Opinion | We Can End Homelessness In Our Cities - The New York Times - 0 views
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The federal government could render homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring. The cure for homelessness is housing, and, as it happens, the money is available: Congress could shift billions in annual federal subsidies from rich homeowners to people who don’t have homes.
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Instead, Americans have taken to treating homelessness as a sad fact of life, as if it were perfectly normal that many thousands of adults and children in the wealthiest nation on earth cannot afford a place to live.
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Government programs focus on palliative care: Annual spending on shelters has reached $12 billion a year
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Rather than provide housing for the homeless, cities offer showers, day care centers and bag checks.
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“There’s a cruelty here that I don’t think I’ve seen,” Leilani Farha, then the United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing, said after a 2018 visit to Northern California.
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“I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve done outreach on every continent,” Dame Louise Casey, who directed homeless policy for several British prime ministers, said after touring homeless encampments in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other American cities.
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almost 40 percent of workers in households making less than $40,000 a year have lost work. Women in Need NYC, which runs shelters, warned this week that New York faces a “mass increase” in homelessness
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Countries confronting homelessness with greater success than the United States, including Finland and Japan, begin by treating housing as a human right
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the first law of real estate applies to homelessness, too: Location, location, location. The nation’s homeless population is concentrated in New York, the cities of coastal California and a few other islands of prosperity.
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Well-educated, well-paid professionals have flocked to those places, driving up housing prices. And crucially, those cities and their suburbs have made it virtually impossible to build enough housing to keep up.
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The government calculates $600 is the most a family living at the poverty line can afford to pay in monthly rent while still having enough money for food, health care and other needs. From 1990 to 2017, the number of housing units available below that price shrank by four million.
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While there are roughly 80,000 homeless people in New York on any given night, more than 800,000 New Yorkers — more than 10 times as many people — are scraping by, spending more than half their income on rent.
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According to one analysis, a $100 increase in the average monthly rent in a large metro area is associated with a 15 percent increase in homelessness.
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In 2018, eight out of every 10,000 Michigan residents were homeless. In California, it was 33 per 10,000. In New York, it was 46 per 10,000.
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in recent decades, wealth and homelessness have both increased — a stark illustration of the inequalities that pervade American life.
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Having failed to address homelessness during the longest economic expansion in American history, the nation now faces a greater challenge under more difficult circumstances
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Reframing the debate — asking what is necessary to end homelessness — is an important first step for New York and for other places that are failing this basic test of civic responsibility.
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The program costs about $19 billion a year. Vouchers for all eligible households would cost another $41 billion a year
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Where to get the money? Well, the government annually provides more than $70 billion in tax breaks to homeowners, including a deduction for mortgage interest payments and a free pass on some capital gains from home sales. Let’s end homelessness instead of subsidizing mansions.
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Without a significant expansion in the supply of housing, adding vouchers would be like adding players to a game of musical chairs without increasing the number of chairs.
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Market-rate construction can help: More housing would slow the upward march of housing prices. New York and San Francisco are the nation’s most tightly regulated markets for housing construction,
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Tokyo, often cited as an international model for its permissive development policies, has expanded its supply of homes by roughly 2 percent a year in recent years, while New York’s housing supply has expanded by roughly 0.5 percent a year. Over the last two decades, housing prices in Tokyo held steady as New York prices soared.
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In California, for example, construction of a five-story apartment building that meets minimum standards costs an average of $425,000 per unit,
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Without public aid, the apartments would need to be rented for several times more than the $600 a month affordable to a family living at the poverty line.
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Proposals for a big increase in affordable housing construction inevitably call to mind the troubled public housing projects of the mid-20th century. They offer one clear lesson: Avoid housing that concentrates poverty
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there is a solution — to build subsidized housing as part of mixed-income developments and to spread the developments out, putting them not just in cities but also in the surrounding suburbs.
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Helsinki, Finland, a city of just 600,000 people, builds about 7,000 units of mixed-income housing a year. That’s a big reason Finland is the rare European country where homelessness is in decline.
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Extending this approach to the entire homeless population would be expensive. To take one example, King County, which encompasses Seattle, would need to increase annual spending on homelessness to roughly $410 million from $196 million to help each of the county’s 22,000 homeless families, according to a study by McKinsey. That’s about $19,000 per family.
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Even if the cost per person were twice as high, the nation’s homeless population could be housed for $10 billion a year — less than the price of one aircraft carrier.
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there is worse to come. Homelessness rises during recessions, the federal funding is temporary and state and local governments face huge drops in tax revenue.
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The federal government already provides housing vouchers to help some lower-income families. The families pay 30 percent of their monthly income toward rent; the government pays the rest. But instead of giving vouchers to every needy family, the government imposes an arbitrary cap. Three in four eligible families don’t get vouchers.
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Americans must decide whether we are willing to let elementary school students spend nights in guarded parking lots
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We must decide whether it’s worth spending just a little of this nation’s vast wealth to ensure that no 60-year-old woman needs to sleep on the same bench in downtown Santa Monica