Next week the White House will release details of President Biden’s campaign promise to Build Back Better. As part of a larger strategy to rebuild the nation after the COVID-19 crisis, the Administration aims to leverage broad public support towards passing a $3 trillion package for infrastructure, schools, and families. The proposal includes funds for carbon-free transportation, a green electrical grid, universal broadband Internet access, and affordable housing.
Simultaneously, while the Senate rejected Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) $15 an hour minimum wage proposal, others attempt to find a compromise. Reportedly Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) may agree to increase the federal minimum wage to $11 an hour. Still, Senate Budget Chair Sanders has stated that “We are going to do what the American people want, and in one way or another, we are going to pass the $15 an hour minimum wage.”
As far as creating affordable housing is concerned, this is a step in the right direction. It recognizes that America’s housing crisis is not a local or a regional political matter; it is a systemic and structural nationwide economic challenge that will require a national solution.
As far as wages are concerned, any increase is an improvement. Still, raising the national minimum wage to $15 an hour will only help some of America’s most impoverished communities meet their housing expenses.
In states like California, Arizona, Texas, or Florida, even with the proposed wage hikes, the poorest renters will still need to work up to three full-time minimum wage jobs to afford median rental rates. According to The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC):
Nationally, there is a shortage of more than 7 million affordable homes for our nation's 11 million-plus extremely low-income families.
There is no state or county where a renter working full-time at minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment.
On average, a worker earning the federal minimum wage must work 3 full-time jobs to afford a modest two-bedroom rental home and 2.5 full-time jobs to afford a one-bedroom rental
As incoming Labor Secretary Marty Walsh acknowledged on Wednesday, income inequality and wage discrimination are intractably coupled. They are historically and statistically tied to waves of intergenerational poverty, shortfalls in fair access to education and healthcare, as well as to persistent economic discrimination. As this chart below demonstrates, America’s housing rental crisis is evidence of policies and laws that have consistently failed America’s poor, and in particular minorities, immigrants, and Native Americans.
While President Biden’s proposal will hopefully make its way through Congress, get signed into law in some form, and make a real dent in the shortfall of affordable homes, national housing insecurity1 will not be resolved until income inequality and wage discrimination2 are addressed as a part of a larger strategy to create more economic opportunities for a more significant number of Americans.
According to the Center for American Progress, raising the minimum wage would positively impact low-income families and, particularly, women, who are increasingly occupying the primary income earner's role for their families, especially in historically disadvantaged communities. Coupled “…with other robust measures, such as vigorous enforcement of workplace protections [raising the minimum wage] is a key policy solution to lifting women and families out of poverty and helping to narrow the stubborn gender wage gap.”
Federal spending on affordable housing has also tracked with reductions in real wages. As the White House Office of Management and Budget’s historical table shows, below, by 2018, HUD and USDA urban and rural housing assistance (via discretionary spending) had contracted to roughly one-fifth of budgetary commitments in the 1970s.
Housing insecurity and wage inequality are persistent, parallel national misfortunes.
These twinned dilemmas have their roots in the 1970s and 1980s. Movement Conservative ideologues pushed for the deregulation of real estate financing and banking, enabling radical market segmentation 3 based on demographics and income. Simultaneously, calls for increasing corporate profit- part of the Reagan administration’s anti-governance revolution- came at the expense of workers’ real wages and housing security.4
The effect on housing development, construction, and housing rental markets was to drive up costs and squeeze inventory, leading to rental housing shortages in states with large urban employment bases. Combined with de-unionization and associated declines in total wages and worker protections, an unsustainable situation was magnified. Today up to “…seventy-five percent of all extremely low-income families are severely cost-burdened, paying more than half their income on rent,” according to the NLIHC.
De-unionization amplifies the effects of real estate deregulation on low-income wage earners and vice-versa. In 1983, the percentage of workers represented by a union was 20.1 percent. By 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of workers represented by a union was 10.8 percent, “…reflecting the disproportionately large decline in total wage and salary employment.”5 These phenomena are part of a downwardly spiraling economic cycle that has driven more Americans into poverty than in any period in our history, save for the Great Depression.
Like the COVID-19 crisis or storm-driven FEMA grade emergencies, homelessness, wage inequality, housing insecurity, and affordable housing shortages are national disasters. They touch virtually every American in one form or another when they land in our communities, and the results will take years to remediate. As macro-economic, market-built dilemmas, they are indifferent to geography and politics. They negatively impact communities, families, and individuals in “Red,” as in “Blue,” states. Despite their broad impacts, these challenges have been too often left to underfunded cities, local non-profit charities, and budget-stretched states to resolve.
These are national tragedies that deserve nothing less than newly minted, aggressive national policies and legislation. They need to be tackled in tandem. Fix only one matter, and the other will persist, weakening any solution to the first. Solving the housing affordability puzzle is part and parcel of creating a fairer society. Revealing how housing insecurity and wage inequality are linked will help stem corrosive, community-destroying cycles of impoverishment and discrimination.
Until minimum wages rise, American workers are better unionized, and housing markets are adequately regulated, our ongoing affordable housing shortfalls and the tragic specter of families enduring relentless poverty and homelessness will not be put to rest. Anything less comprehensive will undoubtedly hamstring President Biden’s plan to Build Back Better.
Design For Dignity
On the topic of homelessness, this June, the AIA Los Angeles will host its 6th Annual Design For Dignity conference, devoted to finding actionable solutions for affordable housing and homelessness in LA.
The annual forum has successfully driven dialogue and grown awareness about various policies and housing design strategies to reduce homelessness and increase workforce housing. Whether you are an architect or not, whether you live in LA or not, you might want to attend if you care about design and social issues.
Almost five years ago, I helped chair the first annual Design For Dignity conference, and in 2017 I provided closing remarks for the follow-up to the first Design for Dignity forum hosted by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. Earlier that year, I wrote a piece for the Architect’s Newspaper about homelessness in LA. I will be updating that opinion piece and those closing remarks, posting them here soon with a series of photographs taken in and around Skid Row by Monica Nouwens.
In 2016 a key question the AIA|LA asked was, "How will design professions respond to the nearly 47,000 homeless people living in L.A. County?" That number rose to 66,436 people in LA County experiencing homelessness in 2020, representing a 12.7% rise from a point-in-time count of 58,936 individuals in 2019.
Despite ongoing, concerted public and private efforts to stem homelessness, the number of people living on the street, in cars, or suffering housing insecurity in Southern California has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In December, Los Angeles County, with federal approval, canceled its 2021 homeless count due to the Coronavirus pandemic.
Point-in-time count or no point-in-time count this year, LA County will likely edge well over 70,000 homeless individuals in 2021, in part because of the current pandemic-driven joblessness crisis.
The Los Angeles Times recently also reported that “L.A.’s homeless residents are 50% more likely to die if they get COVID.” Shockingly, the County probably won’t expand the number of hotels rented to shelter homeless people at risk of contracting COVID-19, citing concerns about delays in federally funded reimbursements.
Follow Up
Hopefully, all of this bothers you, and like me, you are saddened or outraged enough to want things to change for the better, sooner than later. If so, get involved and make your voice heard.
If you live in LA, write to or call the LA City Council, the Mayor of Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and remind our elected officials that they are still far from meeting their own published goals to end homelessness.
Here are some contacts:
LA City Council Directory
The Office of the Mayor of Los Angeles
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors
If you want to see families and women rise out of poverty, insist that we raise the federal minimum wage this year.
Here’s how to contact your Federal and State Senators and Representatives:
Finally, if you want to volunteer for or donate to organizations that work on combatting homelessness in LA— as well as nationally— here are a few places to start:
Notes
“Housing insecurity” is an umbrella term that encompasses several dimensions of housing problems people may experience, including affordability, safety, quality, insecurity, and loss of housing.” via HUD
Wage discrimination means paying someone less because of their gender, race, age, or religion.
Market segmentation divides a target market into smaller, more defined categories, such as income, available savings, family size, credit scores, criminal records, ethnicity, and gender.
“For much of the postwar era, workers took home about two-thirds of total income in the United States, while business owners earned the other third. This relationship between labor and capital was so steady, in fact, that for decades it was considered something like a macroeconomic constant. But in the early 1980s, labor's share of income began to decline. Business productivity continued to increase, but workers' wages didn't rise as quickly as before. Instead, rising corporate profits were increasingly captured by the owners of capital, driving income inequality to record highs.” Source: The Century Foundation
Not coincidently, “…just 12.6% of wage and salary construction workers were members of unions.