Home Sweet Home

November 24, 2020

Today we travel to a future where housing is guaranteed and provided to everybody.

Guests:

Amanda Vail — Director of communications at Plymouth Housing
Dr. Sam Tsemberis — Founder of Pathways Housing First and author of Housing First Manual: The Pathways Model to End Homelessness for People with Mental Illness and Addiction
Dr. Ivis Garcia Zambrana — Assistant Professor of City & Metropolitan Planning at the University of Utah
Tara Raghuveer — Director of KC Tenants, director of the Homes Guarantee campaign at People’s Action
Dr. Daniel Aldana Cohen — Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania & co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green Deal
Carroll Fife — councilmember-elect for Oakland’s District 3, co-founder of Moms for Housing, director of Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment Oakland

Voice Actors:

Intro Phone Tree Voice — Brett Tubbs
Amy — Ashley Kellem: Instagram, Website
Maia — Shara Kirby

TRANSCRIPT

transcription by Emily White at The Wordary

FLASH FORWARD
S6E17 – “Home Sweet Home”

[Flash Forward intro music – “Whispering Through” by Asura, an electronic, rhythm-heavy piece]

ROSE EVELETH:
Hello and welcome to Flash Forward. I’m Rose and I’m your host. Flash Forward is a show about the future. Every episode we take on a specific possible… or sometimes not-so-possible future scenario. We always start with a little field trip to the future to check out what’s going on, and then we teleport back to today to talk to experts about how that world we just heard might really go down. Got it? Great!

This episode we are starting in the year 2042.

FICTION SKETCH BEGINS

[phone ringing]

HELPFUL AUTOMATED VOICE:
Hello and welcome to the Federal Housing Hotline. If you are a current tenant, please press one. If you are a prospective tenant, please press two.

[2]

To look up the status of your application, press one. For more information about how to qualify for housing, and to see if you qualify, press two.

[2]

Please enter your seven-digit zip code.

[98122]

Please wait a moment while we connect you with housing providers in your area.

[hold music]

MAIA:
Hello and thank you for calling Seattle’s Housing Happiness commission. My name is Maia, who do I have the pleasure of speaking with today?

AMY:
(nervous) Um, hello. I’m Amy.

MAIA:
Thanks for calling, Amy. How can I help you?

AMY:
(nervous) Hi. I had a few questions about your program?

MAIA:
That’s what I’m here for! Ask away.

AMY:
So I’m a few months behind on rent right now, and I just don’t know when I’ll have the money. Our car broke down, and then my son broke his wrist on the playground and we just don’t have the money, and with cutbacks at my job my hours are way down and we just… I don’t know when I’ll have the money, and my landlord says he’s done giving me leeway. I don’t know what to do.

MAIA:
Okay, well first I’m really sorry about your son, and your car. And before we get into what we can do for you, I also want to say that you’re not alone. Unfortunately, I hear stories like this all day, every day. And I want to just say that none of this is a moral failing. You’re a good mom. We’re going to get you all sorted out, okay?

AMY:
(relieved, takes a deep breath)Okay, thank you.

MAIA:
So, I don’t want you to worry. You can never be evicted from city housing and your rent will always be 30% of your income. This is re-evaluated monthly, so let’s say you work fewer hours this month, that means your next rent payment will be lower. And if you lose your job, you won’t owe any rent until you find a new job and get your first paycheck!

AMY:
Wow. This is all part of that National Housing Act that passed last year?

MAIA:
That’s right!

AMY:
But I don’t understand… Taxes can’t be paying for all of this.

MAIA:
Well, the National Housing Act raised property taxes for landlords who own 20 or more homes. There are almost a million landlords like that in the country! They all have to pay more taxes now, which helps fund the program. So, let me ask you a few questions. How many members of your family?

AMY:
Three; me and my two sons.

MAIA:
Okay great. And how old are they?

AMY:
6 and 12.

MAIA:
Okay so you’ll probably want two bedrooms at least, right?

AMY:
Um, yeah I guess so.

MAIA:
And do any of you have accessibility needs?

AMY:
Oh, well I use a cane.

MAIA:
Okay, noted. Anything else I should know?

AMY:
I don’t think so… Oh… (nervous again) Do you need a background check?

MAIA:
Nope!

Amy:
I just don’t want to get my hopes up, in case…

MAIA:
Our program doesn’t care what might be in your record, or if you’re clean or sober, or any of that. We provide housing and services, no matter what. That’s our job!

Now, do you have any hobbies? Any interests I should know about? Anything you’re looking for in a unit?

AMY:
Well, (a bit shy, almost embarrassed) I used to do pottery. I mean, it’s silly. It was a long time ago, but…

MAIA:
Ah! We have art centers in some of our buildings!

AMY:
Oh! Well, yes, I would like to do that again. (getting excited) And windows. I’d really love some windows, big enough to let light in so I can grow house plants. I used to be a real gardener, but it’s been a long time.

MAIA:
Oh, I’m sure it will come right back to you! Noted, windows, hopefully in a building with an arts room. Anything else I should know?

AMY:
No… I think that’s it.

MAIA:
Great! Let me walk you through a few of the housing options we have in your area, okay?

AMY:
Yes, sure.

MAIA:
In your zip code, we have three different buildings with current openings. Moore Theatre Heights is our most modern, with lots of fun amenities and community centers. It’s 35 stories with a lovely stargazing deck at the top. The openings in that building are a little smaller. They’re two bedrooms but the second room is pretty tight so I’m not sure the boys will want to share it. But Moore Theatre Heights has a really amazing art room in the basement and the units have big windows like you’re looking for.

We also have some openings in Harbor View, which, as the name suggests, has a harbor view! That building is a little older and less fancy, but the apartments are bigger. No craft room in that one, but big windows for sure, and the two rooms are both pretty big.

The last one I’ve got openings in is the Robert Martin Houses, and those are more like little townhomes. Very exciting that we have an opening. We don’t get those very often. They’re lovely little spots. There aren’t as many amenities, so no art room there, and the windows are a bit smaller, but you have a lot of space, like a whole little townhouse to yourself! And we have one without stairs inside the house, so you should be able to get around.

AMY:
Wow, okay.

MAIA:
So! I’ll assign you a case number. You think on that a bit. You don’t have to make a decision now. What is your current timeline for your apartment and landlord?

AMY:
Oh, I think probably Friday is when he’ll really try to kick us out.

MAIA:
Okay. Call us tomorrow then? Your case number is… sorry do you have something to write this down with?

AMY:
Oh… yes, hold on. (shuffling) Okay. I’m ready.

MAIA:
Your case number is 23 H as in Harry 5900. Got that?

AMY:
23H5900?

MAIA:
Yep, that’s right. So call us tomorrow, let me know which place sounds good, and we can get you onboarded and into a place to live, okay?

AMY:
Okay. That’s it?

MAIA:
That’s it! Housing is a human right! And my name is Maia, so feel free to ask for me if you like when you call back, okay?

AMY:
Okay!

FICTION SKETCH END

ROSE:
So today we are talking about the future of housing. And in particular, the idea that housing is a human right, and should be made available to everybody. A couple of listeners requested this one after the jobs guarantee episode a couple of weeks ago, emailing in and saying, “Okay, what if we also gave everybody a place to live?” So that is what we are going to consider on today’s episode.

Now, the idea that housing is a human right is not new. In fact, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN in 1948, Article 25 states:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.

But of course, as I’m sure you know, in reality, lots of people in the United States do not have access to housing. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, at least 567,000 people in the United States experienced homelessness last year. That’s seventeen out of every 10,000 people in the country.

And the United States has been singled out in particular for its treatment of folks living in informal settlements and on the street. In a special report published in 2018, the United Nations wrote that the conditions imposed upon informal settlements in Oakland and San Francisco “constitutes cruel and inhuman treatment and is a violation of multiple human rights, including the rights to life, housing, health and water and sanitation.” The UN official who visited told one local newspaper that while lots of cities around the world have unsheltered communities, California was one of the worst places she visited specifically because of the ways in which homelessness is effectively criminalized. The police regularly raid settlements, disrupt communities, arrest people, and confiscate their belongings. So what if, instead of destroying whatever property these folks have, arresting them, and forcing them to continually relocate, the United States provided unhoused people with a place to live?

Before we get further into that question, I just want to take a quick second to talk a little bit about language and terminology. Throughout this episode, you’re going to hear people use a couple of different words to describe folks experiencing homelessness. There’s that word I just used, homeless, or people experiencing homelessness. There’s also the term unhoused, which some people prefer because, for some folks who live in these informal communities, they have a home, it’s just not a house.

I asked around, asked a couple of folks, including some unhoused people in my community what they prefer, and the answer is that there’s no real consensus. The style guides I’ve read online say that the key is to focus on the people as people, not simply as representatives of some problem like homelessness. So you’ll hear some of these words used interchangeably on this episode, and I just wanted to make a note about why. It’s always good to be intentional about language, and sometimes the right terminology changes, and it’s important to be open to that too.

Okay, so if housing is a human right, as defined by the UN, what does that mean for people who currently don’t have it or who are at risk of losing it? We’re going to answer that in a couple of different ways on this episode, and the first is by looking at some programs that do provide housing to folks. Programs like Plymouth Housing in Seattle, Washington.

AMANDA VAIL:
We say housing is a human right. You deserve a home. Let’s get you into a home.

ROSE:
That’s Amanda Vail, the Director of Communications for Plymouth Housing.

AMANDA:
We provide housing for people who’ve experienced chronic homelessness. And then along with that housing we provide attached individualized services to help people stabilize in housing.

ROSE:
And Plymouth takes what’s called a Housing First approach.

AMANDA:
Housing First is exactly what it sounds like, it’s housing first before anything else can happen in anyone’s life.

DR. SAM TSEMBERIS:
Because of the way it even sounds, Housing First, it implies a sequence to it, right? Not housing last, or housing second, or housing fourth.

ROSE:
This is Dr. Sam Tsemberis, the founder of an organization called Pathways Housing First.

In Housing First programs, you generally don’t have to prove you’re sober, or that you’ve never been arrested, or that you’re taking any medications you might be prescribed. There’s no test to show that you are “ready” for housing.

AMANDA:
Everyone deserves a safe, stable place to live. You shouldn’t predicate having a home on whether or not somebody is sober, whether or not somebody is taking all of their medications to manage their mental health or their behavioral health. People deserve a home regardless.

ROSE:
Once people are in their apartments at Plymouth or Pathways, the organizations then work with them to figure out what kinds of services they need.

AMANDA:
Some people will want to work on getting clean and sober. Some people will want to work on getting access to income. Some people will want to work on getting routine medical care. We don’t choose, really pick and choose and say, “You deserve housing and you don’t.” That’s not the goal. We really don’t believe that that’s the right way to go about it.

ROSE:
Housing First isn’t just about providing permanent housing the way Plymouth does. Sometimes, these projects involve what’s called rapid rehousing.

DR. IVIS GARCIA ZAMBRANA:
It is well known that the less you stay in the shelter, the better.

ROSE:
This is Dr. Ivis Garcia Zambrana, a researcher at the University of Utah in the City and Metropolitan Planning Department.

IVIS:
So they will ask, “Do you have a family member that can take you in?” They will try to ask questions about, what is the issue? Is it that you… Many times people are already staying with family members, but maybe there was a dispute because you were not able to buy groceries, right? So they will say, “Can we give you, like, 200 bucks, 300 bucks, and then you can stay with your family member?” So there will be a lot of conflict resolution, but also problem solving to divert people so they don’t stay in the shelter in the first place.

ROSE:
And Housing First is in contrast to programs that are called “treatment first” that require folks to enroll in some kind of rehab program to prove that they are ready for “personal transformation” and “self-sufficiency” before they’re offered anywhere to live. And for a long time, treatment first was the dominant way that cities and organizations tried to help people experiencing homelessness.

SAM:
There was this idea that people who were on the street needed to be in treatment, that somehow their mental illness, or their health problems, or their addiction was keeping them from being housed and they needed to be cured of mental illness and addiction before they could reasonably live in a place of their own. And so the whole industry of homeless services, the homeless industrial complex, because it is a big industry, was geared towards fixing people in order to get them into housing.

ROSE:
But about thirty years ago, people like Sam looked around and said, “This is not working.”

SAM:
When you looked at the data for the treatment and then housing, they were doing about 30 or 40% success.

ROSE:
It’s really hard to get sober or keep up regular treatment when you don’t have your basic needs met, when you don’t know where you’re going to sleep that night, or where your food might be coming from. And so Sam and other people working in this field decided that they had to change something. They had to try something different. There had to be a better way to do this.

SAM:
That’s where House First started. Like, “We’re going to take a completely different approach.” And what’s that approach going to be? Well, we didn’t know what that approach was going to be. What we knew for sure was that what we thought would work wasn’t working for this group. So our paradigm shift, frankly, was acknowledging that we don’t know what we’re doing, we’re not really helping these people, and that we’re going to turn the decision-making authority over to the people on the street because they have been surviving all of this. They know the programs. They know where they want to go and they don’t want to go. And so, they are the experts of their own experience. And for us, you know, highly credentialed people, we had to just find the humility to say, “You lead us because we don’t know.”

ROSE:
And when they asked the folks they were working with what they needed, what they thought would be a better strategy or order of operations, the answer was really clear.

SAM:
Overwhelmingly, everyone said, “I’m homeless. Isn’t it obvious what I need? A place to live.” It’s like, “Oh, you’re not interested in treatment or sobriety?” “No, not at all. Thank you.”

ROSE:
So that’s what they did. They started offering housing before asking people to get sober, or medicated, or whatever it was. And at the same time, they also set out to measure whether this new strategy worked.

SAM:
And after 24 months, we had an 80% housing stability rate, you know, immediate access to housing and then stably housed over 24 months compared to 35% for the treatment-then-housing. That was mind-blowing. Like, BAM! It was huge.

ROSE:
And that research has held. For the last 20 years, over and over, studies show that Housing First practices can have really great outcomes and success rates.

AMANDA:
Whether or not they stay with us or they move on to another permanent housing situation, that’s the goal. And we measure our success based on, “Do people retain permanent housing and what does that look like for them?” And so, by that success measure, you know, we’ve got over a 94% success rate helping people avoid a return to homelessness.

ROSE:
Not only does Housing First tend to have higher success rates, it also winds up often saving money.

AMANDA:
As a community, we’re paying for homelessness and it’s expensive.

ROSE:
For example, folks who are homeless often don’t have access to basic medical treatment, so things that might not be a big deal at first wind up going untreated and becoming a problem. So when unhoused folks come in for medical care, it’s often an emergency.

AMANDA:
What that means is that the social systems that come in and intervene in this cycle are the really expensive ones from a public cost perspective. So we’re talking emergency rooms, we’re talking jails, we’re talking sobering centers and temporary shelters.

ROSE:
When Plymouth looks at the amount they spend to not just give someone an apartment, but also support them with the services they need, and then they compare that number to what folks tend to “cost” the other public systems they might use, it’s pretty clear which one is cheaper.

AMANDA:
One year of housing and wraparound services with Plymouth, that’s the equivalent cost of about three days in the hospital or three months in jail. So which would you rather pay for? If all you’re going to look at is from a public cost perspective, where would you rather have your public dollars go? Something that actually builds people up, that solves the problem, or something that just kind of keeps people cycling in it?

ROSE:
And this kind of comparison is true for a lot of Housing First projects. In most places, it’s actually cheaper to give people a place to live. In fact, even private healthcare companies have recognized this. In Arizona, for example, United Healthcare, the giant insurance company, has started its own Housing First program, recognizing that on the whole they could save money if they helped unhoused people out before they wound up in the emergency room.

AMANDA:
I look at permanent supportive housing, at Housing First practices as a win-win-win. It makes sense from a public dollars perspective. More importantly, it makes sense from a human perspective in terms of the individuals who we’re helping and our community as a whole. It’s just better when people have housing.

ROSE:
Now, I’m always a tiny bit wary to lean too heavily on these arguments about money and the fact that Housing First policies save people money. Not because they’re not true. I think it’s pretty clear from the research that these programs tend to save money on the whole. But it’s because I kind of feel like even if it wasn’t cheaper, helping people would probably still be the right thing to do, right? And Amanda has some incredible stories of residents who’ve felt the benefit of Housing First that go beyond dollars.

AMANDA:
There’s a gentleman named Tim who lives at our Simons Senior Apartments. Tim used to have a gardening business and he was really excited because the building has some communal gardening spaces. And Tim was very excited for houseplants because he would now have a place to put plants and create his own little oasis. And when Tim told me he’d been experiencing homelessness and housing instability for 20 years and that this was the first place he felt stable in… It’s one of those things where it just hits you.

ROSE:
I mentioned earlier that Housing First policies have slowly become best practices in most places in not just the United States, but around the world. That was true under both Bush and Obama here in the US. Now, that doesn’t mean that there were suddenly a huge number of Housing First providers all over the country, but the government did shift to prioritizing funding for permanent supportive housing, rather than transitional, temporary shelters. But in the last four years, the federal government in the United States has changed its stance. The Trump administration appointed someone who does not believe in housing first, despite the evidence that exists for it. And there are a couple of avenues that critics of Housing First policies take.

One of the big ones is moral, this idea that folks who are unhoused somehow don’t deserve housing because they’ve made bad choices, or because they’re addicted to drugs or alcohol, or have mental health problems. For me, this one is pretty easy to debunk. For one thing, plenty of people who live in homes currently are addicted to drugs and alcohol and nobody really says they don’t deserve a place to live. Plus, again, we know from the research that it is much harder to get sober if you’re not sure where your next meal comes from or where you’re going to sleep that night.

I live in the Bay Area, in California, where housing is incredibly expensive and lots of people have been forced out of the system. And sometimes when I’m feeling particularly dark, I read the comments on news articles about the various programs and proposals to help unhoused folks. And one thing that comes up over and over in these comments is this idea that people who live on the streets want to be there, that they have no aspirations, that they’ve given up in some way. And that’s not only rude, it’s also just not true.

IVIS:
If you really talk to people, they have hopes, like everybody else, and dreams. And they are, again, waiting for a chance to be able to fulfill those hopes and dreams. So the idea is how we can help to make that happen.

ROSE:
Ivis has done research into why folks return to shelters, what forces them back.

IVIS:
Transportation, right? Something happened that they could not go to work any longer. Health care was a big issue as well. Somebody will get chronically ill and they will have to return to a shelter because all their bills were for that, for example.

ROSE:
In the United States, a shocking number of people live one unexpected bill away from not being able to pay their rent. In 2019, a Federal Reserve study found that 40% of Americans would not be able to cover a surprise $400 bill. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there is not a single county in the nation where a full-time worker earning minimum wage can actually afford a two-bedroom apartment. And Ivis knows about some of the pressures firsthand.

IVIS:
When I finished my master’s, I didn’t have regular employment. So, I actually went to a live-work space. And in that live-work space, this was in San Francisco, I worked in a hotel just washing dishes actually, and I didn’t earn anything, really. What I earned was the ability to stay in the hotel.

ROSE:
If you can’t get a job to pay your bills, it’s really hard to stay in housing. And as we talked about a couple of months ago, it’s really hard to get a job if you don’t already have a job. And it’s even harder if you don’t have a place to live, a stable phone number and address, or if you have a criminal record the way that so many unhoused folks do because, remember, the US criminalizes homelessness, which is why getting people into housing first, as quickly as possible, is a key to success.

Another argument that critics of Housing First make is that over the years, as Housing First has become more common, rates of homelessness have not gone down, and in fact in many places have gone up. And that’s true in some states, although the national rate of homelessness has actually gone down over the past ten years.

But this correlation doesn’t necessarily tell us how effective Housing First programs are. What’s happening here is that the sources of homelessness, the factors that cause people to lose their housing, those are getting stronger.

SAM:
You can actually house 5,000 people this year and the numbers will go up because it’s not a fixed pool of people. It’s not like a lake and we take out, you know, 5,000 gallons and the lake goes down. There’s a waterfall going into the lake. So, we’re in the rescue business, and as long as the structural factors that create homelessness, the economic disparity, no affordable housing, income too low to pay rent, all of those things, racism, you know, affecting disproportionately Black and brown people into homelessness, if we don’t address all of that, we’ll be in business forever.

ROSE:
Currently, the United States has a huge wealth gap. The top 1% of households in the US own 15-20% of all the wealth in the US, while the bottom half of households own just 2%. The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet, while also having the most homelessness in the so-called “developed world.”

SAM:
That’s sort of the most frustrating part of it for me. It’s like, it’s not about we’re a poor country and don’t have the resources to do it.

ROSE:
Housing First is not a silver bullet. Everybody I talked to also talked about how we need to figure out better ways to support people before they lose their housing. In an ideal world, projects like Plymouth wouldn’t even have to exist because nobody would lose their housing and have nowhere to go in the first place.

Another reason that Housing First gets pushback, Sam says, is that there is actually a pretty big industry that exists and makes money off of the status quo.

SAM:
People that have run shelters, that run these transitional programs, that run the entire housing readiness industry, you know, making people go through this.

ROSE:
And in fact, it’s not just homeless shelters, and clinics, and sobering centers that make money on the way that housing is currently set up in this country. There are lots of people who don’t want housing to be easier to get or to afford. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of these shelters that are against Housing First were founded by people who work in the real estate industry. Which is another industry that makes lots of money off the status quo.

TARA RAGHUVEER:
We actually, in my view, in our view, can’t guarantee that everyone has a home if we rely on the private market because the story of today’s housing crisis and the crisis for tenants is a story of vast and pretty brutal market failure.

ROSE:
That’s Tara Raghuveer, a campaign director with a group called People’s Action, and when we come back we’re going to talk about how to go from Housing First places like Plymouth and Pathways to a homes guarantee for everybody in the country.

But first, a quick break.

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ROSE:
Okay, so when we talk about homes and making sure people have them, the first thought is probably folks who are currently without, people who are unhoused. But housing in the United States is incredibly precarious for a lot of people. An estimated 38 million people in the United States live in poverty, which is almost 12% of the US population. Over 6 million Americans spend more than 50% of their income on housing. Another four million are doubling up on housing, living with friends and family because they cannot afford their own place. And it doesn’t have to be this way.

TARA:
We live in the richest country in the history of the world. And we can and we must guarantee that everyone has a home. That’s about as simple as it gets.

ROSE:
That’s Tara Raghuveer again.

TARA:
I’m the Homes Guarantee Campaign Director at People’s Action. And I’m also the Director at a grassroots organization called KC Tenants in Kansas City, Missouri.

ROSE:
In the United States, the cost of living has increased far faster than wages and inflation. Between 2015 and 2018, just three years, the median home price on Zillow increased 21%, and the median rent increased 7.6%. Even accounting for inflation, rents have been increasing for decades, but things got more extreme after the 2008 financial crisis.

TARA:
Speculators, which is to say private equity firms, hedge funds, et cetera, saw an opportunity in the foreclosure crisis to gobble up a bunch of properties and either sit on them so that they would appreciate in value over time or, you know, some of them became landlords. They became some of the first corporate landlords who were doing the business of landlording at a scale that we actually hadn’t seen until that point.

Blackstone, for example, a private equity firm that also has ownership stakes in Motel 6, Ancestry.com, the dating app Bumble, and tons of other companies, bought more than $5.5 billion worth of single-family homes from 2012 to 2013.

TARA:
The model of, like, sitting on housing to wait for it to appreciate and then flipping it or selling it or something when it’s gained a lot of value is really problematic because it actively removes housing from the local market. It reduces the supply of housing for people to live in if they’re seeking a home. And what that often does is, obviously, when you crunch supply down and demand remains the same, it increases the cost of all of the housing in the area. So it contributes to all of the skyrocketing rents that we’ve seen in the last decade.

ROSE:
So what if, instead of throwing our most vulnerable folks to the real estate sharks, basically, we instead offered people a place to go? A homes guarantee.

TARA:
The way that we would do that is building a bunch of housing and rehabilitating a bunch of housing that is never intended to be commodified, speculated upon. It’s housing that’s permanently off of the private market and it’s basically a new version of public housing. But we can do it in different ways.

ROSE:
So there are two main stages to talk about here. The first is getting folks into housing, now. And in fact, in some cities, we could totally do that. Right now.

TARA:
We could end homelessness in Kansas City today based on the vacant properties that we have in the city and the numbers of people who are living in insecure housing situations or on the streets or shelters. We could house everyone in Kansas City today. That’s maybe not entirely possible in every city across the country, but it’s, like, basically possible everywhere. We should maybe do that first.

ROSE:
Then, while folks live in the properties that exist, we’d build new offerings. Tara calls it social housing, housing for the people.

TARA:
If we’re building 12 million new units of housing in this country, that’s a massive jobs program that could feed towards a jobs guarantee. If we’re building those units, we don’t want to do it in a way that’s bad for the climate. We actually want to make those homes sustainable and, hopefully, shepherd the rest of the, sort of, housing sphere in the right direction to avoid climate catastrophe. So it could be a huge part of a green new deal. Ultimately, I think we need to just build and invest in housing that’s permanently, always, forever off of the private market, not available for speculation.

ROSE:
In November of last year, Representative Ilhan Omar introduced a bill called the Homes for All Act of 2019. If passed, the bill would add 12 million new units of social housing in the next 10 years. Another bill, called the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, would provide up to $180 billion to help upgrade the public housing that exists today, to be greener, safer, and more livable. Because a lot of this existing housing has issues like mold, lead paint, or other unhealthy conditions.

Now, I know what you might be wondering: “Okay Rose, that sounds so nice, but how do we actually pay for that?” Well, there are a couple of ways. First, I would like to remind you that the government pays for a lot of things. We’ve bailed out huge banks, and airlines, and the auto industry, and a whole lot of very, very rich people. The US military is spending over a TRILLION dollars to develop a new fighter jet that is projected to come in $10 billion over budget. We have money, we can spend money, we’re just spending it on things like that jet that might actually wind up being too costly to fly and maintain.

But even beyond that, there are other ways to generate money for this kind of program.

TARA:
Through taxing the rich, for example. Many housing initiatives and housing problems in cities could be solved, for example, by vacancy taxes, taxing properties that are sitting vacant and simply appreciating in value for the investor but providing no service to anyone in the community. We could be taxing land value. So again, if people are sitting on properties and the land is appreciating in value, we could be taxing that. We could be taxing real estate transactions to really tax the gentrifiers, the developers, the people who are the cause of so much displacement in so many of our cities.

ROSE:
And in fact, we don’t have to look to some imaginary science-fiction world to see examples of what Tara is describing. Some places have had this for over 100 years.

DR. DANIEL ALDANA COHEN:
So if we go back, let’s say to the beginning, I think the greatest example of social housing would be in Vienna.

ROSE:
This is Dr. Daniel Aldana Cohen, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. So it’s 1918, World War I has just ended, and Austria has become its own country.

DANIEL:
And in Vienna, the Social Democrats, the kind of working-class left-wing party wins an election with universal suffrage. Women were voting too. They win an election and they decide who is going to pay the price for this economic misery is actually going to be the landlord class. We don’t need landlords making super-profits during an economically difficult time.

ROSE:
So they decided to build new housing that is affordable, modern, desirable, and accessible to the working class. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, Vienna built a bunch of this housing.

DANIEL:
The best architects competed for the right to build the various social housing projects. They contained an enormous number of services inside them. The most famous project in Vienna is called the Karl Marx Hof, Karl Marx Houses, and it even had a city-run interior design and consultancy on the ground floor where people could come and figure out the best furnishings for their apartments. So this is kind of the jewel of social housing around the world, the housing built in Vienna, paid for by taxes on real estate and paid for by luxury taxes.

ROSE:
To this day, Vienna is consistently rated one of the best cities in the world to live in, in part because this housing still exists.

DANIEL:
If you go to Vienna today, two-thirds of the housing is off the market. About a third of that is social housing operated by the government, and about a third of it is cooperative housing run by cooperatives and also insulated from market pressures.

ROSE:
And this housing is mixed-income and mixed-use, it’s for people from across the economic spectrum. And the US could have had this too. In fact, there was a push to model our public housing off of places like Vienna.

DANIEL:
A really brilliant woman called Catherine Bauer spent some time in Europe visiting Vienna and other European capitals and said we need to build what she, at the time, called modern housing in the United States as well. It should be mixed-income, high quality, mixed-use housing, fully integrated into cities.

ROSE:
So what happened? Why didn’t the US follow Vienna’s footsteps? Well, perhaps you saw this coming, but the real estate lobby saw these plans and said, “Oh no. We cannot have that.” They quickly mobilized against these social housing plans, and they won.

DANIEL:
There was a big housing act passed in 1937, and what the law basically said was, you’re going to have government support for public housing for very low-income people, but only for very low-income people. And that will be public housing. And then we’re going to provide mortgages subsidized for middle-class people, and then, subtext, only white middle-class people. So you had this construction from 1937 onward of, like, a two-tiered forum of public support for housing, low-quality housing for low-income people, and mortgages that would ultimately be in the suburbs, mostly for white people.

ROSE:
And this is part of why public housing in the US has such a stigma attached to it. It was designed, by lobbyists, to be low quality on purpose. Which of course then feeds into the impression that all public housing must, by definition, be low quality. But that’s not the case. In fact, if you want to find some of the greenest, most innovative housing projects in the world, they’re happening in Europe’s public housing projects.

DANIEL:
The most sophisticated building techniques that you find, the most interesting use of resources, the most creativity, and architecture; that is happening with green social housing. And you even now have the head of the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen saying she wants to create a Bauhaus Institute, named after the most interesting architect of the 20th century in Europe. A Bauhaus Institute to coordinate low-income green housing retrofits in the years ahead.

So, I think if you’re interested in innovation, and creativity, and really cool new building materials like hempcrete, concrete made with hemp, or using agricultural waste like rice husks for insulation, if you’re interested in that really innovative, creative, exciting kind of frontier of housing construction, then you’re actually going to be interested in social housing.

ROSE:
This kind of social housing, affordable and available to all, is possible. It is totally within reach. It’s not fantasy land. Last year, Daniel gave a talk about the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act at the Pelham Parkway houses, in the Bronx, alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

DANIEL:
And she was like, “Listen, this sounds like science fiction, but it’s not.” And she said, “Even I, having proposed this bill, sometimes worry that it sounds like science fiction.” But when we look at these other models, we see that it’s not, that if they can do it in France, there’s no reason that we can’t do that here. And I would even almost go further and say the United States is a country full of really brilliant people. We have these huge design schools that turn out some of the best designers, some of the best architects in the world. And it’s actually… I think there’s a pivot where we can start to think, “Okay, what would be the innovations in US social housing?” Like, how would we do things not just copying what they’re doing in France, or in Vienna, or elsewhere? How would we do things differently? How would we generate our own, like, locally spectacular and innovative models?

And I think maybe shifting to that kind of question can be helpful for people to just think, “Oh, yeah, okay.” Imagine that there’s resources. Imagine that there’s some money in the sector, some political will to support it. What can we do?

ROSE:
Not only is this not science fiction, it’s also not politically impossible. When polled, 63% of likely voters say they support federal investment in social housing. And that includes 56% of Republicans. Politicians that ran on housing platforms did well this election cycle. People like Oakland’s Carroll Fife.

CARROLL FIFE:
My name is Carroll Fife, with two Rs and two Ls, and I am the Director of the Oakland Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.

ROSE:
Like many other cities in the United States, Oakland has been rapidly gentrifying. In fact, the Bay Area in general is gentrifying more rapidly than any other part of the country, which has led to long-time residents being pushed out because they can no longer afford the rents. For years, Oakland recognized that this was a problem, but the solutions they put in place didn’t work. In 2016, for example, the city passed an affordable housing fee that would charge developers money for each new market-rate unit they built. That money was then supposed to go to a fund to be used for affordable housing.

But as of last year, zero affordable housing units had been built. And that didn’t really surprise people like Carroll.

CARROLL:
It was untested, it was unsubstantiated that this was an effort that could work. The fees were too low at the time and opted out some of the districts that really, really needed economic development, like in East Oakland. And there was criticism by almost every housing organization in our city saying this is not a great idea. Folks were pushing back. And lo and behold, it is what people said.

ROSE:
Carroll is one of the founding members of the organization Moms for Housing, and this fall she ran for a seat on the Oakland City Council, and she won, beating a two-term incumbent. And one of the key pieces of her platform is housing.

CARROLL:
I would like to see a speculator tax that incentivizes house flipping, especially in gentrifying neighborhoods that have displaced historic populations. I’d like to see similar legislation that they passed in Portland, a right to return for people who have been displaced. I want to have a percentage of properties that are developed be allocated to deeply affordable housing for students, and the disabled, and seniors.

ROSE:
Another thing Carroll is adamant about is that the solutions not just come from politicians or advocates.

CARROLL:
I firmly believe that the people closest to the harm should also be a part of creating the solutions because they know firsthand what their experiences are and what they would need to get out of those experiences.

ROSE:
So what would that future look like? What could that future look like? And how do we really get there? All of that and more, when we come back.

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So what could this future look like? Well, we have a few examples we can look to. Take Finland for example. They’ve almost entirely eliminated homelessness and are the only European country where homelessness is actually decreasing.

SAM:
And how do they do it? I mean, of course, they had smaller numbers, you know, and all of that. But it’s the same problem and the same solutions apply to all of us.

ROSE:
Around 2007, Finland began implementing a nationwide Housing First policy.

SAM:
So they began to convert their existing shelters into apartment buildings. So, a 250-bed shelter became, like an 80-studio apartment building. They ran the entire real estate portfolio as a sliding scale real estate.

ROSE:
So if you can pay full price, you pay full price. And if you can’t, you don’t.

SAM:
So they did that. They took everybody off the street, put them into housing.

ROSE:
Okay, so far this sounds like the programs we’re describing earlier, just executed on a larger scale, right? But here is where Finland goes to the next level.

SAM:
This is where it’s really futuristic. I mean, all of this, what I’m saying, would be quite futuristic, but this is where they went over the top. They identified from their existing data who is at risk for becoming homeless; people with mental illness, single-parent moms with kids who are paying more than 70 or 80% of their income towards rent, widowers who were just recently widowed and went from a two-income to a one-income the rent is high. Six or seven groups like this.

ROSE:
And then the government simply subsidizes the rent of those people, so that they don’t fall into homelessness in the first place.

SAM:
That’s the future. And it’s beautiful.

ROSE:
We can also look to Vienna, which we talked about earlier, as a model.

DANIEL:
Part of how I see the future of housing is inevitably inspired by the time that I spent in Vienna. So, I would picture things like a beautifully landscaped courtyard with buildings around me of different colors, with balconies coming out of the buildings, that kind of creative directions. I might see, like I saw in Vienna, balconies with transparent glass windows that would roll open or shut so that they were essentially choosing whether to be outside or inside at any given moment. I would see, like, spaces for childcare on the ground floor. I would see children playing so that you would essentially have community babysitting running at all times. I would imagine being able to walk to a bus stop, to a metro stop. I’d see the bike racks there so I could lock up my bike in safety and in confidence.

It’s a future where people don’t have epic commutes to get to work. It’s a future where you don’t have social homogeneity in neighborhoods but you have a real mix of incomes and ethno-racial backgrounds. And I think there is something to a future where you never see someone on the street and wonder, “Is this person going to have a bed tonight? Is this person going to be taken care of?” You never wonder when you talk about someone who’s having a really hard time, “Are they going to be able to make rent?” Those will be questions we would never ask ourselves.

AMANDA:
What a world that would be. I think hope and joy replicate themselves across everybody’s communities, right? So when we bring people out of homelessness, when we offer them keys to their very own apartment, they realize… and this takes time, they realize that it’s there for them, that they are not going to lose it on a whim, you know, that we will work with them to maintain their housing. They start to be able to pursue anything else that they want to do, and very often that is something that brings joy.

CARROLL:
I believe we will become like these other beings. I imagine us as, like, these supernatural beings whose bodies aren’t, like, impacted by excess cortisol, and anxiety, and all of the stress that makes your hair turn white or fall out, because now you can focus on things that really, really matter. You can focus on the things that are nurturing to your soul. You can focus on your family. You can focus on building your business out because you’ve been impacted by COVID. I mean, if you were not burdened by the stress of having to pay more than 30% of your income in rent, I just think the whole world opens up.

TARA:
I think my vision for what this world is, is actually best articulated by Lucille Clifton, this brilliant Harlem Renaissance poet who wrote this poem called “The Good Times.” And it goes like this.

My Daddy has paid the rent
and the insurance man is gone
and the lights is back on
and my uncle Brud has hit
for one dollar straight
and they is good times
good times
good times

My Mama has made bread
and Grampaw has come
and everybody is drunk
and dancing in the kitchen
and singing in the kitchen
Oh these is good times
good times
good times

oh children think about the
good times…

I mean, getting drunk and dancing in the kitchen with the people that you love. That’s it. Like, that’s the vision, right? The rent is paid. There’s nothing to worry about. The lights are on and you get to, like, live as a human. In this country, so many people are breaking themselves and are forced to live without any humanity in order to work these three minimum wage jobs and still barely pay the rent for a shitty place that’s making their kids sick. It’s gross. It’s horrible. And there are so many people I know personally who never get to experience even a moment of this type of good time, where you don’t have some big stress, some big bill hanging over your head. And I think that’s actually, ultimately, what a homes guarantee produces. It’s the ability for someone to just take a deep breath and, like, enjoy life and be a human for a second.

ROSE:
I don’t know about you, but all the stuff you just heard, all the stuff we just talked about, all the ways in which this could make people’s lives better, I mean, it sounds pretty good, right? I’d like to live in that world. And it’s not that it’s easy to get there, but unlike some of the things that we talk about on this show, it’s totally possible. This isn’t artificial wombs. It’s not fusion technology. It’s not something that we don’t even really understand how to do yet. We can see these futures and we know how to get there.

The coronavirus pandemic is pushing an already perilous economy and public into really dire territory. It’s time to think about solutions that are bigger and bolder than what we’ve tried before. To admit that this is not working for millions of Americans. And to think about what we could do instead. Remember the unofficial motto of this very show? Imagine Better Futures? We should try that!

CARROLL:
I heard that on the campaign trail. “Well, you can’t really do that. That’s not how things are set up.” “Well, Carol, that sounds great, but that’s like pie in the sky. We just can’t go and change things.” We have to! We have no other choice.

[Flash Forward closing music begins – a snapping, synthy piece]

Flash Forward is hosted by me, Rose Eveleth, and produced by Julia Llinas Goodman. The intro music is by Asura and the outro music is by Hussalonia. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky. The voices from the intro scene were played by Brett Tubbs, Ashley Kellem, and Shara Kirby. You can find more about each of them in the show notes, and please do check out their work! They’re awesome.

If you want to suggest a future that we should take on, you can send a note to Twitter, Facebook, or by email at Info@FlashForwardPod.com. We do love hearing your ideas! And if you think that you’ve spotted one of the little references that I’ve hidden in this episode, email us there too. If you are right, I will send you something cool. I will give you a hint now. Maybe take a look at the names of the various housing complexes from the intro scene. Just a hint.

If you want to discuss the episode, some other episode, or just the future in general, you can join the Facebook group! Just search Flash Forward Podcast and ask to join. You have to answer one question. Your answer doesn’t really matter that much. It just needs to be an episode of the show so that I know that you actually listen to the show. That’s it.

And if you want to support Flash Forward, there are a couple of ways that you can do that as well. Head to FlashForwardPod.com/Support for more about how to give. If financial giving is not happening for you right now, you can head to Apple Podcasts and leave a nice review, or just tell your friends about the podcast. That also helps. If you’re looking for a gift for somebody to give them, you could pre-order the Flash Forward book. It will come out next year and you can give it to them then, I guess. An April Fool’s gift? I don’t really know. But yeah, check out the Flash Forward book. You can pre-order that at FlashForwardPod.com/Book.

That’s all for this future. Come back next time and we’ll travel to a new one.

[music fades out]

Home Sweet Home

TRANSCRIPT

Give The Land Back?

Is Anybody Out There?

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