Conclusion

For many years, when a student or colleague would ask me what has to be done to fix our US housing crisis, my answer was fast and unequivocal: more government-subsidized housing.

My answer was wrong.

I came to that realization over the course of hundreds of hours spent in eviction court. Looking out over the packed courtrooms, I recognized that I was witnessing an abundance of government-subsidized housing.

First, I saw the landlords and their representatives, coming to court to evict dozens of families from their homes. In our city, as is the case across the country, it is increasingly rare for those landlords to be locally owned companies, much less the iconic mom-and-pop landlords renting out a single house or two. Eviction record analysis of our community shows that nearly nine of every ten cases are filed by corporate landlords, many of them national or multinational investor-owned firms.¹

For these landlords, government subsidies flow their way like a river after a week of rainstorms. We saw in chapter 4 that this river includes deductions for pass-through income, depreciation of real estate, and deferred and often never-paid capital gains taxes, along with a plethora of estate tax exemptions and avoidance schemes. “If you’re looking to get richer while telling the tax man you’re getting poorer, it’s hard to beat real estate development,” concluded one analysis of landlords’ tax avoidance.²

Next, I looked around the room and saw the lawyers there. Most represent landlords, but there are a few employed by nonprofit legal agencies who work alongside my students and me advocating for tenants. None of us lawyers in eviction court have real estate developer–level money, of course. But we too are usually blessed with a generous package of government housing subsidies—because most of us own our homes.

Consider my own situation. After renting for several years, my spouse and I managed to purchase a home for ourselves and our three children. We did so thanks to family help with the down payment. That help was available because our white relatives had benefited from the historic mid-twentieth-century government home-purchasing subsidies. The Home Owners Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Veterans Administration made it possible for our parents and grandparents and millions like them to buy homes.

Moreover, the government boost allowed my relatives to create wealth through their homes increasing in value—still the top source of wealth in most US households. As we learned in chapter 3, these housing subsidies and the wealth-creation opportunities that came with them were almost fully denied to Black families.

For my spouse and me, the mortgage we signed was affordable in part because of favorable terms created by the federal government insuring our mortgage through the Federal Housing Administration. Then, we benefited from the mortgage interest tax deduction. Our mortgage allows us a whopping thirty years to pay off our debt on fixed terms, borrower-friendly standards that were also created by federal backing of mortgages. That meant that our monthly housing cost as homeowners was both more affordable and more stable than it was when we rented. When we sell, we likely will not be required to pay any taxes at all on the profit we make, up to a half-million dollars.

The bottom line: eviction court lawyers like me—and virtually everyone else who has a mortgage—live in government-subsidized housing.

But what about the families lined up in court, waiting to see what day a constable will show up at their door to change the locks and put their belongings on the curb? One of them, Angela, has a family that is a lot like mine: two parents, three kids, started out as renters. But Angela’s former husband is ill and out of the picture. Her family has no generational wealth—they are Black and never had access to the home-buying subsidies my ancestors did.

For a long time, Angela managed a difficult juggling act, devoting as much as 70 percent of her home health care wages to pay the monthly rent. Then the balls fell to the floor.

Angela’s longtime patient died, so Angela went weeks without a new patient or a paycheck. The “as is” used car she bought—because she could not afford a down payment on a car with a warranty—broke down. She still owed a substantial debt on the car, and it was her only transportation to her job and to child care. So Angela had to pay to get it repaired. She fell behind on rent, triggering first late fees and then court filing fees.

Alone among the major players in eviction court, Angela and her fellow renters have no government-subsidized housing.

As we saw in chapter 4, Angela and virtually all our other eviction court clients are losers in the cruel musical chairs game we play with low-income housing in the US: three of every four households that qualify for housing vouchers or public housing do not receive it. But once we widen our lens and look beyond the unlucky households like Angela’s, we see that their struggles are not because of a lack of government-subsidized housing.

They go without while we generously subsidize those who need it the least.

Informed by the experiences of eviction court, this book aims to lay out the path to remedying this injustice. Immediately, we must take the following steps:

• Enact a Tenants’ Bill of Rights, both in state and local laws and tied to every landlord who receives federal financing or tax breaks. That Bill of Rights must include rent control (chapter 7) and a good-cause requirement before refusing to renew leases (chapter 5). These rights would finally provide Angela and other renters with the stability that I and other lucky homeowners have long enjoyed. The Tenants’ Bill of Rights also must include enforceable guarantees of good housing conditions. When an eviction case is filed, we should ensure a careful, deliberate legal process with a right to counsel for all tenants. We can and must immediately slow down our government-funded fast-track eviction machine.
• Distribute universal vouchers that bring housing assistance into the same “entitlement” category as SNAP / Food Stamps and Medicaid. Simply put, Angela’s and every other household that qualifies for housing assistance should receive it. As we saw in chapter 6, since vouchers rely on the private housing market, this system must include source-of-income antidiscrimination laws that prohibit landlords from refusing to rent to voucher holders. (The US Department of Housing and Urban Development is experimenting with substituting vouchers with cash stipends paid directly to the recipients, an approach that could help alleviate some of the challenge of finding landlords who accept vouchers.)³
• Eliminate the billionaire/millionaire landlord subsidies outlined in chapter 4. Instead, create revenue for affordable housing by taxing housing speculators and luxury transactions that meet thresholds like Los Angeles’s voter-approved “mansion tax” on home sales over $5 million.⁴
• Mandate that cities and communities that want highly coveted federal funds for highways and mass transit must first remove the zoning restrictions that operate as “covert redlining” preventing the building of dense and affordable housing.

That is just the start. We also need to immediately begin building more enduring solutions. The core long-term remedy is this: We need much better public housing, and much more of it. As we saw in chapter 8, US public housing has been starved of the resources it needs to maintain current units and blocked from funding to create desperately needed new ones. This must change.

As we saw in chapter 9, there are many examples internationally and in the US proving that public housing can be attractive, affordable, abundant, and the foundation of thriving communities. Universal vouchers are a necessary interim step. But vouchers rely on the for-profit market to provide affordable housing, and the US experience over the past half century proves that cannot be a long-term solution. There is no alternative to a plentiful supply of high-quality public housing.

Can we get there? In this book’s introduction, I mentioned that seeing our housing crisis from the perspective of eviction court can make it tempting to despair. It is hard to find optimism when standing alongside Felicia explaining how her children have been sickened by mold, rodent droppings, and sewage backups in their home, Ashley facing homelessness when her landlord increased her rent by 40 percent, and Robert, whose disability check is no longer enough to keep him housed in his apartment of two decades.

But, as we saw in chapters 11 and 12, a social movement is building that aims to change all this. The history of such movements should give us hope, because that history shows that momentous changes can occur when dedicated organizers build a strong foundation for change.

For example, we remember the seismic Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955 and 1956 and the dynamic leadership of the young Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that helped launch the most impactful stage of the US civil rights movement. Less well known is that the boycott ignited only after years of organizing by E. D. Nixon, president of the Montgomery, Alabama, NAACP, and Jo Ann Robinson of the local Women’s Political Council.⁵

Every American knows about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War’s end-game role in abolishing US slavery. Less appreciated are the years that abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Angelina Grimké, and William Lloyd Garrison traveled the countryside gathering signatures on petitions and speaking to often near-empty halls. Eventually, those halls began to fill, the petitions swelled with names, and pressure for change mounted.⁶

For housing justice, this sometimes frustrating, two-steps-forward, one-step-back organizing is being done right now by tenants and tenant organizers across the country. The process can be a grind and often is not successful in the short term. But it is how change happens. That is why this book concludes with the story of the burgeoning tenant union movement.

I hope—and I believe—that the tenants in Louisville and Kansas City and Connecticut and North Carolina and beyond are building the foundation for a better future. One day, the US will join the many other nations where housing is a fully realized and enforceable human right for all. I have learned a great deal from my time in eviction court, but I look forward to a day when that courtroom is empty.