Housing First

On my visit to Motels4Now, I learned that afternoons there are rarely boring.

In the parking lot outside the former Knights Inn in South Bend, Indiana, a young woman and an older man are engaged in a bitter argument. At times, the back-and-forth calms, only to loudly reconvene in one of the rooms or behind the building. The young woman, Clara (I will not use residents’ real names here), issues a series of colorful, detailed threats and defies anyone to stop her from carrying them out. “I heard the cops are coming!” she yells. “Where are they? I ain’t afraid!”

Soon after, a city police officer does drive up, but by then Clara has left. The police officer pulls away, ignoring the man riding his bicycle in tiny circles in the middle of the parking lot and the woman who emerges from one of the rooms every few minutes to levy rapid-fire accusations to no one in particular. A heavily bearded man takes it all in from his spot in a stained beige recliner next to the dumpster, while drinking from a twenty-five-ounce can of Hurricane High Gravity malt liquor. A small pile of empties is at his feet.

Another man hurriedly walking across the parking lot is greeted by Motels4Now director Sheila McCarthy, who welcomes him back from a short jail stint for violating his probation as a sex offender. McCarthy returns to the staff office, two motel rooms with the separating wall knocked out. Across from a stack of Narcan is a chart on the wall noting the body’s safe injection sites. Desperation can trump discretion, though: one of the residents was recently treated for a large injection-created abscess in her neck.¹

Motels4Now is a low-barrier shelter in the tradition of Housing First, meaning that residents do not have to demonstrate sobriety or medication compliance to be able to stay. The staff estimates that nearly all the 115 residents are dealing with at least one severe mental illness, often including substance use disorder. About 80 percent have lived on the streets for a year or more. Few can consistently keep any employment besides occasional one-off jobs. More than half of the current residents are on their second stay here, usually because they have been asked to leave during previous stays.² “Violence is about the only thing that will cause someone to have to go immediately,” McCarthy says.

The challenges are on high-volume display, but McCarthy points out the less obvious signs of success. A group of older men sit and talk in mismatched chairs they have set up on the narrow sidewalk in front of their rooms. On the far right is Lawrence, who lived outdoors for eighteen years before he was invited to move to Motels4Now. There was an adjustment period. Lawrence at first did not want to spend the night indoors, and then he struggled to break his habit of hoarding food. But now he is settling in, and regularly getting medical care for the first time in four decades. “It is a myth that people prefer to be homeless if they have an alternative that allows them safety and respect,” McCarthy says.

Motels4Now’s most impressive success stories are no longer on site. More than three-quarters of former residents, more than five hundred people in total, now live in stable long-term housing. Those who have not yet joined them are on the same path, McCarthy insists, even as they deal with profound challenges exacerbated by years on the streets. She points to the office wall opposite the safe injection poster where a print made by a local artist reads, “Housing is Healing.” “You can see when our repeat guests come back, they are a little better each time,” McCarthy says. “It is visibly transformative for them to have a roof over their heads.”

McCarthy picks an unlikely example: Clara, the young woman who was just threatening a fellow resident. Overall, Clara’s stay was much more peaceful than her past times at Motels4Now, McCarthy says. Like all the others who have been asked to leave, Clara was assured that she has been automatically placed on the waiting list for a return stay. When her name gets to the top of that list, Clara will be welcomed back.

“It Is the Right Thing to Do Because It Works”

Filmmaker Don Sawyer, a longtime advocate for homeless people and director of the award-winning documentary Under the Bridge: The Criminalization of Homelessness, says Motels4Now’s unconditional commitment to providing shelter and security is the foundation of the Housing First philosophy. “The record shows conclusively that this is not just the right thing to do because it gives them dignity—it is the right thing to do because it works,” Sawyer told me in an interview. “For the first time in years for some of them, people can lock their own door, put their things away, and find a little bit of calm where they can safely breathe, where they can safely think. And that usually allows them to move toward stability.”

Indeed, more than two dozen studies and high-profile success stories from Houston to Helsinki have shown that Housing First can quickly and relatively inexpensively end homelessness.³ Sawyer also points out that immediate shelter programs that use motels or hotels provide a far safer and healthier response than congregate shelters. Studies from the University of Washington and the Yale School of Public Health have shown that motel shelters lead to improved health and social outcomes.⁴

Like many other motel- or hotel-based programs, Motels4Now grew out of COVID-19 pandemic necessity. In the summer of 2020, the virus forced the closure of South Bend’s congregate facilities. Tent encampments popped up on the edge of downtown for the first time, quickly swelling to a population of more than one hundred people, all living without access to clean water or sanitation. When some of those people developed COVID and were subsequently quarantined by city officials at local motels, it became clear that the motel rooms could respond to the broader need. Yet it was just as clear that some of the encampment residents struggled with mental illnesses and addictions that would prevent them from complying with traditional shelter rules.

This was not news to the members of the St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker community in South Bend. Founded in 2003 in the tradition of the movement created by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin seventy years earlier, the Workers in South Bend created Our Lady of the Road, which offered the homeless community a place to take showers, do laundry, eat a meal, and simply sit and rest.

Volunteers at Our Lady of the Road had known many of the tent city residents for years. Moved by the visible tent city crisis in 2020, the group’s supporters donated funds to cover the cost of more motel rooms. Soon after, local government officials offered CARES Act dollars to rent out the entire Knights Inn by the airport if Our Lady of the Road agreed to run the operation. McCarthy, a longtime Catholic Worker who had earned her PhD in theology at Notre Dame, was enlisted to lead the Motels4Now team.

During its three-plus years of service, Motels4Now has welcomed over seven hundred residents, with the average stay lasting about four months. Most residents live with a roommate in the seventy-four rooms spread across three single-story buildings. Another local ministry provides meals, security is on site around the clock, and community mental health providers have an office in the motel.

Motels4Now explicitly avoids proselytizing to its residents. There is no “pray to stay” requirement like what some programs maintain. But there is an undeniable religious undertone to the approach.

“I could not do this work now without first spending so many years at the Worker,” McCarthy says. Her seven years at the Catholic Worker had provided her with plenty of time to get to know members of the homeless community who did their laundry and ate breakfast at Our Lady of the Road. McCarthy, who also teaches classes at the nearby Westville Correctional Facility, says the Worker training dovetails perfectly with the low-barrier and Housing First philosophy. “The Catholic Worker teaches you to see people without judgment, to love people without attachment, and let them be who they are without projecting your disappointment onto them,” she says.

Eliana Armounfelder, Motels4Now’s head of housing, agrees, citing the legendary Matthew 25 admonition: I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger and you invited me in. “A low-barrier commitment to shelter is the same as Jesus’s approach, because it was his mission to be with the people that others shun,” Armounfelder says. “When our guests have been kicked out of virtually every other setting, accompanying them is clearly what the Gospels tell us to do.”

McCarthy puts on her theologian hat to point out that this commitment to unconditional love and service is by no means an exclusively Christian concept. The Quran mandates care for the poor, and the Torah repeats no less than thirty-six times the commandment to welcome the stranger.⁵ McCarthy notes that the Hindu “namaste” greeting connotes the same divinity-in-every-person belief that animates Matthew 25. (We will discuss in chapter 10 the multifaith commitment to housing as a human right.)

Beyond tangible housing and support services, that philosophy manifests itself at Motels4Now in less measurable ways. The staff call their work “accompaniment,” not case management. Residents are considered honored guests and addressed as such. “Both Housing First and the Gospels have the same mandate: we give unconditional positive regard for our guests because we see Christ in them,” McCarthy says.

“We Are Not Giving Up on Them”

As the “4Now” portion of the program’s name acknowledges, converted motel rooms are not the ultimate solution for the residents. Our Lady of the Road has obtained funding from the City of South Bend and the state mental health agency to build both a new low-barrier intake center and an adjacent facility for permanent supportive housing. Until then, long-term housing for most Motels4Now residents will have to come from a combination of federal subsidies and private landlords that are willing to accept them.

Armounfelder’s role is to help residents search for that housing and assist with the often overwhelming details of applying for and retaining the government subsidy. With help, many residents can obtain housing choice vouchers, once known as Section 8 vouchers, which cap their rent at 30 percent of their income, with the federal government paying the rest. The subsidy is critical for the many Motels4Now residents living on a monthly SSI disability check that is less than $1,000, an amount that would barely cover market-rate rent and leave nothing for other daily needs.

But obtaining a voucher is only half the battle, as private landlords often refuse to accept tenants who rely on vouchers.⁶ This is where Armounfelder and colleagues step in, building relationships with local landlords and promising to assist if there are ever problems with tenants who are former Motels4Now residents. Armounfelder also helps with the intimidating process of keeping the vouchers, most notably the document-intense annual recertification process with the local public housing agency. “We do not end our relationship with our guests when they move out of the motel,” she says. About 80 percent of the motel residents who have moved into permanent housing have stayed there.

Teddy hopes to soon join that number. He spends most days walking the streets of South Bend. With his unruly, graying beard, dirty clothes, and his speech sometimes an unintelligible mumble, Teddy fits every stereotype of a homeless person. But he is not. When Teddy relaxes with a drink after a long workday, he does so at his home—Motels4Now.

It just happens that Teddy’s workday consists of him pulling on a reflective vest and walking up to five miles pushing a shopping cart he fills with aluminum cans, which he redeems for thirty-five cents a pound. Then his post-work relaxation commences in that stained beige recliner next to the dumpster across from his room at Motels4Now. “My boss gave me the rest of the day off,” he jokes. “And he can’t fire me, because he knows that would make the whole business go under.”

Teddy has been asked to leave Motels4Now a time or two before for fighting, conflicts which he is happy to describe blow by blow. But he has been welcomed back, and a relative has agreed to serve as the payee for his monthly disability check. Teddy is on track to soon secure a voucher and apartment of his own. Although some Motels4Now residents arrive fresh from an eviction or a hospital bed or jail cell, Teddy is among the majority of current residents who are on their second or more stay. That recidivism may seem like a failure. Not to McCarthy. “When people have been on the street for years, struggling with so many mental health and addiction challenges, the healing can take a while,” she says.

Linda too is a return resident. She is very thin and has deep, weathered creases running vertically down her cheeks. Linda’s best guess is that she has been at Motels4Now three times, but she is not sure. “The people here are mostly nice,” she says. Then she pauses and cocks her head to the side a bit. “Some of them get on my nerves sometimes, though, if we’re being honest.”

McCarthy hears that and smiles. Linda’s and other residents’ annoyance is often directed at the Motels4Now staff. One of Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day’s favorite quotes came from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, when a wise monk counsels a would-be do-gooder. The woman wants to serve the poor but fears that she will not receive the warm fuzzies of gratitude in return. The monk affirmed her fears. “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams,” he said.

The analysis holds up, McCarthy says. “We are up front with our staff that you need to expect to be verbally abused sometimes,” she says. “We all just have to understand that our guests are expressing the hurt that they feel after years of people and systems letting them down, and they are transmitting that pain toward us.”

Technically, neither Linda nor Teddy nor any other Motels4Now resident has ever been kicked out. Instead, they are asked to “take a break.” Like Clara today, they are automatically put on the waiting list for future openings. And while they wait, they remain welcome at the affiliated Our Lady of the Road café and laundromat. “We want to assure people that we are not giving up on them,” McCarthy says.

After three years of Motels4Now’s operation, local service providers, police, and business owners all agree that South Bend’s visible homeless population has been sharply reduced.⁷ The number has dwindled so much that the Motels4Now team can identify virtually every unhoused person they see. “Most of those on the streets have been with us before and will soon be back, or they are newly homeless and they will head our way or find another option,” McCarthy says. “It is no exaggeration to say that we have ended long-term homelessness in our community.”

Which, McCarthy admits, surprised her. “Starting out, I knew this was the morally right thing to do. And intellectually, I believed in the concept,” she says. “But the fact that four of every five guests we have ever had are now either safe at our motel or on to more permanent housing? I did not think it was possible that this many people could get this much better after years of dwelling in such brokenness.”

The lesson, she says, is that there is no reason the US cannot join other nations, some of them with far less resources than ours, that have all but eliminated homelessness. “Other communities and programs don’t have to do it the same way we do, of course,” she says. “But the experience here does show that this works. It can completely transform not just individual lives but a whole community.”

Housing First and the Hidden Homeless

Each night, our client Barbara and her four children spread out blankets and lie down, head to foot, on the floor of her sister’s living room. Barbara is not sure how long this arrangement can last. Her sister and husband have two kids of their own, and they are worried their landlord will hear about them packing nine people into their two-bedroom apartment.

Kevin and Samantha and their infant daughter sleep in their Ford Focus, then take turns watching the baby while the other one works a shift at a fast-food restaurant. They arrive early for their shifts so they can spend time in the restaurant bathroom trying to bathe themselves the best they can.

After she was evicted, Melissa slept in a neighbor’s garden shed. The neighbor charged her rent to do so.

Here in the US, the Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates more than a half million people are homeless each night. That is widely considered to be a significant undercount. Even so, it is a number so large it equals the entire population of Kansas City, Missouri.⁸ For most of us, the visible evidence of this crisis comes from seeing in-the-street struggles of people like the Motels4Now residents who are chronically homeless. But most homelessness is more hidden.

Why do our clients experience homelessness? For most, it is simply because they cannot afford rent. Research from the US Government Accounting Office shows that for every $100 in average rent increases, there is a 9 percent spike in homelessness.⁹ Barbara, Kevin, Samantha, and Melissa can attest to the truth of that.

They are not alone. A comprehensive study of the homeless population of California, the largest such sampling in the past thirty years, found that homeless persons’ median income the month before they became unhoused was only $960.¹⁰ For them, just like for the people who are unhoused because of mental health issues, Housing First works. Providing a safe, secure roof overhead immediately, then addressing other social service needs, is the most humane response to the needs of all our housing-insecure sisters and brothers.

As Motels4Now’s track record proves, it is also the most effective response, reducing the number of people who are unhoused and blocking the too-common path from homelessness to arrest and incarceration. That same survey of homeless persons showed that nine of every ten unhoused people felt they would have been able to stave off homelessness if they had access to a voucher for affordable housing.¹¹

Housing First is not “Housing Only.”¹² The Housing First model adds in wraparound services that can include psychiatric and substance abuse treatment when needed.¹³ The comprehensive Housing First approach connects deeply to the conversations we will have in chapters 9 and 10: housing is a human right, and it is immoral to create conditions people must meet in order to have a safe, secure roof over their head. Beyond immoral, it should be illegal, too. It is in Finland, where Section 19 of the Finnish Constitution guarantees housing and is the impetus for that country’s enormously successful Housing First program.¹⁴

Housing First may seem like a no-brainer approach to the problem of homelessness, but it was not always the norm. Until the early 2000s, the consensus among government funders and service providers was that unhoused persons should be required to “earn” a shot at permanent housing. They cleared that barrier by first living in transitional, nonpermanent housing, and completing treatment and/or employment training.

But that “housing readiness” approach rarely worked. So, in the 1990s, the New York City organization Pathways to Housing replaced it with Housing First. It proved to be far more successful in both getting people with psychiatric disabilities into housing and keeping them there.¹⁵

As multiple studies verified Pathway’s success with Housing First, it gained excited, bipartisan support from policymakers. President George W. Bush’s homelessness czar was a fan, as was President Donald Trump’s first secretary of housing and urban development, Dr. Ben Carson.¹⁶ Housing First was the centerpiece of the Biden-Harris administration’s approach to homelessness.¹⁷

But today, Housing First faces two significant challenges. First, it is being attacked by right-wing politicians and commentators who label it as a failed liberal policy approach that makes cities more dangerous. The critics include the activist Christopher Rufo, who also helped elevate critical race theory into a reliable political target, and commentators like Tucker Carlson.¹⁸ The partisan motivation behind these attacks is revealed by their focus on homelessness in Democrat-governed California and by claiming addiction is the cause of the crisis—even though homelessness in California and beyond is proven to be largely fueled by the inability to afford stable housing.¹⁹

To me, the labeling of homelessness as largely an addiction or mental health issue is deeply frustrating. As someone who each week stands alongside people who are on the brink of homelessness, I can attest that their plight is rarely caused by mental health issues. Their main problem is a lot simpler than that, and a lot easier to solve: they can’t afford their rent! And even though people like our clients are not as visible as the Motels4Now future residents on the streets struggling with mental health challenges, studies show time and again that people like our clients are the majority of people facing homelessness in our nation.²⁰ In 2023, the Pew Charitable Trusts summarized decades of academic research on this question: “Housing costs explain far more of the difference in rates of homelessness than variables such as substance use disorder, mental health, weather, the strength of the social safety net, poverty, or economic conditions. Some vulnerabilities strongly influence which people are susceptible to homelessness, but research has repeatedly concluded that these factors play only a minor role in driving rates of homelessness compared with the role of housing costs.”²¹

Beyond the mischaracterization of the causes of homelessness, Housing First programs face a second challenge, too. This one comes from a less obvious source. Many Housing First supporters undercut its effectiveness by watering down the program, reducing costs by not offering the wraparound services that have proved to be critical to participants staying housed. Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris administration was among those who have attempted to achieve Housing First success on the cheap, reducing federal spending on supportive services like drug treatment and health care.²²

Half-baked Housing First efforts can be incredibly damaging, producing the kind of underwhelming outcomes that both perpetuate the cycle of homelessness and fuel cynical criticism of the overall approach. That criticism is also bolstered by the mixed evidence on the cost savings of Housing First: although Housing First significantly reduces costly emergency health and law enforcement interventions triggered by chronic homelessness, there is no denying that up-front housing costs are not cheap.²³

But political noise and funding debates should not distract us from the most important outcome of Housing First: it gets people housed, and it effectively helps them stay that way. I rarely agree with Trump administration officials, but Ben Carson was right on target when he said in 2017,

For years, there has been a growing mountain of data showing that a Housing First approach works to reduce not only costs to taxpayers but the human toll as well. The evidence is clear… . Once we give people a stable place to live, it becomes much easier to provide mental and physical health treatment, education and job training—essential rungs on the ladder out of homelessness… . We can say without hesitation that we know how to end homelessness.²⁴

The “mountain of data” Carson refers to started with the multiple studies, including randomized control trials, which showed the Pathways to Housing turn-of-the-century approach achieved better results than anything tried before.²⁵ Similar results have followed from US cities like Houston, Milwaukee, Denver, and Santa Clara, California.²⁶

The most widespread evidence of Housing First’s impact comes from its remarkable success reducing veterans’ homelessness by over half. That outcome was made possible by the fact that the VA—like Motels4Now and some other programs—does Housing First right, providing access to VA health care and other programs to buttress the housing provided.²⁷ Housing First has worked just as well in nations like Canada, Finland, Australia, and multiple European countries.²⁸ We can do that here, too. And there is a plan to do so: former Representative Cori Bush, who has herself experienced homelessness along with her children, along with multiple other members of Congress introduced “Housing Justice for All” legislation that would create a national-level Housing First program.²⁹

Inclusionary Zoning

Still wearing olive-green scrubs, Phyllis comes to court straight from her shift as a medical assistant at a local hospital. She faces eviction because her frustration finally led her to withhold her rent from her apartment complex.

More than two months ago, Phyllis and her teenage daughter both smelled gas in their apartment. The complex, whose corporate ownership had changed twice in the past three years, did not respond to their maintenance calls. So Phyllis reached out to the local utility company, who sent out a service technician. He found multiple leaks in the apartment appliances and immediately cut off the gas supply.

Phyllis renewed her calls, texts, and emails to the apartment complex. Now, seven weeks later, the apartment complex has still not fixed the leaks. All the while, Phyllis and her daughter have been without hot water to bathe and cannot use their cooking stove.

There is a list of other health and safety concerns Phyllis and other residents have about the complex—we have represented other clients there with complaints about mold, security, and leaks. But like most of the other complex residents we have represented, Phyllis does not want to move. At first, that surprised me and my students. But Phyllis answered our question about moving with a question of her own: “Where else are we going to go?”

We do not have a good answer. The national vacancy rate in rental units was less than 5 percent in 2022, and the rate is similar in our community.³⁰ Lower-rent housing is in even higher demand.

There seems to be an obvious solution. We should build more affordable housing or rehabilitate the many vacant units that exist throughout the nation, especially near jobs like Phyllis’s and good schools that her daughter can attend. Brookings Institution housing expert Jenny Schuetz explains how that would work: “In places where land costs are high, the easiest way to reduce per-unit housing costs is to build more homes on a single land parcel,” Schuetz writes. “Stacking small apartments vertically, even in relatively low-rise buildings, can substantially lower the per-unit cost of each home.”³¹

Simple, right? If only it were not illegal.

For three-quarters of the land zoned for housing in major US cities, the only housing allowed to be built on that land are single-family houses, often with required minimum lot sizes that ensure they are spread far apart.³² The resulting US landscape of automobile-dependent, sprawling metropolitan areas comes to us courtesy of our practice of allowing local communities to pass their own laws controlling the use of land. Those laws—Matthew Desmond calls the term “municipal zoning ordinance” the most soulless phrase in the English language—create a de facto moat separating Phyllis and other limited-income people from many of the most desirable neighborhoods across the country.³³ The New York Times calls single-family zoning “practically gospel in America.”³⁴

The usual academic term for these laws is exclusionary zoning. But some call it “snob zoning.”³⁵

The snob zoning label may not be fair. As we discussed in chapter 4, we live in a nation where we provide limited retirement and disability protections but huge tax breaks for homeowners. That leaves the value of a home as the chief source of income security for those fortunate enough to buy one.³⁶ So nervous homeowners vote for zoning restrictions that perpetuate housing scarcity, which increases their nest-egg homes’ value but shuts Phyllis out of options. Phyllis is not the only one who loses out: a generational conflict has emerged where baby boomers who want exclusivity to increase their investment are angering a younger generation who cannot find affordable housing.³⁷

Economist William Fischel coined the term “homevoter” to describe the powerful bloc of residents in every community who are laser-focused on supporting laws and practices that protect and increase their home values.³⁸ Little wonder, since the average US homeowner has over $270,000 in home equity.³⁹ Exclusionary zoning has been called a form of home-value insurance.⁴⁰ Surveys show most Americans support more public housing; they just do not want it in their own neighborhood.⁴¹ The homeownership influence on policy support is dramatic: voters who receive a mortgage interest deduction—as we saw in chapter 4, a deeply impactful form of government subsidy—on average oppose more investment in public housing. At the same time, self-identified conservative renters are more likely than self-identified liberal homeowners to support affordable housing being built nearby.⁴²

And, as we saw in chapter 3, there is a far more sinister history of exclusionary zoning that reaches beyond family economics. After the US Supreme Court in 1917 struck down zoning exclusion by race, that same court nine years later upheld exclusion by house type.⁴³ The stage was set to impose rules restricting neighborhoods to single-family homes and large lot sizes as substitutes for the rules that once prevented Black people and other persons of color from the same communities. In Atlanta, for example, neighborhood zoning district names were simply changed from white to “dwelling house” and from colored to “apartment house.”⁴⁴ Exclusionary zoning weaponizes our enormous wealth and income gaps by race, causing US neighborhoods to remain nearly as segregated now as they were when the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968.⁴⁵

We are not helpless to overcome these barriers to creating more affordable housing for Phyllis and others like her. Cities like Louisville, Minneapolis, Boston, and Seattle, along with states like New Jersey, California, and Oregon, are creating land-use policies that push back against exclusionary zoning.⁴⁶ Since it will always be an uphill battle to persuade local communities to open their zoning processes in a homeownership economy and culture, state and national-level approaches are called for, too.⁴⁷ The Biden-Harris administration proposed providing extra funding to localities that adopt inclusionary zoning to facilitate affordable housing development.⁴⁸

Along with a carrot like this, there should be sticks: cities and states that are hungry for federal funds for highways and mass transit should be required to dismantle their exclusionary zoning restrictions.⁴⁹ Inclusionary zoning alone cannot solve our affordable housing crisis. As we will explain in chapter 8, market solutions can never fully address the significant needs of households who cannot afford market-rate rent. But fixing our zoning laws is clearly a step in the right direction.

Discouraging Housing Speculation

We know from chapter 4 that US policies too often treat housing as a tool for profiteering instead of a human right, especially by adopting tax policies that subsidize rich individuals and corporate landlords. The result is toxic: global equity firms and other super-wealthy entities gobble up rental properties, then spike rents, neglect maintenance, and often turn around and sell the properties soon thereafter.⁵⁰ Charles was a recent client who kept track of the different property management companies overseeing his complex: he counted five property managers in just two years, with at least two ownership changes in that period as well. Charles’s calls about a caved-in ceiling in his apartment were routed to out-of-state call centers. Weeks went by before anyone showed up to fix his ceiling.

Just like with exclusionary zoning, we have the tools to stop this. Our local, state, and federal governments should slam shut the tax loopholes that reward corporate, speculative property purchasers. Instead, we should aggressively tax speculators that keep properties vacant and/or flip properties.⁵¹

For example, a land value uplift tax can impose a hefty charge on profits made from selling a home without making any capital improvements.⁵² A flipping tax can charge for quick turnarounds by home purchasers; blight/vacancy taxes can impose significant costs to the speculative practices that damage a community. Land value taxes can discourage investors from hoarding vacant or unused properties, forcing them to either develop the property for housing or sell to someone who will.⁵³ The revenue from all these taxes should be devoted to creating more affordable housing.⁵⁴

Equally justified is a tax on high-value property transactions, with the revenue going to create more affordable housing.⁵⁵ At least seven states and some cities have progressive transfer taxes that increase with the sale price of the property.⁵⁶ Los Angeles voters in 2022 overwhelmingly approved a “mansion tax,” Measure ULA, that imposes extra taxes on the sale of property worth over $5 million. The money generated by this new tax goes to building affordable housing and providing rental or cash subsidies to low-income older people and people living with disabilities.⁵⁷

Beyond tax policy, we have other tools to discourage housing speculation. Our governments must divest their pension funds from speculative real estate. We should increase transparency requirements of real estate investors, and we should regulate campaign finance to limit real estate speculators’ outsize influence on our political process.⁵⁸ The federal government can make a big dent in real estate speculation by banning rent securitization—the bundling of rental property assets together to sell as bonds—and limiting the same securitization of mortgages, too.⁵⁹

Universal Housing Vouchers

As we learned in chapter 4, the tenants we see lined up in eviction court are almost always losers in the cruel musical chairs game our nation plays with housing assistance: only one of every four people with incomes low enough to qualify for federal housing subsidy get the help they need.⁶⁰ In some communities, the gap is even larger. In central Indiana where our clients live, there are over 118,000 households with incomes low enough to be eligible for vouchers, while only a little over 11,000 vouchers are available.⁶¹ The local public housing agency that administers the program long ago closed its vouchers waiting list.

The fast, logical, and humane response to this travesty is to make housing subsidies available to all who qualify. A “universal voucher” approach would triple the number of housing choice (Section 8) vouchers that can be used to find private rental units for which the federal government helps pay rent.⁶² This approach would mirror how we already administer programs like Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps), so-called entitlement programs where eligibility guarantees access.⁶³ It would be a step in the direction of popular, successful universal-access programs like public schools and Medicare.

A universal voucher program was a campaign promise made in 2020 by President Biden, and it is the subject of legislation pending in the US House of Representatives.⁶⁴ Polling in 2020 showed a strong majority of voters support universal vouchers, including a majority of Republican voters.⁶⁵ The Urban Institute has estimated this expansion can be accomplished for $62 billion per year—a sum far lower than the revenue forgone by the federal government via the many corporate landlord and wealthy homeowner tax breaks listed in chapter 4.⁶⁶ Further, the cost of universal vouchers would be a mere fraction of the US military budget.⁶⁷

In chapter 8, we will discuss why the long-term solution for our housing crisis must center on the de-privatization of affordable housing. But, in the short term, the urgency of the housing crisis and the limited public housing supply mean that we need to expand the voucher program. University of Pennsylvania researchers have called for this expansion to include “project-based” vouchers tied to particular units. Those vouchers would ensure those property owners a guaranteed source of income they can use to ensure good maintenance and necessary rehabilitation. Of course, we need to accompany a voucher expansion with inclusionary zoning measures that ensure multifamily housing is welcome across communities.⁶⁸

Unavoidably, this fast expansion of rental assistance will reward for-profit landlords. But we cannot allow those private landlords to discriminate against prospective tenants who hold federal housing vouchers. We need a federal ban on that practice, which would follow the lead of the eleven states and fifty-plus cities that have already adopted “source of income” antidiscrimination laws.⁶⁹

This source-of-income discrimination ban is critical to voucher expansion. A social worker friend recently referred Sarah to our clinic, hoping that we had some housing suggestions for her. Sarah, seven months pregnant and with a two-year-old already, was one of the fortunate few who had a housing choice voucher—the local waiting list has been closed for years.⁷⁰ But Sarah was growing desperate: her current landlord wanted to stop accepting voucher tenants at the end of her lease, and she could not find another landlord to accept her as a voucher tenant. If she did not find a voucher-accepting landlord soon, Sarah would forfeit her voucher.

As we saw in chapter 2 with our client Belinda, Sarah’s situation is common: the voucher program’s reliance on the self-interest of for-profit landlords means that the promise of vouchers is often an empty one. As many as 30 percent of those who receive vouchers end up forfeiting them because private landlords will refuse to accept Section 8 tenants.⁷¹ Refusing to rent to Sarah, Belinda, or other prospective tenants because they hold vouchers should be as illegal as refusing to rent to prospective tenants because of their race or religion.

Beyond Housing

The tsunami of struggle that engulfed Brenda’s life swept her up and deposited her in eviction court. First, her husband Jared suffered injuries in a car accident that left him quadriplegic, which compels the family to spend extra money on a rental house with wider doorways and hallways to accommodate his wheelchair. Now, Jared has been hospitalized for surgeries and then complications in recovery. Because Jared is in the hospital, his disability checks have stopped coming to the home.

During the limited time she is not caring for Jared or their young son, Brenda puts in shifts at a home health care agency. But that has not been enough to pay the higher-than-usual rent. She is picking up extra hours at a child care center, but the rent and the late fees and court and attorney’s fees are starting to pile up.

Brenda’s story has unique details, as do the stories of all our clients. But the stories almost always share a common theme: the family simply does not have enough money to pay the rent. In 2023, the largest study of homeless people in decades confirmed what reams of previous research have shown: an effective response to the needs of people who have too little money is to give them money. Even small amounts of financial assistance are enormously effective at helping people stay safely housed.⁷²

Yet millions of Americans teeter on the edge of becoming unhoused. Census figures show 12.5 million households report being behind on either their rent or mortgage payments.⁷³ Thirty-eight million people in this country live below the poverty level, which means they do not have enough income to meet their essential needs.⁷⁴ Eighteen million of those endure so-called “deep poverty,” trying to survive on incomes below $13,000 for a family of four.⁷⁵

Beyond the lack of affordable housing, how did we get here? Well, many of our clients are home care workers like Brenda. Others are restaurant cooks and servers, or child care providers, or retail workers. As we will discuss more in chapter 12, the US pays our service-sector workers less than any other industrialized nation.⁷⁶ We have a very low federal minimum wage and laws that restrict unionization.⁷⁷

Compared to these similar nations, our safety net does not do a good job protecting for income loss, child care, health care and disability needs.⁷⁸ For this we can thank decades of demonizing of the poor—recall Ronald Reagan’s mythical “welfare queen” and Bill Clinton’s promise to “end welfare as we know it.”⁷⁹ This was always a lie: people receiving assistance spend less than the rest of us on nonessential items like alcohol and entertainment, both in real dollars and proportionally.⁸⁰ Racism is intertwined within this contempt for the poor, with most Americans inaccurately believing that most welfare recipients are Black.⁸¹

Despite these headwinds, a year and a half before Brenda faced eviction, she and nearly every one of the other seventy-three people on that day’s eviction docket were safely housed. They were making ends meet thanks in large part to a combination of stimulus checks, extended unemployment benefits, expanded child tax credit, and maximized food stamps, all instituted as a response to the COVID pandemic.

Together with a national eviction moratorium, we extended a lifeline to tens of millions of Americans. The Eviction Lab at Princeton University estimates that these programs prevented more than three million eviction cases.⁸² More broadly, we achieved the remarkable result of reducing poverty rates during a pandemic. In fact, the percentage of Americans in poverty reached the lowest level in a half century.⁸³

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says that just one component of our COVID response, the American Rescue Plan of 2021, may be the most effective antipoverty legislation since the New Deal in 1935.⁸⁴ For the first time, the US’s shared prosperity began to resemble that of other industrialized nations where housing is a human right and subsistence needs like health care and child care are guaranteed.

Then, one by one, we let all these effective programs drift away. The extended unemployment benefits ended in September 2021; the expanded child tax credit was not renewed for 2022. Food stamps reverted to their previous level.⁸⁵

For a while, one program remained: Emergency Rental Assistance. In two segments, Congress approved $46 billion in rental assistance to be distributed by cities and states. If renters had endured pandemic-related financial hardship and their incomes were below 80 percent of their area’s median income, they could get funds delivered directly to their landlords or sometimes to the renters themselves.

For many of our clients, housing costs take up nearly all their monthly income, especially if they live with a disability or have extensive child care obligations. So it was no surprise that these clients and millions of others flocked to the emergency rental assistance program. The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University documented that almost one in four renters with annual incomes below $25,000 applied to the program.⁸⁶ Analysis by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development shows that the program kept millions from becoming homeless.⁸⁷

We can attest to that. For Elise, who has been unable to work much while caring for a sister living with severe disabilities; for Courtney, who shuttles between two fast-food jobs while finding off-hours child care for her toddler son; for James, who missed seven weeks of work after being injured on the job—the rental assistance program kept them all housed.

Now it is gone, too.

Once the programs started drifting away, eviction filings quickly rose to pre-pandemic levels.⁸⁸ Indianapolis’s version of emergency rental assistance, called IndyRent, hung on longer than many similar programs. But it too ended, just one day before Brenda was summoned to court. When she got there, the sign outside the courtroom with the four-foot blue arrow directing people to Rental Assistance was still up. But it did not point to anything.

Brenda’s court date was early December, and the judge ordered families to move out of their home by December 22. In the hallway after their hearings, we told them they likely have a few extra days beyond the official move-out date. Neither landlords nor constables like the optics of putting families out of their homes around Christmas.

But their eviction day is coming. Not so long ago, our country saw the struggles of Brenda and the other families lined up in court, and we pulled them up to a place of safety. But then we let go of that rope.