You don’t have to be an expert to know that the way we’ve chosen to do housing in this country is horribly dysfunctional. Rents are too high, supply is too low, banks and credit agencies are still discriminatory dinosaurs, and neighborhood segregation is still rampant. On top of all that, Detroiters were recently reminded that the status quo is also deadly.
Earlier this month, the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office determined that the horrifying death of two children in a casino parking garage in February was caused by carbon monoxide poisoning. But the unspoken underlying cause was that 2-year-old A’millah Currie and 9-year-old Darnell Currie Jr. were unhoused during a punishing winter, and were living out of a van with their mother, Tateona Williams, grandmother, and three other children. Greektown’s parking garage was a last resort after Williams’s requests for help slipped through the cracks of the city’s homeless response system. In an especially brutal twist, there is now speculation that the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office could pursue charges against Williams for what is essentially the crime of being poor.
More broadly, the unspeakable tragedy has kicked off a wave of reflection about what experts call our “broken” homeless response system. What will it take to make sure this isn’t a city where people die freezing on the streets or poisoned in their cars?
As Bridge Detroit reports, the mayor’s office has released a seven-point plan in response. The city will now keep housing helpline hours open 24/7; expand the number, hours, and coverage areas of outreach teams; double the number of shelter beds; and start treating every call that involves children like an emergency.
This is better than nothing. But the infuriating reality is that this is all preventable. There is a very effective way to protect anyone from ever hitting such a devastating rock bottom: by preventing homelessness in the first place through a guaranteed universal right to housing.
As John Stoyka, president and executive director of Community & Home Supports, Inc. told the Detroit Free Press, “As long as there’s not enough housing, people will continue to pile up in shelters” and “be on the streets.”
Addressing the actual problem
There’s an analogy about fires I like. One common mistake you see across mainstream media and political commentary is to talk about public policy as if it was akin to a fire department. In this scenario, there are serious problems out there like poverty and homelessness that are torching people’s lives and ravaging communities. In response, we send in our lawmakers and institutions to put out the flames.
But this gets it all wrong. To quote Matt Bruenig, founder of the progressive think tank People’s Policy Project: “the economy is a government program.” Property law, contract law, corporate law, commercial law, and on and on — all of these are politically built economic institutions. In the case of housing, our institutions force people to acquire units through the private market rather than directly providing housing as a basic human need the way we do other public services.
To be clear, then: homelessness is a fire started and fueled by public policy. And it is entirely reversible. Our admirable care providers can only do so much. And our many affordable housing gimmicks fall enormously short. Instead, we should just put the fire out at its source through a massive social housing program.
Social housing: the way to go
Social housing, or large-scale publicly-owned housing, is a simple and elegant solution to an infuriatingly persistent problem.
Back in 2018, the People’s Policy Project released a blueprint for building ten million social housing units around the country. Going on a building spree like this would increase the housing supply at a time when we desperately need it. And by making the units mixed-income, perhaps with wealthier residents subsidizing lower-income ones, we can avoid the fear of displacing ordinary people that comes with luxury developments — not to mention the disastrous consequences of income and racial segregation that doomed our last public housing push.
While we can’t expect the federal government to launch a universal housing program anytime soon, we don’t have to wait either. The people of Seattle, for instance, just voted overwhelmingly in favor of taxing wealthy corporations as a way to finance mass public housing. They achieved this over the furious opposition of corporate giants like Amazon and Microsoft and local corporate Democrats. As the PPP proposal outlines, cities can combine moves like this with municipal bond market financing to fund social housing programs.
We could do the same here, but there’s one major problem. Out of either a sincere and misguided belief in the superiority of market-based housing or fear of incurring the wrath of the real estate lobby, our current political class will never embrace a universal right to housing. A few years ago, for instance, Mayor Mike Duggan’s machine led a ferocious attack against Proposal P, which would have rewritten Detroit’s charter to create an affordable housing fund along with addressing other human needs like water affordability and transportation.
But with enough political courage, the kind inspired by massive public pressure, we could eradicate homelessness in short order, both for the thousands of Detroiters and the nearly 800,000 across the United States who we force to sleep on the streets and in shelters.
Tried and tested
As the PPP report highlights, other countries have a lot to teach us about providing high-quality, affordable housing for everyone.
In Austria’s capital city of Vienna, 60% of residents live in public housing, while Finland has significantly reduced homelessness through its “Housing First” model. Sweden went on a spree of its own, building one million social housing units “for the benefit of everyone.” And Singapore, as Bruenig writes in The Guardian, “has taken it the furthest of them all: 80% of its residents live in apartment units built and owned by the nation’s public housing authority.”
Each of these approaches has its challenges, but our system is atrocious by comparison. We should learn what we can from them and apply the lessons.
Our responsibility to make different choices
When Tony Stark goes to recruit Peter Parker to join the Avengers in Captain America: Civil War, he asks Parker what motivates him.
“When you can do the things that I can, but you don’t and then the bad things happen, they happen because of you,” the young Parker replies.
This is how any honest policymaker should think of their job. If you have the power to throw a rope out to a drowning person, or to put out a fire, or prevent one from ever starting in the first place, but choose not to, then you are responsible for the consequences of that decision. This is especially true for the wealthiest country in human history, where it should be trivially easy to make sure everyone has a place to sleep.
Parker’s point is that refusing to use the power at your fingertips for good leaves an intolerable moral stain on whoever holds that power. Our society has chosen a course of action that guarantees some will be homeless, instead of one that guarantees no one will be. People suffer and die needlessly because of that decision. Tateona Williams and her family were homeless because we’ve decided housing is a luxury good instead of a publicly guaranteed one like schools, libraries, and the fire department.
To put it plainly: homelessness is not a force of nature we have to overcome. It is a direct result of choices we make, and we can make different ones. We can stop the flames from ever engulfing people’s lives by removing the arsonists from power and taking care of our residents the way more humane countries do.
