvement in the quality of life it
provides.
Being homeless and being a parent, I kind of didn't
want my child to see me in that situation, so it
kind of put a wedge in our relationship for a
little bit. But once I got housed, now I could
provide a space where we can interact together and
she wouldn't have to be subjected to that
lifestyle. Being able to have my housing first, I
know that I'm in control of my environment now.
What happens here is all about what I create.
But Housing First also comes with its own set of
criticisms. Experts like Stephen Eide from the
Manhattan Institute believe that Housing First
hasn't shown any real result.
When the public is told that this particular
policy is going to end homelessness, what they're
expecting is that they're going to see fewer
homeless people around.
That homelessness numbers will significantly drop as
a result of the implementation of this
policy. And I don't think that we've seen that in
the case of Housing First.
Critics also point out that Housing First might
not be as cost effective as it looks.
Research in 2015 discovered that while
permanent housing intervention was more
successful in achieving housing stability, it was
also more expensive than temporary housing.
A 2018 survey by the National Academy of
Sciences, Engineering and Medicine also concluded
that there is no published evidence to
prove that permanent supportive housing
improves health outcomes or reduces health care
costs.
No government that I'm aware of has saved money
by investing in homeless services through a Housing
First approach.
You can talk about potential cost offsets.
That is, if you invest $1,000,000 in Housing
First, that will trim some of the budgets and
some other service systems. You're not going
to actually save money, reduce the cost of
government, to the point where you could be talking
about, let's say, a tax reduction as a result of
investing in housing first. So I think that
there has been some misleading of the public
with respect to that concern.
There is also the question of whether the need for
housing actually triumphs over the need for
treatment.
If we want more from people, we have to be
talking about far more than just housing.
But in the housing first era, there's a way in
which housing just continues to suck all the
air out of the room.
And all we keep coming back to is are we doing
enough to expand the stock of subsidized
housing to help the homeless?
Meanwhile, Dr.
Tsemberis argues that the criticisms towards Housing
First are designed to blame those who are
unhoused rather than to assist them.
They want to go back to treatment and sobriety
first and then housing maybe.
Because that changes the entire narrative back to
homelessness is the fault of the individual.
You know, anybody who fails in a capitalist
society like ours with no taxation and no
government, it's only because it's their fault.
Housing First hit its first bump under the Trump
administration that sought to replace it with
programs focused more on treatment and sobriety.
They were talking about housing fourth as a
policy, housing fourth, okay?
And that was very deliberate because it's
Housing First and they were like, no, housing
fourth. You know, treatment, sobriety,
employment and housing maybe.
You know, that was a very, very targeted
attack.
The Biden administration, however, showed a return
to Housing First.
The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 included
70,000 emergency housing vouchers and a staggering
$350 billion in state and local fiscal recovery
funds in an effort to aid homelessness and housing
instability.
The Biden administration absolutely supports the
Housing First approach.
They feel that in a society as ours that
housing should be a right and not a privilege, that
every American deserves a safe and stable place to
call home. So they are providing the resources
and the support.
Critics of Housing First believe that lawmakers
need to be giving more alternative policies a
chance and approach the homeless crisis in a more
structured manner.
We need to have them invest in a broad range of
programs, residential programs, that can benefit
the homeless population in all its variety,
because the homeless population is very diverse
. Within that framework, Housing First-like
programs would have a place, low barrier
programs would have a place, but they would not
rule the roost in the way that they currently do.
Those in support of Housing First believe that
more resources and support from the
government are needed to truly end the crisis once
and for all.
Well, if you don't have the resources in the
program to deliver a place to live, then your
listening and your promise to them is hollow.
You need to have the listening, let's call that
the policy, which is housing first, person
first, but then you need the resources behind the
policy: apartments, subsidy, support services
in order to actually make the package viable.
We're nowhere near where we need to be in
investment, either of building public housing or
affordable housing, having the capacity to
address the homeless problem.
We're nowhere near.
What's important is that homelessness is a crisis
that can be solved as long as there is enough
attention, care and resources to support the
cause.
It's just very disgraceful that in a country that's
so blessed, so wealthy, that has done some things
right in the past, if not everything, that we can't
do something to fix this problem or at least make
it smaller, ameliorate it.
So there's a lot of good work going on.
So that's what gives me hope that we can actually
turn the nighttime stars into a daytime where we
just turn up the lights enough to really end it
for all. Because the other thing gives me hope
is we know how to do it.
We have the cure.
We have good examples of how it's done.
We need to take it to scale.