A Home for the Brave — Dissecting Poverty in the United States
This essay on poverty won the 1st Prize in the 2019 Essay Writing Contest at the University of San Diego.
Inside the Statue of Liberty, a bronze plaque proclaims, “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” If you read $2 a Day, you may begin to think that this “golden door” has led many into an alley of despair. You will learn of one and a half million families with three million children who lived on only 2 dollars per person, per day in 2011 (p. xvii). Your heart will ache at stories like that of Rae, a malnourished 25-year-old who lived with her daughter in twelve shelters and dilapidating properties in a single year, surviving on disability checks and SNAP cards. Through engaging narratives, $2 A Day authors Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer paint a vivid portrait of poverty in contemporary America. In this essay, I focus on housing insecurity, exploring why its burden weighs more on the hardworking poor, on children and on people of color. I argue that solving this issue requires a radical shift in how the housing insecure are perceived as well as bravery on the part of changemakers.
Housing insecurity takes many forms: trouble paying rent; moving frequently; overcrowding; and homelessness. Rising housing cost often lies at the center of all these. In the US, families are considered cost burdened if they spend over 30% of income on housing. Edin and Shaefer note that “Already in 2001, 63 percent of very low income households were putting more than half their income toward housing” (p. 74).Things got worse when the Great Recession of 2008 led to waves of foreclosures. Mortgages went through the roof and people flooded rental markets. Many low income families were pushed out of rental properties by rising prices. Paradoxically, many units remained empty. Vacancy of rental units constructed since 2001 reached 21% in 2017 (JCHS).
Despite rapid technological advances, cost of construction materials has spiked and productivity gains in homebuilding have stalled. Building cheaper homes is clearly not a priority for property developers. While Tata designed $720 nano houses for poor Indians, US houses have become more and more expensive (Alter). Harvard researchers note that most buyers lack sufficient savings for required deposits since federal down payment assistance programs serve less than 50,000 households annually.
Some say that the poor should work harder to get or keep roofs over their heads. They picture the housing insecure as lazy, drunk or jobless folks whose sole mission is to claim welfare. $2 A Day breaks this myth. It features hardworking people like Jennifer who commutes three hours daily to work two shifts. Yet, she still can’t afford a home for herself and her two kids. Edin and Shaefer cite the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), noting that “today there is no state in the Union in which a family supported by a full-time, minimum-wage worker can afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent without being cost burdened” (p. 66). From 2000 to 2012, rents increased by 6% while the real income of the middling US renters dropped by 13% (p. 74). In today’s America, hard work no longer guarantees access to a life of dignity.
50% of the 500,000 homeless people in America are over 50 (PressTV). Yet, housing insecurity affects children in a critical way. “Children experiencing $2-a-day poverty are far more likely to move over the course of a year than other kids — even more than children living in less extreme poverty” (p. 73). Itinerancy increases the risk of ACEs: Adverse Childhood Experiences like physical, emotional or sexual abuse. In $2 a Day, Jennifer fled her aunt’s house to save her two little children from drunk, abusive roommates. She ended up landing in a third home that year, only to catch her uncle molesting her daughter, “standing over her with his pants down.” America is at risk of losing an entire generation because chronic homeless adults today were yesterday’s chronic homeless children.
Before coming to San Diego, I envisioned a liberal California welcoming me with open arms. I had secured enough funds for rents and deposits. However, landlords whom I’d been texting would turn down offers as soon as I showed up at their doorsteps. When I complained to a classmate, she placed her fist against mine and pointed to our different skin colors. For three months, I lived in two AirBnBs and then with friends. Like the $2-a-day poor, I experienced toxic stress which inhibited my ability to concentrate in class. I ended up subletting a room in an East San Diego apartment. Often, my landlady threatens to evict me if I don’t pay unfair fabricated monthly fees. For too long, racial biases have excluded people of color not only from entire neighborhoods, but also from mortgage lending and homeownership. A Harvard study found that since 1994, white home ownership rates have increased 7 times faster than black ownership, widening the black-white gap by 29.2 percentage points (JCHS).
Thinking of solutions, the authors of $2 A Day echo David Ellwood insisting that “any program out of sync with American values was doomed to fail.” These four values — individual autonomy, virtue of work, primacy of family and sense of community — should be the foundation on which initiatives tackling housing insecurity need to be built. I also believe fixing America’s housing crisis requires a perceptual shift. When the housing insecure are viewed as a homogeneous underclass, solutions tend to further alienate them from society. It is important to consider the intersectionality and dignity of those affected by this problem. They should not just be statistics in reports. The home insecure deserve a seat at the table when decisions affecting them are made.
For decades, the Federal Government has provided housing assistance mainly through HUD’s public housing developments and housing voucher choice programs. However, $2 A Day argues that both interventions have been failing since Reagan years. Federal housing assistance is administered through local lotteries managed by public housing authorities. The lotteries have a combined waiting list of over 4 million, and their administration is plagued with bottlenecks and unnecessarily complex procedures. Consolidating small or dispersed housing authorities could reduce administrative costs, streamline services and make their operations more effective (Galvez et al).
Because the US Constitution does not guarantee the right to housing, local governments should play a key role in protecting renters’ rights. Edin and Shaefer speak of abusive landlords who remove exterior doors, cut off power, change locks and even smear rental electric panels with feces. In eviction cases, most low income tenants don’t have legal representation. The 2017 Housing as a Safety Net report lauds cities like Seattle and Boston where “just cause” eviction laws now require landlords to demonstrate that tenants have violated specific rental clauses before eviction. Other metropoles have gone even further. Denver raised public and private funds to create a voucher program enabling low income households to live in vacant high-rent units. Atlanta on its part voted an ordinance stipulating that 10–15% of units in new properties should be affordable to tenants earning 40–80% of median income. I am not suggesting that cities should blindly copy these solutions; every urban setting is different. What I am arguing for is braver action at a local level.
We are heading into a future teeming with disruptive forces for the housing market. A Zillow research indicates that another recession would be fatal for the US real estate industry. Climate change is getting worse and we may soon witness more phenomena like hurricane Maria which destroyed 204,000 Puerto Rican homes in 2017. If technology is not regulated, it may increase inequality. For instance, home sharing platform AirBnB encourages landlords to focus on short term leases, further increasing housing cost (Brown). Facing this complex web of challenges requires flexibility, ingenuity and open thinking. It demands complementary and collaborative actions not only from government, but also businesses, nonprofits and social enterprises to help people like Rae and Jennifer have a home to raise their families. Now more than ever before, the anthem calls on America’s changemakers all over the land to act with bravery.
Essay by Momo Bertrand
Originally published by the University of San Diego on: https://www.sandiego.edu/cee/grants-and-awards/student-essay-contest.php#content-accordion1
