Housing is for People

A first-time candidate running for her local city council called me recently for my take on local housing policy. After we spoke for half an hour, she exclaimed with exasperation, “Why is it that everyone in this town says we need more affordable housing – including elected officials – but then they don’t do anything about it?”

It was only after years of banging my head against a wall as a fair and affordable housing advocate that I realized “do we need affordable housing?” is the wrong question. It obfuscates the deeper, broader issue, which is about government’s role as a caretaker for all its people – what Michael Ignatieff, in The Needs of Strangers, calls “a shared language of the good.”

We have an opportunity today that cannot be squandered. Not since the 1960s has a groundswell of Americans pushed for an end to disparities based on race, class, and geography. The coronavirus pandemic, murders of Black Americans by police, and economic upheaval have brought to light the ways in which public policy benefits some and harms others.

We have come to recognize that homogeneous suburbs, neighborhoods, subdivisions, and apartment buildings are unhealthy socially, economically, and morally. They are spiritually demoralizing as well because equating community with bricks and sticks rather than people is alienating and dehumanizing.

As more energized, newly minted activists throw their hats into the electoral ring – you, dear reader, may some day be one of them– I share my hard-earned wisdom on how to talk about affordable housing in the context of building community.

“Why don’t they do anything about it?”

These elected officials, appointees or neighbors might say things they don’t believe so as not to appear to disdain lower-income families, a disproportionate number of whom face additional discriminatory hurdles to living in the community based on race, disability, or presence of children. They might conflate “affordable housing” with people of color as if none of them earned high incomes and no whites were struggling.

One could also respond to this aspiring political leader that the city council is simply passive, reflecting the status quo bias against change. Council members might be unwilling to “tamper with the free market,” or give presumably underserving people something for nothing. They might fear for their political life if they don’t attract the “highest and best use” for available land (a euphemism for squeezing the maximum tax revenue from each square foot).

Adding more students to local schools might also, they fear, lower property values. That’s because the school district is faced with the hard choice of raising property taxes to expand school capacity, or doing nothing, also unpopular. Illinois spends less than any other state on its public schools as a share of total school budgets, at just 25 percent. Home Rule, established by the Illinois Constitution in 1970 along with a state income tax, freed municipalities to fund, and thereby control, schools within their borders. That’s how far white flight Chicago suburbs went to avoid having their income tax dollars fund Chicago Public Schools. (This history is worth reading in The Chicago Schools: A Social and Political History (1971) by Mary Herrick and in the Chicago Urban League’s 2008 lawsuit against the State of Illinois for racial discrimination in school funding).

Fifty years of self-funding resulted in “spiraling inequality” between the quality of public education in rich and poor towns. Overlay this with racial segregation in housing and we have a textbook description of systemic racism: a convoluted political scaffolding that nurtures “super zip codes” of wealth and privilege, privatizing education in all but name.

Housing in context: “What kind of community do we want to be?”

Just as changing the phrase “global warming” to “climate change” in public opinion polls broadened consensus for action (in addition to more accurately describing the phenomenon), so will rephrasing the question about “affordable housing” to “building community.”

My epiphany happened in 1999, when I ran Open Communities, then called the Interfaith Housing Center of the Northern Suburbs. I participated in a small evening gathering of Glencoe residents and religious leaders with the Village President at a church. He talked about his vision of creating the first affordable senior housing in Glencoe, “in the $500,000 range.” After we raised eyebrows over this “affordable” level, Rabbi Bruce Elder of Congregation Hakafa said that the real question we should be asking ourselves is not what kind of housing do we want but “what kind of Glencoe do we want to be.”

Since then, I have come to see that when we ask ourselves this underlying question about the kind of community we want to be, we’re not thinking about our four walls and property values, but about the larger place we share with others. I witnessed this in a highly participatory community forum in Skokie. Just read the voluminous responses to the question, “What do we need to do individually and collectively to maintain and strengthen the things that we value about living in Skokie?” and you will see that affordable housing is but one of a laundry list of aspects of a community that residents value.

Put in this way, housing isn’t the center of the universe any more than the earth is the center of the Milky Way. Housing serves community.

Here are ten more common-sense arguments I have used.

#1: Call it “Mixed-Income Housing.”

What we’re really grappling with when we’re looking at a proposed development or creating a housing plan for our town, is how we house a diversity of people. Policies of “inclusionary zoning” or “affordable housing set-asides” describe private multifamily development that is designed to house people at various income levels. Inclusionary zoning is a proven way to capture low-cost housing among units that would have been built anyway. A typical income mix under inclusionary zoning targets 85 percent of units for wealthier people and 15 percent for people who cannot shell out the market rate. You might ask why it makes sense to focus the majority of new housing on a minority of very wealthy people. A town could choose the opposite, with most units for the gamut of low- to moderate-income families and a small percentage in the luxury range.

Another way to foster a mixed-income community is through a housing trust fund that provides rental subsidies that are either granted to specific low-income families for the market-rate housing of their choice, or to a landlord for a specific block of apartments.

#2: It’s a cost of doing business.

Developers and municipalities have pushed back on including below-market rate housing in their developments with claims they can’t afford it. They might call it “social engineering” in a derogatory fashion, as if the fact that communities look as they do were not the result of generations of policies of segregation from restrictive zoning codes and covenants. You can respond to them that it’s a cost of doing business in this town. Just as some localities require installing sprinkler systems in new buildings or employing union labor in construction, so we require a percentage of units to be affordable to families at certain income levels. A municipality can allow for flexibility in the design and total number of units to meet the developer part way, but the point is that rules are rules. Having consistent rules also ensures that all neighborhoods of a town are treated the same.

#3: Affordable housing is a resource like trees.

Read the fine print: most affordability periods expire unless ordinances or loan documents are rewritten. If the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit is used in Illinois, after fifteen years the developer can raise the rents. Most inclusionary zoning ordinances incorporate a sunset period; in Chicago, it’s thirty years. But we all know that in our economic reality where the cost of living rises faster than wages, an affordable housing unit that reverts to market rate is gone forever. Follow the lead of many municipalities that protect their affordable housing in perpetuity by putting these units in under the ownership or control of a Community Land Trust. Think of a CLT like the Nature Conservancy but for low-cost housing or small businesses. A CLT is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the public good that owns and controls land and regulates what is built on it, taking it off the speculative market. In Chicago’s northern suburbs, Community Partners for Affordable Housing is the CLT that partners with municipalities and developers to own or control low-cost units in mixed-income developments. A deed restriction can also preserve affordability for 99 years.

#4: All people are worthy.

Opponents dismiss “affordable housing” because they think it is for people who are in some way defective. In this view, people seeking low-cost housing don’t work hard enough or at all; they might even be trying to defraud taxpayers. Bring on the trader, doctor, engineer, CEO, or lawyer who, skeptics say, don’t need a “hand-out.”

Hold on, you might say. Is not the mortgage interest tax deduction a multi-billion dollar “hand-out” that benefits even wealthy homeowners? Value is a social construct. Do not fall into the trap of measuring a neighbor’s value by the amount of money they make or inherit. At the top of their field, even the very best emergency medical technician, pre-school teacher, cab driver, grocery bagger, or social worker will only earn so much money. The same goes for older people and people with disabilities who live on Social Security or SSI, or people who are unemployed. Does that mean we don’t want them in our town?

In 2011, the affluent and predominantly white Chicago suburb of Winnetka was deeply divided over a modest affordable housing plan. The Rev. Paul Allen, a widely regarded community leader, preached on this very topic, and this was the most talked-about part of the sermon: “A recent letter to the editor ended with the question: ‘Would you like to live next door to your maid?’ Hm! Well… What would you say?” (I might respond, “Would your maid like to live next door to you?”) Rev. Allen zeroed in on the incontrovertible heart of the matter:

“Is reality seen as a set of shelves, getting smaller the higher up you go? Is our worth dependent on getting from lower shelves to higher ones? Do we have to make sure our friends are the people on our shelf or a higher one? Do we use the people on lower shelves to clean our homes but never, never get close to them? Is that the vision? How different is Jesus’ vision!”

#5: Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

One misconception about inviting below-market rate housing is that taxpayers will have to foot the bill. Private developers argue that lower-cost units will not support financing costs or minimum profits. But a government committed to mixed-income housing takes this into account and makes accommodations for the developer like allowing additional market rate units, waiving particular fees, or lowering parking requirements. New housing and the residents who live in it generate revenue. As Habitat for Humanity points out, when people’s housing expenses are within their means, they recycle their dollar back into the community as consumers.

#6: Life doesn’t segregate.

Lilo and Michel Salmon, the founders of Housing Opportunities and Maintenance for the Elderly (H.O.M.E.), the Chicago nonprofit organization I direct, often pointed out that life doesn’t segregate by age, so why should we? H.O.M.E.’s affordable housing is intergenerational. Some of our housing is communal with shared meals and activities. Everyone benefits when all age groups interact with one another. But developers, with the support of municipalities, segment the market into distinct population types. They decide that “young professionals” and “empty nesters” should live near transit and downtowns in small apartments, away from families with children. This is wrong. The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination against families with children unless the building is designated for older adults.

Life doesn’t segregate by race or income either. What compelling reason could there possibly be for having homogeneous or gated communities?

#7: Promoting a mixed-income housing “portfolio” promotes economic stability, and racial and ethnic diversity.

We're talking about common sense as well as social justice. Discrimination, as W.E.B. Du Bois put it 125 years ago, is “morally wrong, politically dangerous, industrially wasteful, and socially silly.” People of color, people with disabilities, and families headed by women tend to earn less than households headed by white, able-bodied men. Having a housing stock at various price points, sizes, types, and structures attracts and preserves a diverse population. It helps families stay together as some people downsize and others gain independence.

The cost of an overwhelmingly single-family housing stock is transience. Homeowners bear a high property tax burden to pay for schools where there is no industry or retail to share the load. This is something Winnetka has grappled with. As its own Plan Commission summarized, “Winnetka’s housing stock increasingly serves only one kind of resident – a family at the peak of its earning years and with school-age children”; this is the resident that moves out after their youngest child graduates New Trier High School. Just as investment advisors recommend a diverse set of financial holdings to promote stability, so should a government invest in a diverse and inclusive housing portfolio.

#8: Think regionally, act locally... and regionally.

Our towns and cities aren’t fiefdoms. We are tied together, as Dr. King put it, in a “single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” It’s a zero sum game in which one extreme is dependent on the other. I have likened the symbiotic relationship between wealthy and poor suburbs to Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, the fictional character who sacrificed his integrated self for unnatural wealth, beauty, and immortality. His soul, which absorbed all the evil he did, was banished to a closeted portrait. Likewise, “super zip codes” in Chicago’s northern suburbs like Glencoe cannot flourish without the exploitation of people or land elsewhere, as in the southern suburb of Ford Heights. People of color are too often relegated to low-wage jobs and housing near toxic dumps in order to make lavish lifestyles across town possible. Some towns will say with a certain smugness that they have met their “quota” of affordable housing, as if lower-income people can only be tolerated in small doses. Not only is this offensive, it blocks effective inter-suburban cooperation.

#9: A mixed-income community is all about us; there is no “other.”

We need community as much as we need housing. The most successful messaging about affordable housing tells the stories of the real people behind the data. These are the people we interact with regularly who are quietly sacrificing meals just to stay in their home, or for whom long commutes to a job-rich but housing-poor suburb mean they come home too late to help their children with homework.

#10: A mixed-income community is morally right.

No one said it better than Justice Morris Pashman of the New Jersey Supreme Court when it ruled against the exclusionary practices of the Township of Mount Laurel back in 1975. Justice Pashman in his concurring opinion explains in very human terms what this decision should mean for the people:

"[M]any suburban communities have failed to learn the lesson of cultural pluralism. A homogeneous community, one exhibiting almost total similarities of taste, habit, custom and behavior is culturally dead, aside from being downright boring. New and different life styles, habits and customs are the lifeblood of America. They are its strength its growing force. Just as diversity strengthens and enriches the country as a whole, so will it strengthen and enrich a suburban community....

"Finally, many suburban communities have failed to recognize to whom the environment actually belongs. By environment, I mean not just land or housing, but air and water, flowers and green trees. There is a real sense in which clean air belongs to everyone, a sense in which green trees and flowers are everyone’s right to see and smell. The right to enjoy these is connected to a citizen’s right to life, to pursue his own happiness as he sees fit provided his pursuit does not infringe another’s rights.

"The people of New Jersey should welcome the result reached by the Court in this case, not merely because it is required by our laws, but, more fundamentally, because the result is right and true to the highest American ideals."

I congratulate you as aspiring elected leaders who want to do the right thing as stewards of the people who live, work, study or play in your community. Political will for mixed-income housing comes from each official’s appreciation of our common humanity.