Tag Archives: affordable housing

Why Americans are moving in with strangers twice their age

Originally published in Vox on February 24, 2025.
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Denise Poirier was facing a pivotal moment. After teaching in Maine public schools for more than three decades, she was preparing to leave her career for what would likely be a lower-paying job, while also navigating other major changes: adjusting to life after the end of a 28-year marriage, downsizing from a house to a condo, and her third son moving out.

One afternoon, as Poirier listened to local news, she learned about Nesterly, an online platform matching older homeowners with younger renters seeking affordable housing. The company had just launched a statewide partnership and pitched a simple concept: In exchange for below-market rent, some tenants could help with light chores around the house.

“I’m a natural worrier about money; I just am that type of person,” Poirier told Vox. “With my youngest son moving out, I thought, ‘Hm, I have a little extra room.’ I’ve always liked young people — I taught high school and underresourced youth — and I thought maybe this could be a good way to supplement my income.”

Soon, she matched with Joseph Anzalone, a 20-year-old student at Southern Maine Community College who also juggled a full-time job at the Hyatt hotel in Portland. Poirier wasn’t looking for help with mowing or shoveling, just someone to keep their space clean and handle their own dishes. Anzalone was drawn to the idea of a quieter, off-campus space that, at $850 a month, cost hundreds less than a typical apartment in the area.

After signing a Nesterly agreement, which is like a rental lease but also includes expectations around shared spaces, quiet hours, guests, chores, and smoking, he moved in last August. “We got pretty close,” Anzalone told Vox. “We had fun watching the presidential debate, played debate bingo, and since my family lives in Florida, she invited me to Thanksgiving with hers.”

Poirier and Anzalone’s arrangement highlights a trend emerging across the country, one that harnesses changing demographics and an acute housing shortage. When Noelle Marcus, who would go on to found Nesterly, was studying urban planning at MIT, one statistic caught her attention: 54 million spare bedrooms sat empty each night in American homes. “And that’s using a very conservative methodology, only counting occupied housing units,” said Marcus. “That’s a lot of real estate.”

According to ApartmentList, about 60 percent of homes in the US now have at least one spare bedroom. The opportunity is particularly notable among “empty nest households” — Zillow reports roughly 21 million such homes where older residents living with no children have at least two extra bedrooms. And with baby boomers retiring and birth rates declining, census data projects that by 2030, adults over 65 will outnumber children under 18 for the first time in US history.

With a nationwide housing shortage and developers having largely abandoned building new entry-level homes, the idea of “unlocking” millions of unused bedrooms — through intergenerational home-sharing — is gaining traction. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of families sharing living spaces with non-relatives increased by more than 500,000, suggesting growing acceptance of the practice.

Melanie Lambrick for Vox

But the benefits can extend beyond just aiding young renters or seniors on fixed incomes: Advocates see intergenerational living as a powerful tool against social isolation. Studies examining the outcomes of such households are limited, but existing research finds that seniors often report feeling more connected and in better health than those living alone. For younger residents, particularly students from disadvantaged backgrounds, research suggests that their academic performance improves when living in mixed-age communities.

“I’ve seen situations where an 18-year-old kid is good friends with the 73-year-old retired Marine Corps sergeant, and you never would have predicted that but they’ve lived together for five to six years,” said Atticus LeBlanc, the CEO of Padsplit, another company founded to facilitate home-sharing arrangements.

Many home-sharing programs now actively encourage these cross-generational connections. “It’s really a win-win for everyone,” said Marci Alboher, a leader with CoGenerate, a nonprofit focused on bridging age differences. “It’s not just one generation showing up to serve and rescue another.”

Reviving an older idea

While multigenerational living among relatives has long offered a way for families to share resources and manage caregiving, intentional home-sharing between unrelated people traces its modern American roots to Philadelphia in the early 1970s.

That’s when Maggie Kuhn, forced to retire at age 65 from a job she loved at the Presbyterian Church, founded the Gray Panthers. The organization advocated for Social Security, Medicare, and against workplace age discrimination, and grew into a movement with 100,000 members across 30 states within its first decade.

As part of this work, Kuhn opened her Philadelphia home to “panther cubs” (younger activists), an experience that led her to establish the National Shared Housing Resource Center in 1980. That organization would go on to help establish hundreds of home-sharing programs across the US, fielding thousands of inquiries annually by the late 1980s. Kuhn viewed home-sharing as both a form of affordable housing and a way to combat social isolation.

Kuhn’s ideas about intergenerational housing have found new urgency in West Philadelphia. The city’s historically Black neighborhood of Mantua is seeing more longtime residents pushed out as Drexel University expands nearby. Over the past decade, the area’s white population has increased by 73 percent, while rents have risen by 44 percent. Most concerning, there’s been a startling 454 percent increase in the number of households that spend more than half their incomes on rent.

In response, leaders, through the Mantua Civic Association, are partnering with Drexel to match students with older residents in the area. Again, the goal is twofold: helping longtime residents maintain or achieve homeownership while providing more affordable rental options for students.

This vision gained traction in 2021 when leaders received state and philanthropic funding to help existing Mantua residents make repairs on their duplexes so homeowners could start home-sharing. Now, leaders are partnering with a local developer to build a $60 million mixed-use project that will include 18 duplexes and triplexes specifically meant for intergenerational home-sharing. Older Mantua residents will buy the properties, and rent out some units to help cover their mortgages.

These home-sharing programs will recruit renters from Drexel’s longstanding community-based writing workshop, a free arts program for students and local Philadelphians. Leaders plan to incorporate journaling and storytelling sessions into their home-sharing model — called Second Story Collective — and already have their sights on expanding to university-adjacent areas beyond Philadelphia. In 2022, they received a $1 million National Science Foundation grant to explore replicating this model nationwide.

“Higher education is in crisis, and students and faculty are craving a new way of being more impactful,” said Rachel Wenrick, executive director for arts and civic innovation at Drexel’s community partnerships office. “This offers that, while bringing university resources to bear on solutions the neighborhood itself has identified.”

While such institutional partnerships show promise, sustaining intergenerational housing can be difficult. The model pioneered by Kuhn often struggled with sustainability and hundreds of home shares ultimately shut down after just a few years. Finding reliable renters that homeowners trusted, handling legal and administrative tasks, and collecting payments proved overwhelming. “The Gray Panthers had popularized intergenerational home-sharing with these same values of helping people age in place and creating more affordable housing options,” said Marcus of Nesterly. “But they were very labor intensive and paper-driven.”

Today, automated background checks and payments, secure messaging, and video call portals are supposed to modernize the process and make it more convenient than it was in the ’80s and ’90s. Yet technology itself can present new barriers, particularly for seniors who may struggle with both awareness of and access to online platforms.

Growth constraints

Savenia Falquist sees these challenges firsthand. As executive director of HomeShare Oregon — founded in 2021 to address the state’s housing crisis — she’s realized that digital solutions aren’t enough. “What I feel and where we’re going is we need to build capacity across the state to have coordinators in regions that go work directly with folks,” she told Vox. “They need help putting photos on their pages, and support to match those folks with renters.”

The barriers extend beyond technology. Alfa Hernandez, who directs a home-share program through the Homeless Intervention Services of Orange County, California, points to deeper concerns about safety. “Seniors like the idea of companionship, but even though we’re there to facilitate and do monthly check-ins and screenings, they’re more prone to identity theft and falling for scams, so I think that’s why there’s more fear to participate,” she told Vox.

Melanie Lambrick for Vox

Many still view sharing their private living space with strangers as a last resort. Just as ride-sharing in Uber or Lyft had to overcome being seen as weird or risky before becoming mainstream, home-sharing faces similar cultural barriers. Local regulation compounds these challenges — some communities still have outdated laws that enforce traditional nuclear family living arrangements. Their zoning codes define “family” as those related by blood, marriage, or adoption, with occasional exceptions for “domestic servants.” These restrictive rules can be wielded against not just home-sharing programs, but also larger, often immigrant, intergenerational families living together.

“The laws are enforced when people want them to be,” said LeBlanc of Padsplit. “If you have a neighbor who doesn’t want affordable housing in their neighborhood … then you absolutely see an issue with it.”

Advancing the future of home-sharing

Despite these barriers, several states have begun updating their housing policies. Over the past few years, Colorado, Iowa, Oregon, and Washington have all passed laws banning or restricting family-based occupancy limits. At the federal level, the Department of Housing and Urban Development took a step in 2021 by allowing housing vouchers to be used for shared housing arrangements.

The conversation is expanding beyond just policy changes. Last spring, leaders in housing, finance, and social services convened for a Harvard University symposium on the future of intergenerational housing. Their October report emphasized design choices that could foster connection — even spaces as mundane as lobbies and stairwells are being reconsidered. In one New York City housing complex, the laundry room was placed next to the rooftop garden so that parents and grandparents could play with children, practice tai chi, or tend to gardening projects while washing their clothes.

Some jurisdictions are learning from parallel efforts. After California eased restrictions on accessory dwelling units in 2016, developers built over 80,000 new housing units over the next six years, providing a model that states like Massachusetts, Oregon, and Vermont have since followed. Marcus, of Nesterly, sees potential for similar momentum in home-sharing if more local governments create supportive policies. She points to the UK’s Rent a Room Scheme, where homeowners can earn tax-free rental income by renting rooms in their primary residence.

In Tampa, Florida, 61-year-old Quantia Hollowell shares a six-bedroom Padsplit home with five people. Though initially drawn to the more affordable rent, she’s formed an unexpected bond with Bennie, a housemate two decades her junior. Her “adopted son” drives her to medical appointments and helps with errands. “Bennie, he loves me and I love him,” she said. “Every day we hug each other.”

What started as a practical solution became something neither of them expected.

Can downtown office buildings become new affordable housing?

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A plot of land in Southern California could be a game-changer for the housing crisis

Originally published in Vox on September 12, 2024.
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Soaring prices put purchasing homes out of reach for most people, but building new housing is slow and expensive.

So far, most solutions to this housing crisis have focused on subsidizing prospective buyers. But what if there were a way to make housing cheaper at every step of the process: cheaper to build, cheaper to buy, and still affordable for the next resident?

In San Bernardino, a sunny California city located about 60 miles east of Los Angeles, a first-of-its-kind experiment is underway to test these ideas on a single plot of land. Think of it as an affordable housing policy trifecta: three different strategies to bring down housing costs — all at once.

The first innovation is to streamline manufacturing. About 90 percent of homes are built on the land they rest on, but in San Bernardino, manufacturers assembled a modest house — 1,462 square feet, three bedrooms — in a factory before transporting it to its final destination on Ramona Avenue.

The existence of a new moderately sized single-family house is itself a coup when most new homes far exceed 2,000 square feet. Back in the 1940s, nearly 70 percent of new homes were 1,400 square feet or less. Today, that number hovers around 10 percent because rising land and construction costs — along with arduous permitting regulations and a preference for larger projects from lenders and investors — have made smaller homes nearly impossible to build using traditional production techniques.

In the case of San Bernardino, not only are smaller houses less expensive for residents, but factory manufacturing further lowers the price by allowing developers to complete projects more quickly. Manufactured homes cost 45 percent less per square foot than their “site-built” counterparts, according to Freddie Mac.

The second innovation is an 800-square-foot accessory dwelling unit (ADU) located on the same plot of land, about 20 feet away from the house. The matching cream-colored unit provides two more bedrooms and bathrooms to another family, below market rate. In other words, the ADU increases affordable housing without requiring additional land, making more efficient use of the space.

The third innovation: the land itself is owned by a local affordable housing development group, which is using a community land trust to ensure that both the manufactured house and the ADU remain reasonably priced for generations. The community land trust, in effect, limits how much the homeowners could ever resell the property for when they’re ready to move on.

Dora Davila, a 42-year-old medical lab technician born and raised in San Bernardino, recently moved with her three children to the new manufactured home on Ramona Avenue. Her family had been living in an apartment, and despite months of searching, could find no houses available that were affordable.

“We were looking at mobile home parks but, the thing is, none of them had a yard and I wanted space for my kids,” she said.

Davila struck gold one day when she overheard a coworker talking about their sister, who had moved into the new ADU on Ramona Avenue this past winter. The developers were now looking for a family for the adjacent house. Davila immediately reached out to the housing development group, Neighborhood Partnership Housing Services, Inc.

“I was in the right place at the right time,” she told me. “It seemed too good to be true — there’s really no place that we could find something in our budget for our family.”

Dora Davila and her children outside their new home.

Dora Davila and her children outside their new home.Dora Davila

Neighborhood Partnership Housing Services had led a few other projects in southern California using factory-built housing, but never before on a community land trust. They broke ground in December 2022, and despite some construction delays, Andy Lopez, the project manager, suspects it would have taken at least nine more months to build on Ramona Avenue should they have tried to go the traditional site-built route. (It took about a year, but they’re estimating future projects could be completed in four to six months.)

Already, one other California city is looking to replicate the San Bernardino model, and federal housing officials are excited by the idea. The lower-priced houses are built to meet the construction standards set by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), meaning they get special financing options, and can be produced more efficiently at scale.

“Manufactured homes built into the HUD code are special because they are the one truly reliable means we have of lowering construction costs for new homes,” said Dan Hardcastle, a special policy adviser at HUD.

In August, HUD announced it would be expanding the types of housing units that could be built under its code, paving the way for manufactured duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes.

Lopez says their goal is to combat misperceptions of manufactured housing, and to “show the community how attractive factory-built housing has become.” They know there’s still a stigma; many believe factory-built homes are dingy, clunky trailers on wheels, not regular places that look like any other home in a traditional neighborhood.

A local government caught wind of the idea

Palm Springs, California is a well-known travel destination and a luxurious retirement spot, drawing wealthy retirees from other expensive cities who have helped drive up housing prices to well above a million dollars on average.

But the average household income in Palm Springs is just about $67,000, making it very difficult for those who work in the city’s hospitality and tourism industries to buy homes.

Ariel Tolefree-Williams is an affordable housing administrator for the city, hired in early 2023 to launch new projects. She learned about the community land trust/manufactured housing pilot happening about 55 miles southeast in San Bernardino and wondered if Palm Springs could offer up its own vacant land for this model. She got in touch with Neighborhood Partnership Housing Services, and now the city is moving forward with projects on three plots of city-owned land, subdivided to build six manufactured single-family homes. Each home will rest on a community land trust also owned by the city, and be sold for roughly $170,000 to $200,000, a much more doable price for prospective families. If the project is successful, then Palm Springs plans to build more homes on other vacant properties.

A photo of a modest single-story home with carport and a front yard.

The accessory dwelling unit (ADU) at the Ramona Avenue Gateway demonstration project.NPHS Inc. and NPHS Community Land Trust

Tolefree-Williams said the projects allow the city to do something useful with its vacant single-family lots. Most housing developers are less interested in those, she explained, because they’re focused on bigger residential projects that can yield greater returns.

Some local residents initially objected when they heard manufactured homes were coming to Palm Springs. But Tolefree-Williams said concerns waned when constituents learned more about the building materials and the solar energy components. “We’re going to do a lot of community meetings and outreach in September to make sure folks understand it,” she added.

Challenges to expanding the model

A big barrier to expanding this model is the restrictive zoning codes written long ago to exclude factory-built homes from most areas.

“There are a lot of communities around the country that place restrictions on manufactured housing,” said Hardcastle, the special policy adviser at HUD. “I think you’re seeing this take off in California because they just have such high costs for purchasing and constructing homes.”

In other words, the state’s desperation has created an openness to unconventional ideas. But even in California there can be reticence to trying new things.

“There can be a lot of hold-up with obtaining various permits from the city, partly because they don’t really understand manufactured housing placed on permanent land — they’re used to it going into a [trailer] park,” said Jesse Ibarra, the chief business officer of Neighborhood Partnership Housing Services. “So we’ve had to do a lot of education with the permitting process.”

Another challenge can be finding enough special licensed contractors (known as c47 contractors) qualified to assemble manufactured homes to national standards.

Some people may be less enthusiastic about buying a house on a community land trust, since it would deny them the chance to maximize the money they could earn as their house increases in value. However, while community land trusts cap the amount of profit a homeowner can generate, owners still get to keep whatever they pay down on the mortgage when they sell.

“Some people see it as glorified rentership, but most folks see it as a much better deal than renting,” said Ibarra. “It can be a stepping stone to a bigger home, and you can save that money instead of giving it all to a landlord.”

While this San Bernardino pilot is now underway, there are some remaining kinks to iron out.

Neighborhood Partnership Housing Services plans to collect rent for the first few years and then eventually sell at least the single-family house to Davila, once they recoup their development costs. Their task will be to figure out exactly how to structure the agreement. Would Davila, or whoever else lived in the single-family house, also own the adjacent ADU and then lease that out to whomever they like? Or should that be kept under Neighborhood Partnership Housing Services’s purview? Put differently, should the first-time homeowner also become a landlord, or is that too complicated? And how does the community land trust piece fit in, if there are two units on one parcel? “We’re figuring all that out now,” said Lopez, the project manager.

Davila understands she’s part of a housing experiment. She’s just happy to have a comfortable place her family can finally call home.

“The noise outside the windows, we don’t hear anything,” she said. “I haven’t slept this well in such a long time.”

A new strategy to house homeless people

Originally published in Vox on May 29, 2024.
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Sometime in the next month, the Supreme Court could grant permission for cities to more easily criminalize people experiencing homelessness. 

Some are eagerly awaiting that permission. In April, Donald Trump released a video declaring that if he were president, he’d ban outdoor camping in most places, erect sanctioned campsites for “treatment,” and send people to jail who refused to go.

Yet even among Americans opposed to a punitive approach, it’s become common to sigh regretfully, lament that affordable housing is in short supply, and point out that unhoused people often turn down shelter — so what can cities really do? If the US Supreme Court rules in favor of the homeless plaintiffs in Grants Pass v. Johnson, local governments might just invest more money into building emergency shelters, so they can prove there were adequate shelter options available before anyone resorted to fines or arrests. 

But emergency shelters don’t end homelessness, they just get people indoors for brief periods. And there are better options available. 

This message is being shouted to anyone who will listen by Mandy Chapman Semple, the architect of Houston’s nationally recognized homelessness strategy, which reduced the city’s homelessness rate by 60 percent between 2012 and 2016.  

Semple was Houston’s first special assistant to the mayor for homeless initiatives, and she’s credited with helping to design the city’s “street-to-home” encampment response, which prioritizes getting people quickly into housing, permanently closing tent encampments, and working closely with landlords so they feel comfortable renting to tenants with more serious problems. 

“I am truly concerned that we are unintentionally giving up on reducing homelessness,” Marc Eichenbaum, the current special assistant to Houston’s mayor for homeless initiatives, told Vox. “Many acknowledge that housing is the long-term solution to homelessness, only to psych themselves out from being able to respond because of a lack of affordable housing. That is when cities chase expensive, short-term options to manage the situation or resort strictly to enforcement.”

Semple has since taken her work beyond Houston, and through her company — Clutch Consulting — she’s working with cities including New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Dallas, and Hartford, Connecticut. She brings an unapologetic approach to her consulting, rejecting both the idea that homeless people belong in jail, or should be allowed to camp wherever they feel most comfortable. She insists there is a better path forward if leaders and service providers approach their work in a new way. 

Her model works like this: Public subsidies can be used to pay rent for people experiencing homelessness, but private donations, which are not subject to the same federal rules and restrictions, can help finance things that make moving unhoused people into apartments more feasible — like apartment hold fees, application fees, security deposits, and furniture. Oh, you have a unit in your building opening up in a few weeks? We’ll pay you an extra $1,000 if you offer it to us, first. Her team spends time scouting and building relationships with landlords, then tries to house everyone living in an encampment at once.

“Every market has movement, even tight markets, even expensive markets,” Semple said. “You can get into that by using flexible private dollars to incentivize landlords. We’re creating a business relationship that provides us an advantage.”

Once people have moved into housing from a tent encampment, Semple ensures that landlords have a team they can call to help with any problems that may arise. The formerly homeless individuals have case managers to help them access social services, and the landlords, too, have their own liaisons they can call. The city permanently closes down the encampment, puts up signs and sometimes fencing, and uses law enforcement to bar anyone else from returning to the area. 

“I think we really hurt ourselves as advocates when we say that at the core homelessness is an affordability problem,” said Semple. “It is, but we do not have to wait for that affordability to be solved to move people into housing.” 

Semple’s “street-to-home” encampment response has helped dispel the idea that everyone sleeping outside just doesn’t want to be inside. Clutch and its clients say that over 90 percent of people offered the option to move into an apartment say yes, even if they’ve repeatedly rejected invitations before to sleep in congregate emergency shelters.

The approach is not without criticism or challenges. Not all homeless providers are inclined to abandon their focus on getting people into shelters, and some social workers say Clutch’s methods have been abrasive and too dismissive of client concerns. 

Some advocates argue that Clutch’s encampment approach has led to more inequitable distribution of resources by focusing help on those living in areas causing leaders the most political headaches, rather than necessarily the most vulnerable in a city. Others worry the solution is not really scalable, especially as rents continue to spike. 

Angela Owczarek, a New Orleans social worker who previously worked at an organization providing street outreach services in encampments being closed by Clutch, said she felt the company used inappropriate tactics to rush people into apartments.

“We cannot participate in things that coerce people; the ends do not justify the means,” Owczarek told Vox. “Not only is that bad ethically, but it also makes it harder to do our job in the future, because then people will be like, ‘Oh yeah, you guys were part of that effort that threw out my tent and told me I had two days to agree to an apartment I didn’t want to live in or who made me feel rushed or not listened to, even if I ended up living somewhere I liked.’ How we treat people matters every moment.” 

Semple acknowledged that some outreach workers “have struggled in some cases with this shift in expectations and it takes time to help them understand why and how they need to adjust their practices.” 

But she rejected the idea that living outside in encampments is acceptable for human beings, even if they may not feel ready to move indoors. 

“Staying on the streets can be their choice, but they will need to move if they choose [that],” she said. “Living in this location under these conditions cannot continue.”

System leaders have shown more enthusiasm than frontline workers for the Clutch approach. Jamie Caves, who is implementing the Clutch strategy in Oklahoma City, said it has been “fantastic” so far, and they’ve housed 126 people since launching in September. 

“It’s new and we’re building the plane while we’re flying it so there’s certainly things we’re learning and streamlining, but it is really, really powerful,” she told Vox. “We’re really beginning to close multiple encampments in a month and really move aggressively toward our goal, which is to house 500 unsheltered people by the end of 2025.”

Sarah Pavone, the director of strategy at Journey Home in Hartford, Connecticut, echoed the excitement. 

“Up to this point we never thought about prioritizing the unsheltered for any specific resources, we never had a different approach to those living outside than those who were in [emergency] shelters even though they have very different needs,” she said. “We also didn’t engage our systems to overcome systemic barriers that delayed people from entering housing quickly.” 

The fine print of Clutch’s model 

As Houston was bringing down homelessness, the number of unhoused people in Dallas was climbing: a 45 percent increase between 2015 and 2021. Armed with tens of millions of dollars from Covid-19 relief funds and new private donations, local government and civic leaders in Dallas decided to team up and try the Clutch model, setting a goal to move 2,700 people into housing by October 2023. 

More than 10,000 people have been rehoused since the effort began in 2021, and Dallas recently reported its lowest total number of people experiencing homelessness in nearly a decade. The latest Point in Time Count — an annual nationwide survey to estimate the number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January — showed Dallas with a 19 percent reduction in homelessness overall since 2021 and a 24 percent reduction in unsheltered homelessness. Last year, only 27 percent of communities nationwide reported reductions in homelessness.

“To scale we had to get more and more creative about master leasing,” Semple said. “So we said how do we consider new business relationships that give us access to whole buildings, or a whole bunch of units, or future units at a new property?” 

Despite the rare progress, convincing the public to stay the course and stick with the street-to-housing model isn’t easy. Sarah Kahn, the president and CEO of Housing Forward, which leads the homelessness response in the Dallas region, told Vox there’s been political pressure to divert resources to more short-term solutions like tiny home shelters.

“Honestly the challenge is that it doesn’t matter what the result of the Grants Pass case is, it still [will] not give local governments or communities any tools to resolve these issues,” Kahn said. “There’s clear evidence that you can’t actually enforce your way out of homelessness. Really the only solution is resolving homelessness and we do that by moving people into housing.”

In Oklahoma City, leaders currently implementing the Clutch model are focused on how it could save them money in the long run. Armed with a $12.5 million investment to reduce unsheltered homelessness by 75 percent in two years (with at least $5 million coming from private donations) the city says it’ll be spending about $24,000 per person to house 500 people. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a chronically homeless person costs taxpayers $35,578 per year. 

“You can still do a traditional pathway and go to a shelter, but now we have new pathways for those unsheltered homeless, where we build rapport, get them document-ready, and it’s very streamlined and aggressive to get those things done in four to five weeks so we can move them directly into housing,” said Caves. “I think it’s a positive solution that makes economic sense and is also the dignified answer to those who are experiencing homelessness.” 

Clutch Consulting won’t work with communities that aren’t sufficiently bought into its theory of change. Last year leaders in St. Louis hired Semple to conduct a needs assessment to gauge a potential partnership and ultimately she concluded it would not be a good fit. 

St. Louis, which has cold winters and hot summers, has long been focused on emergency shelters as a harm-reduction approach, and Semple determined the city’s service providers were too invested in increasing the number of emergency shelter beds in the city.

Samantha Stangl, the executive director of House Everyone STL, has been trying to push back on her community’s reliance on congregate shelters. “What if the real problem were not an inadequate supply of shelters but rather a bottleneck of demand caused by a lack of exits from shelters?” she asked in a January op-ed. 

In an interview with Vox, Stangl went further. “What a lot of communities that have found success have done is come to the realization that shelter should actually be the absolute last resort because it is kind of a crisis environment,” she said. “I’m not interested in the status quo in St. Louis. We need more rapid rehousing and more permanent supportive housing to do things like that.” 

Owczarek, the social worker from New Orleans, says more skepticism should be brought to bear when interpreting Clutch’s reported results on offering housing to everyone in encampments. 

“The idea that everyone is offered housing needs an asterisk after ‘everyone,’” Owczarek said, noting that anyone who arrives at a camp after the city establishes its list of residents to house is not given the same housing opportunities. (Semple told me their approach is to house everyone eventually but designed in a way to discourage people from moving to encampments to get housing faster. “These are high-risk encampments deemed public health hazards,” she said. “We don’t want to encourage folks to come live at this site to get housed.”)

Owczarek also pointed out that “offering” someone housing does not mean there was always housing available for everyone by the time an encampment actually closed. Some residents had nowhere to go even after their encampment cleared. Semple said in those situations individuals are offered emergency shelter or in some cases motels.

Criminalization will make this housing work harder

Though Semple helps cities work with landlords to assuage their concerns, there are limits to how many people are willing to rent units to those with criminal records. Given that 1 in 3 US adults has a criminal record, this creates a significant barrier to the street-to-housing encampment response model.

Arresting, fining, and ticketing unhoused people — which local governments will be more easily able to do if Grants Pass is overturned — makes it harder for those people, who already struggle to afford shelter, to obtain permanent housing. 

Owing fines can exacerbate an unhoused person’s already poor financial situation and prolong their homelessness. One study of people experiencing homelessness in Seattle found those with outstanding legal debt spent roughly two more years without stable housing than those without such debt.

“Every time we’re pushing someone needlessly through the criminal justice system it affects their ability to get housed because every landlord is running a criminal background check,” said Semple. “These nuisance charges create the perception that they’re a criminal and not a good tenant and it’s just a tremendous waste of law enforcement capacity too.”

How The Largest Known Homeless Encampment in Minneapolis History Came To Be

Originally published in The Appeal on July 15, 2020.
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On June 7, less than a mile away from where a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, a veto-proof majority of the City Council gathered at Powderhorn Park and pledged to dismantle the police department and rethink public safety. A few days later, more than 200 homeless individuals were evicted from a hotel they had been using as an ad-hoc shelter, and about a dozen made their way to the closest park: Powderhorn. In the month since, many more have followed. City officials estimate more than 550 tents have been set up there, in what is the largest known homeless encampment in Minneapolis history.

Residents in the Powderhorn neighborhood initially jumped into action—determined to support their new, vulnerable neighbors, many of whom were Black and indigenous. But as the encampment grew, some housed residents’ became more exasperated, citing concerns about crime and safety. Their frustrations have gotten some national coverage. The conditions that led the encampment to form, however, and the government’s response or lack thereof, have gotten far less attention.

The homelessness crisis in Minneapolis, worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, is not new. In 2018, a Minnesota-based research group found over 4,000 people experienced homelessness in Hennepin County, an 11 percent increase from 2015. The researchers cited a lack of affordable units as the main driver, and found more than half of those experiencing homelessness were languishing on waiting lists for subsidized housing.

Back in the summer of 2018, an encampment cropped up alongside a Minneapolis highway sound wall, with roughly 300 people living there by the fall. “One thing that was very frustrating about the 2018 encampment was everyone talked about this great emergency, but the emergency had been going on for years,” said John Tribbett, a street outreach manager at St. Stephen’s Human Services, a Minneapolis  homeless services group. “It was just a congregation of it that forced the public to actually see it.”

Nonprofit groups and city officials supported the primarily Native residents, who are disproportionately represented among Minnesota’s homeless. But by December those living in the encampment were moved into a so-called navigation center, a first-of-its-kind experiment in the state. The navigation center had on-site social services, lower barriers to entry than many homeless shelters, and no curfew. Within six months nearly half of its homeless population had moved into permanent housing or treatment programs, though others were kicked out, incarcerated, or back on the streets. The center shut down in June 2019.

“After it closed, what we really saw was the atomization of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness throughout the summer of 2019 and frankly up until COVID,” said Tribbett, emphasizing that displacement was routine, and homeless people were regularly “on the move all the time.”

As unsheltered people were dispersed across Minneapolis, the crisis of homelessness became easier for the city’s housed residents to ignore. The Powderhorn encampment has forced the public’s attention once again.

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After the tents went up at Powderhorn, the community mobilized to support their unhoused neighbors. Volunteers began organizing funds and coordinating daily meal deliveries, setting up laundry shifts, and donating blankets, water, and toiletries. They also began organizing among themselves to put pressure on elected officials for help.

While the Minneapolis Park Police told those living in the encampment they would have to evacuate, dozens of housed residents protested, and pointed to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance and an executive order issued by Governor Tim Walz urging against homeless encampment sweeps during the pandemic. The Minneapolis Park Board relented and said the encampment could stay, and five days later, on June 17, the board approved a resolution to allow homeless people to seek “refuge space” in Minneapolis parks. By this time nearly 200 tents had been set up at Powderhorn.

As time went on, some residents felt abandoned by the government and frustrated that the bulk of care duties were falling on untrained volunteers. Encampment safety concerns grew too, with at least three incidents of sexual assault taking place between June 26 and July 5, one person threatened with a knife, and several overdoses.

“Things are very tense,” said Patrick Berry, a 41-year-old homeless individual who moved to Powderhorn in late June. “When your life is in the gutter, little things can set you off. People definitely freak out at the encampment over little things.”

“As white homeowners, I think we just assumed that the government was operating at a level of competence that it’s clearly not,” said Lily Lamb, a lifelong Powderhorn resident who has been volunteering. “I’ve called my elected officials from all levels of government and their response overwhelmingly has been, ‘What do you think we should do, what are your suggestions?’”

Alex Richardson, another Powderhorn resident who has been volunteering, said although he understands some of his neighbors are anxious about security concerns, he has tried to help them recognize that these are not new problems. “It’s just that we’re seeing it now, now it’s in our front yards,” he said. “Some people have been fearmongering, or there’s a lot of shock and disbelief since they’re used to not having to bear witness.”

On July 4, residents brought tents and camped outside the governor’s mansion in St. Paul, demanding a more organized state-led response to the homelessness crisis. “Walz just gave $6 million in relief aid to the Minnesota Zoo,” said Sheila Delaney, a Powderhorn volunteer. “I love animals, but Jesus Christ.”

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Government officials have defended their crisis response, while noting that the pandemic has put unprecedented strain on their systems. “The most critical issue is that all of our staff and services have been stretched beyond anything we’ve ever known,” said David Hewitt, the director of the Office to End Homelessness for Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis.

Hewitt pointed out some things the government has done at the county level, including expanding shelter space, redeploying county staff to homeless services, and working to distribute $15 million in emergency rental assistance to prevent new homelessness. Between January and May, Hewitt added, the county moved more than 700 people from homelessness into permanent housing.

But he acknowledged their efforts “still fall woefully short of meeting the unprecedented need” and said at Powderhorn, they’ve been working to provide medical services and connect residents with housing options. “The daily increases in the number of people at Powderhorn Park are also not accompanied by any commensurate reductions in the numbers of people in other encampments or in shelter in Hennepin or Ramsey County,” Hewitt said.

Marion Greene, a Hennepin County commissioner, told The Appeal that the county has also been significantly scaling up funding for homelessness. “Normally we budget about $20 million per year, and now we’re spending an additional $2.5-to-3 million per month just on shelters,” she said. “I feel like there’s been really strong partnerships between the city, county, and state, and we’ve all been clear that permanent shelter is the goal.” The Minneapolis Park Board, for its part, said it has been providing portable toilets, trash cans, handwashing stations, and other onsite cleaning services. Today encampments are spread across 38 city parks, though Powderhorn remains the largest.

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The current escalation of the homelessness crisis in Minneapolis is overlapping not just with the pandemic but also with intense protests around policing and racism.

Despite making up roughly 14 percent of Hennepin County’s population, Black people represent 65 percent of those living in its homeless shelters, and 49 percent of homeless adults living in the county overall.

While a dearth of affordable housing is certainly contributing to the crisis, the lack of wealth in Black and Native communities—the result of being shut out for centuries from wealth accumulation opportunities—is another main driver. Minneapolis has one of the largest racial income gaps in the country, and Black homeownership in the city stands at one-third the rate of white families. Some federal funds flow to tribal governments, but the majority gets spent on reservation life, despite the fact that most Natives now live in cities.

One resulting consequence is that in times of need, when Black and Native individuals turn to their family and friends for help, many of their social networks struggle to absorb the added financial pressure in ways white communities more easily can. Researchers found that people of color “are not unwilling to double up, take people in, or live in another person’s home—but they do not have the capacity to accommodate the additional consumption of resources” like food and household goods. “That, in turn, strains relationships.” Less wealth means less ability to weather unexpected financial emergencies.

The criminal legal system and decades of racist policing are also notorious drivers of homelessness. Formerly incarcerated people are almost 10 more times likely to be homeless than the general public, and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness reports roughly 48,000 people who enter shelters every year come directly from jails and prisons. Having a criminal record can then be a serious impediment to finding housing, which can then begin vicious cycles right back into prison. One study found that people returning from prison who lacked stable housing were more than twice as likely to end up back in prison than those with stable homes.

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Looking ahead, even those most supportive of letting homeless people take sanctuary in public parks recognize an alternative solution must be developed, with the freezing Minneapolis winter just months away. Policymakers are also worrying about thousands of new people becoming homeless if lawmakers start lifting eviction moratoriums and unemployment rates stay high. “The economic impacts of COVID-19 are further threatening to exacerbate these challenges,” said Hewitt, the homelessness office director.

Earlier this month, Minneapolis Park Board members considered a resolution that would have limited homeless encampments to 10 parks, at a maximum of 10 tents per park, with all encampments having to be cleared by Sept. 1. After protests, the park board voted 5-4 to table the resolution.

“It felt pretty par for the course, where they wanted to do something that seemed like they were taking action, but it was really more for their housed constituents to get the homeless out of sight,” said Richardson, one of the Powderhorn volunteers.

“It was just another set of reactive strategies, similar to the governor saying you can’t clear the encampments but providing no further guidance on what you can do,” said Tribbett, the street outreach manager.

Jono Cowgill, the park board president, told the Star Tribune he brought the resolution forward to help set deadlines, which he hoped would push the state to act more quickly. Cowgill did not respond to a request for comment.

Some advocates are pushing the city to create a new navigation center, similar to the one that shut down last year. One possible location is in a South Minneapolis Kmart building the city recently purchased, though even that would not be a long-term solution.

“A lot of people called the navigation center a success but for many Native people it was just a revolving door to the streets,” said Autumn Dillie, an outreach worker with American Indian Community Development Corporation. Dillie said her group has been pressing the county to build a culturally specific shelter for Native people. Greene, the county commissioner, said the government is also exploring the purchase of hotels as a way to provide shelter.

Lamb, the lifelong Powderhorn resident, says the last few weeks have been exhausting, and she worries about people becoming desensitized to the crisis. “The ability of humans to adapt to circumstances is extremely powerful and is working against our favor,” she said.

Delaney, one of the Powderhorn volunteers, agreed. “I think we’ve become accustomed to seeing tents everywhere, but we should all be revolted,” she said. “Especially in an incredibly wealthy state.”

Berry, who is still camping at Powderhorn, wants help, but not too much of it. “All I really need is a safe place to live where I can close my door at night,” he said. “And where no one will harass me.”

Conservatives Are Nudging The Supreme Court to Dismantle Affordable Housing Policies

Originally published in The Intercept on June 25, 2019.
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WHEN IT COMES to conservatives and the U.S. Supreme Court, abortion and labor rights are often considered among their prime targets. Brett Kavanaugh’s ascension to the court last fall, though, opened the road for a host of other challenges for which conservatives have quietly been laying the groundwork for years. This month, the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm based in California, made moves on one of those fronts, asking the Supreme Court to take up a case challenging the constitutionality of inclusionary zoning — a popular tool cities and states employ to increase affordable housing and promote residential integration.

Inclusionary zoning generally works by requiring real estate developers to reserve a certain number of units in new housing complexes for tenants who live on more modest incomes; some jurisdictions also allow developers to alternatively pay a fee so the city can construct more affordable housing elsewhere. Conservatives argue that the policy effectively violates a provision of the Fifth Amendment that says private property cannot be taken without just compensation.

This is the Pacific Legal Foundation’s third attempt to bring an inclusionary zoning challenge before the Supreme Court. Its previous efforts, in 2015 and 2017, were both dismissed, but legal experts say that with Kavanaugh now seated on the high court, it is more likely the case will find an audience — and be resolved in favor of conservatives.

The law firm is representing an elderly couple — Dart and Esther Cherk — in Marin County, California, who wanted to divide their 2.79 acres of land into two developable lots. They hoped to sell half of their land to supplement their retirement. In 2000, they applied for a permit, and in the time it took to get their permit, the local law changed such that the couple now had to pay Marin County $40,000 as an affordable housing fee to proceed. They paid, but then demanded a refund, calling the payment unconstitutional.

“Rather than respect property rights and allow a free market in land use, Marin County (and other California cities) have concocted counterproductive ‘affordable housing’ programs by which they collect fees from people like the Cherks (who are actually trying to create new building lots) and stuff it into government coffers for government programs that will allegedly make housing more ‘affordable,’” wrote Larry Salzman, a Pacific Legal Foundation attorney leading the case.

Inclusionary zoning is a land-use policy, first developed in Montgomery County, Maryland, in the 1970s, as a way to foster mixed-income communities. Since it was enacted, the inclusionary zoning policy in Montgomery County has been used to build more than 11,000 new affordable units. By the end of 2016, according to Grounded Solutions Network, 886 jurisdictions in 25 states and Washington, D.C., had also adopted inclusionary zoning policies. And it’s still spreading: This past spring, the New Orleans City Council passed a mandatory inclusionary zoning law to boost affordable housing in the city’s most desirable neighborhoods.

Some real estate developers and economists bemoan inclusionary zoning, arguing that it actually decreases housing affordability by making it more expensive to build market-rate units. This is a concern leaders take seriously, especially in places like California, which is grappling with soaring housing costs driven largely by a scarcity of available units. Still, other experts say that fear is overblown, or can be mitigated with careful program design.

THAT THE PACIFIC Legal Foundation is trying to eliminate a legal tool used by policymakers to promote residential diversity comes as little surprise to those in the civil rights community. The Pacific Legal Foundation has challenged a host of liberal policy ideas in court, including affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act, bilingual education, and school integration.

Their case, as Salzman explains, is built on the idea that Marin County’s inclusionary zoning program violates Supreme Court precedent that protects property owners from being forced to pay extortionate permit fees. Since the couple splitting their lot wouldn’t be exacerbating the local affordable housing crisis — and arguably would be helping to ameliorate it since they’d be increasing supply in an area that desperately needs more housing — “they can’t lawfully be charged a fat fee to solve the region’s so-called ‘affordable housing’ problem,” argues Salzman.

Thomas Silverstein, a fair housing attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said it’s likely the Supreme Court will eventually take up an inclusionary zoning case, even if not this one. “It seems it’s just part of Pacific Legal Foundation’s agenda to be consistently developing a pipeline of potential challenges, bringing them up and bringing them up, and hoping one day they’ll crack through,” he said.

In 2015, Justice Clarence Thomas signaled his interest in taking up a future inclusionary zoning case, writing a concurrence that stated the inclusionary zoning case they were denying to review “implicates an important and unsettled issue under the Takings Clause.” Kavanaugh’s record on property rights and the Takings Clause is more limited, in part because he was previously on the bench at the D.C. Circuit, where those kinds of cases came up far less often. Still, his notorious record on civil rights was flagged by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund at the time of his nomination. Last summer they warned that confirming him to the Supreme Court “would threaten the government’s ability to use race to promote diversity and halt discrimination.”

This is the final week of the Supreme Court’s current session, and the court won’t decide whether to hear the zoning case until it reconvenes in the fall. The court’s decision could rest on whether it finds the facts of the case to be representative of questions around inclusionary zoning writ large, Silverstein noted. On the one hand, the Pacific Legal Foundation picked a case with a relatively sympathetic set of plaintiffs; it’s not some rich real estate developer building a high-rise tower but rather a couple looking to retire who would not be hurting Marin County’s affordable housing crisis by splitting up their land. “I think the flip side of this is, you could also imagine the court looking at these facts and saying this is a really unique situation, and if we’re going to take up the issue of whether inclusionary zoning is constitutional, it makes more sense to do it when the facts in front of us are more typical,” Silverstein said.

A KEY CONSTITUTIONAL question for the court, Silverstein said, will be whether inclusionary zoning amounts to a constitutional regulation of how property is used or an unconstitutional taking of property from a property owner. Another question will be whether past legal precedent applies to legislative ordinances, as opposed to ad hoc or administrative decisions. The three big Supreme Court cases that the Pacific Legal Foundation is basing its new argument on — Dolan v. City of Tigard, Nollan v. California Coastal Commission, and Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District — were all centered on administrative decisions.

In the 5-4 Koontz decision authored by Justice Samuel Alito in 2013, the U.S Supreme Court ruled that a water management district in Florida had imposed illegal conditions on an entrepreneur’s application to build a shopping center. The proposed shopping center was to be located on a swath of wetlands, and the water management district said the entrepreneur could either reduce the size of his project or spend money on wetlands restoration efforts to mitigate the project’s environmental impacts. The entrepreneur refused, calling the conditions unreasonable, and the Supreme Court agreed.

In the dissent, Justice Elena Kagan objected to the idea that a requirement to pay money to repair public wetlands amounts to a taking of private property, and noted that the court has already held that taxes do not amount to a violation of the Fifth Amendment. “Once the majority decides that a simple demand to pay money—the sort of thing often viewed as a tax—can count as an impermissible ‘exaction,’ how is anyone to tell the two apart?” she wrote. “In short, the District never made a demand or set a condition—not to cede an identifiable property interest, not to undertake a particular mitigation project, not even to write a check to the government. Instead, the District suggested to Koontz several non-exclusive ways to make his applications conform to state law. The District’s only hard-and-fast requirement was that Koontz do something—anything—to satisfy the relevant permitting criteria.”

Pacific Legal Foundation appears to be modeling its legal argument around the decision in Koontz. The group “has been very careful to frame their cases around a fee; they want it to seem as much like Koontz as possible, where it’s considered an unconstitutional fee from the start,” said Silverstein. “But if you say instead that there’s a requirement to provide affordable housing, and if you don’t want to provide affordable housing, you can get out of that obligation by paying a fee, that makes their case look much less like Koontz and more like a land-use regulation that might be permitted under Euclid v. Ambler, which effectively upheld zoning. If a fee is seen instead as an opt-out, it’s almost like you’re doing a nice thing for the property owner.”

Even as conservatives have raised constitutional challenges to inclusionary zoning in recent years, cities and states have not held back on moving forward with inclusionary zoning out of fear of their laws being struck down on the federal level. A Supreme Court dismissal of the new petition would reinforce the message that the proactive steps many jurisdictions have already taken to use inclusionary zoning are lawful and legitimate. Alternatively, if the court did take up the case and ruled in Marin County’s favor, that would also send a strong signal that jurisdictions can continue to pass inclusionary zoning mandates.

“The problem,” said Silverstein, “is we have a Supreme Court that is very skewed toward the petitioners in this case, and there’s a real risk they would decide the case the other way and upset the applecart.”

Elizabeth Warren Introduces Plan to Expand Affordable Housing and Dismantle Racist Zoning Practices

Originally published in The Intercept on September 28, 2018.
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This week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., introduced the American Housing and Economic Mobility Act, one of the most far-reaching federal housing bills in decades. The legislation calls for a half-trillion dollar investment in affordable housing over the next 10 years, creating up to 3.2 million new units for low- and middle-income families.

The bill also expands the protections of decades-old legislation to reduce discriminatory banking, ban housing discrimination, and desegregate neighborhoods. For example, Warren’s bill would make it illegal for landlords to discriminate against renters with federal housing vouchers, and would also impose new regulations on credit unions and nonbank mortgage lenders like Quicken Loans. The bill also incentivizes states and localities to loosen their racist and discriminatory zoning restrictions; eases the path for low-income families to move into more affluent communities; and provides federal assistance to first-time homebuyers from formerly segregated areas and those who saw their wealth decimated in the 2008 financial crisis.

Warren’s bill comes on the heels of two other federal housing bills introduced this summer by Democratic Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, of New Jersey and California, respectively. Harris’s bill, which came first, aims to provide financial relief to renters by creating a new refundable tax credit. Booker’s bill would also establish a refundable tax credit for renters and incentivize communities to curb their exclusionary zoning rules to increase housing supply. Booker, Harris, and Warren are all names frequently thrown around as 2020 presidential hopefuls, though none has actually announced their intent to run.

“Much of the housing discussion has been about affordability, production, and tenant protections, which are all really important issues,” said Philip Tegeler, the executive director of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. “What’s so powerful about Warren’s bill is that it aims to tackle all those things, and it also looks at how are we going to structure our society going forward. Fair housing is really embedded in the legislation, and that’s why I find it so creative.”

To incentivize states and communities to ease their zoning restrictions and boost affordable housing supply, a Warren aide told The Intercept, the senator’s staff looked at the Race to the Top program, the Obama administration’s signature education initiative. In Race to the Top, the federal government doled out $4 billion in competitive grants to states that adopted the administration’s preferred education reform policies, like lifting caps on charter schools and overhauling teacher evaluations. The program was massively effective: Forty-six states and Washington, D.C., revamped their policies to compete for the federal funds.

Warren’s bill takes that same competitive grant model, and allows states, metropolitan regions, and cities to compete for $10 billion in federal funds. (Race to the Top had two rounds of competitive funding; Warren’s bill proposes five.) To compete, jurisdictions must first reform their zoning restrictions and reduce other barriers to affordable housing production. Grant winners can then use the federal dollars to fund all sorts of projects, such as building parks and schools and improving local transit.

Often when new, dense housing developments are proposed, residents raise concerns about the overcrowding of schools or increased traffic congestion. Warren’s bill would arm political leaders with added resources to help make those housing tradeoffs a bit easier. Yes, increasing housing supply could lead to an increase in the public school student population, but reforming land use policies could also help cities access additional federal dollars to absorb those new residents more smoothly.

To fund the bill, Warren proposes a return to Bush-era estate tax levels, and increasing those taxes on the country’s 10,000 wealthiest families. The Massachusetts senator cited an independent study conducted by the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, an economics research firm, which determined that Warren’s bill was “fiscally responsible” and would “go a long way toward addressing” the affordable housing crisis. Moody’s projects the bill would lower rents by 10 percent and make it easier for low- and middle-income workers to live closer to their jobs, thereby reducing “long and costly commutes.”

POLITICIANS, INCLUDING PROMINENT progressives like Warren, have historically steered away from efforts to curtail exclusionary zoning, said Rick Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a liberal think tank. The difference now, he told The Intercept, is that “rents have become too damn high,” so elected officials, including presidential hopefuls, are more open to ideas that previously seemed too controversial to embrace.

Henry Kraemer, a Portland-based activist, co-authored an article in The Nation in May making the political case for Democrats to take up housing issues. In August, he followed up with a co-authored report laying out specific policy recommendations, such as new rent subsidies and expanded public housing. Kraemer and his report co-author, Laura Loe Bernstein, note that successfully enacting all their proposals would be “nearly or entirely impossible” without ending “apartment bans” — another name for exclusionary zoning. “Apartment bans restrict new home-building to the sort of single-family houses most commonly associated with suburbs and affluent neighborhoods,” they write. “Apartment bans are extraordinarily widespread, and render it illegal to build duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and other spaces where multiple families can live nestled together (and often more cheaply) on the same plot of land.”

Kraemer told The Intercept it’s “fantastic” to see 2020 hopefuls “putting out bold solutions to the housing crisis” that Democrats can pursue if they reclaim Congress and the White House. In the short term, Kraemer said, the Harris, Booker, and Warren bills “send the right signals” to state and local lawmakers.

“Maybe more than any other politician, Elizabeth Warren helped set the tone and agenda for the party’s economic work around the country,” Kraemer said. “To see her saying now that these historic inequities in housing and soaring rents and mortgages are huge problems — well, that’s a big, big deal.”

The Trump administration has also recently signaled its intent to address zoning rules, at least rhetorically. In August, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson came out to say that he, too, wants to use federal funds to loosen zoning restrictions. “I want to encourage the development of mixed-income multifamily dwellings all over the place,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

But progressives have voiced rightful skepticism of Carson’s newfound enthusiasm for zoning reform, as he’s also been leading the push to weaken civil rights protections from his federal perch. For the past year, HUD has been trying to weaken the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which was finalized in 2015 and designed to bolster fair housing enforcement. In August, the agency announced that over the next two months it would be opening the rule back up for public comment, claiming that “the current regulations are ineffective” and provide jurisdictions with “inadequate autonomy in developing fair housing goals.”

Carson went further in a statement, claiming that the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule is “suffocating investment” in distressed neighborhoods and contributing to the lack of affordable housing.

“When Ben Carson talks about zoning, he’s not really talking about exclusionary zoning. He’s talking about fair housing rules that prevent the piling on of all the low-income housing in poor neighborhoods,” said Tegeler, whose primary concern with Warren’s bill is that it lacks language to prevent the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal housing funds from pouring exclusively into poor areas.

“It’s very important that this continues to be a fair housing bill and not play into the Trump administration’s framing,” Tegeler said. “As this bill is further refined, we’d hope to see some protections against piling on the bulk of this new development in high-poverty, segregated neighborhoods.”

When a Suburb Tries to Densify, Forget ‘Minnesota Nice’

Originally published in CityLab on June 21, 2018.
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In late April, some residents of Normandale Lake Estates, an apartment complex in Bloomington, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis, received a letter informing them that their leases were being terminated and they’d have to move out by June 1. New owners had recently bought the building and planned to upgrade the units. Existing tenants were told they could prequalify to return, but many suspect the new rents will be higher than they can afford. In the meantime, they’re scrambling to find new places to live.

For some of the displaced Bloomington renters, this isn’t the first time they’ve been forced out of their homes. A little over two years ago, in the nearby suburb of Richfield, new owners purchased an apartment complex called Crossroads at Penn. They renamed it Concierge, renovated the units, and priced out hundreds of families. Some of those Crossroads tenants, like Lisa Jones, who relies on a federal housing voucher for herself and her two grandchildren, and Linda Soderstrom, also on federal housing subsidy, moved from Richfield to the Normandale Lake Estates. Now they’ve been pushed out once more.

“The lack of humanity is deep,” Soderstrom told The Star-Tribune. “It’s really deep.”

After the Crossroads takeover in late 2015, housing activists and community groups across the metropolitan region began meeting regularly to strategize how they could confront the challenges of rising rents and displacement. Soon the Suburban Hennepin Housing Coalition was born—comprised of nearly two dozen community and faith-based groups. Their mission centered on the “the three P’s”—preservation of affordable housing, production of affordable housing, and protection of tenants.

Much of the attention around affordable housing in the U.S. has tended to focus on cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle—densely built urban areas where land for new housing is in short supply. But most Americans live in suburbs, many of which are seeing rapidly increasing poverty and racial diversity. Here, the need for affordable housing can be just as acute, but the dynamics of the issue are distinct from the urban version—and, often, more complex.

On the outskirts of the Twin Cities, the housing crisis includes some familiar ingredients—anxieties about race and poverty, debates about density and “neighborhood character.” But here there are also deep divisions between various pro-housing advocacy organizations, as well as big differences between suburbs, depending on their relative affluence.

Hope Melton, a retired urban planner, has lived in the wealthy suburb of Edina for nearly 40 years. Last fall, she invited some neighbors to meet in her living room, to kickstart a conversation about steep local housing prices. They’ve been meeting and growing their group ever since.

“Fifteen or twenty years ago, the affordable housing crisis was mainly hitting poor people,” Melton told CityLab. “Now it’s affecting a much wider swath of people. We’ve really been attracting a lot of seniors in Edina, the older generation is really stepping up.”

Although the Twin Cities have historically been one of the nation’s most affordable places to live, the region has a markedly low rental vacancy rate, meaning there’s high demand for new units and steady pressure on rents. Activists fear that “flipping” affordable units into luxury market-rate apartments will become increasingly common prospects for investors, especially those from out-of-state.

Anne Mavity, the executive director of the Minnesota Housing Partnership, says the region is not building new affordable units at the rate at which presently affordable units are disappearing. Market-rate units that were constructed 35 years ago are generally reasonably priced today simply because they’re and older and not fancy. The term-of-art for these types of units is “NOAH” or “naturally-occurring affordable housing.”

“We’re losing NOAH at a rapid pace,” Mavity said. “And every time a sale happens, the price of the unit is going to go up, the rents will go up. We are increasingly attractive to national investors, and that is not good for our residents.”

To combat some of these trends, the Suburban Hennepin Housing Coalition has been organizing around several key policy areas, namely to add new affordable housing stock, and help tenants fight displacement. In March, for example, the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park passed a first-of-its-kind ordinance requiring new property owners to give low-income tenants 90 days notice to find a new place to live if they’re being priced out, and to pay for tenants’ moving expenses. A similar rule was just introduced to the Bloomington City Council this month, according to the city’s program manager, Bryan Hartman.

Nelima Sitati-Munene, executive director of the African Career Education & Resource, Inc. (ACER), a group focused on organizing the African immigrant community in Minnesota and a member of the Suburban Hennepin Housing Coalition, says they’ve been pushing municipal leaders to no longer “view the landlord as the only stakeholder” in their cities. In her suburb of Brooklyn Park, activists recently succeeded in getting rental affordability requirements included in new multi-family housing developments.

Sitati-Munene says organizing around suburban governments has been both a challenge and opportunity. “The reality is this affordable housing crisis is a new phenomenon for a lot of people,” she said. “And a lot of suburban city councilmembers are part-time. A lot of leaders have been really surprised to learn what’s going on, to hear people’s personal stories.”

Still, the fundamental tensions associated with affordable housing debates in other parts of the country persist here: Many suburbanites are vehemently opposed to changes in local development patterns, especially when the word “density” comes up.

“That’s a very polarizing issue,” said Ricardo Perez, a community developer at the Community Action Partnership of Hennepin County, when I asked him about increasing housing density as a strategy to boost affordability. “I personally leave it to the policy experts to have those conversations amongst themselves. My main focus is on community and to serve those families who are being affected directly by these issues.”

Aaron Berc, a housing organizer with Jewish Community Action and another Suburban Hennepin Housing Coalition leader, was similarly noncommittal on the question of density. “We’re not going to support a project because it’s dense. We’ll support a dense project because it’s affordable,” he said. “Certainly we need more housing—our city needs to go grow. But I would say we need housing that is affordable for the community more than we need more housing.”

These questions around development and density are hardly theoretical abstractions. In March, the city of Minneapolis released a draft comprehensive plan which included a new proposal to upzone neighborhoods so that single-family-homes could be more easily converted into fourplexes, an idea with the strong backing of Minneapolis’s new mayor, Jacob Frey. “Affordable housing is a right,” he tweeted in March. “Addressing our supply—and shortage—is going to be a key part of realizing that right.”

Some groups, like the Defend Glendale Public Housing Coalition, have already come out in strong opposition to the fourplex idea; they argue that relying on market-based solutions will inevitably make things worse for low-income people and increase displacement. The city is accepting public comment on the draft proposal through the end of July.

In Edina, efforts to add more housing have also met stiff resistance. The City Council recently rejected a proposal for a new seven-story building, which would have included 20 percent of its 135 units as affordable. In October the Edina City Council rejected another proposed high-rise condo building, this one of 173 new units, with twenty percent of them designated as affordable.

“There’s no doubt that height and density are the two issues that have focused people’s minds as we address development, redevelopment and affordable housing,” says Melton. “How would I characterize the conversation? Chaotic, emotional, uninformed.”

The dynamics get more complicated, Melton says, as residents wrestle with complex issues of race and class through the politics of Midwestern cultural norms. “‘Minnesota Nice’ plays into this very much,” she said. “People don’t raise their voice, nobody wants to talk about race, nobody wants to talk about their responsibility historically for what’s happened to people that they don’t want to have in their community.”

Instead, Melton says, her neighbors will “say they don’t want ‘urban’ things, that they don’t want all the noise and diversity and crowding and traffic and all that,” she says. “Those things they regard as negative, and they moved to Edina to escape it.”

Bruce McCarthy, the president of the Lake Cornelia Neighborhood Association in Edina, has said he is “very pro-development” but that “we just want to see it a certain kind of way.” He’s urged his city council to focus on its new comprehensive plan before it approves any new project that requires amending building size requirements.

Yet even among housing activists who might otherwise be on the same side, the issue of racial integration and fair housing can be charged. In 2014, two of the Twin City’s most racially diverse suburbs, Brooklyn Center and Brooklyn Park, filed a federal fair housing complaint against the state, alleging that policymakers had illegally concentrated subsidized housing and poverty in their cities, in defiance of a state law that requires affluent communities to provide their “fair share” of affordable housing. The re-adoption of a “fair system” is a way of ensuring that more subsidized units end up in higher-income areas. The Metropolitan Interfaith Council on Affordable Housing (MICAH), a faith-based housing organization, partnered with the cities on the complaint.

Sue Watlov Phillips, executive director of MICAH, says the Metropolitan Council, a regional government agency charged with enforcing the “fair share” law (among many other municipal duties) has been resistant to their complaint, though HUD is continuing to investigate their grievances.

“We’re not saying anyone needs to move or be forced to move, but we’re saying we want to make sure if you want to move out to another place, you should have affordable housing and opportunity in every community,” she said. “We went from being one of the most integrated metros in the country to one of the most segregated, and a lot of it was because we have designated our resources and policies so housing could only be developed in certain areas.”

But Sitati-Munene of Brooklyn Park’s ACER opposes the fair housing complaint: Her group insists that the working-class suburbs of Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center need much more subsidized housing construction, not less.

Despite disagreements over strategy, placement, and scale, the fact that groups in in the Twin Cities metro are even wrestling with these issues puts them ahead of the curve nationally when it comes to organizing the suburbs. And activists acknowledge that the housing issues they’re confronting are not unique to their region.

“After the foreclosure crisis people lost their homes and more people have started to rent,” says Sitati-Munene. “Rental markets are flooded, and prices are going up. If other suburbs aren’t dealing with affordable housing issues now, it’s coming.”

Donald Trump and the GOP Are Expanding a Controversial Obama-Era Public Housing Program

Originally published in The Intercept on April 2, 2018.
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The most recent spending bill passed by the Republican Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump includes a massive expansion of a controversial program called Rental Assistance Demonstration, or RAD, which privatizes public housing to preserve physical housing units. Despite the program’s threat to public housing in general, beleaguered affordable housing advocates have reacted with cautious approval, even as a government watchdog recently affirmed their long-term concerns, finding that the Department of Housing and Urban Development has insufficiently monitored the program and may be exaggerating its benefits.

In a 72-page report issued on March 22, the Government Accountability Office concluded, among other things, that HUD has not sufficiently monitored tenants’ experiences; has not ensured tenants can exercise all their rights; has dramatically exaggerated the amount of private capital generated through the RAD program; and has not done enough to ensure the long-term affordability of the units. The report issued five recommendations to improve the program, all five of which HUD said it agrees with.

Many affordable housing advocates are open to RAD, which works by allowing private companies to rehabilitate and manage public housing in exchange for tax credits and subsidies, but they have voiced concerns for years about what they consider to be wholly insufficient oversight for the federal program and potential risks for low-income tenants. GAO has now affirmed some of those fears with an independent assessment, yet lawmakers are moving to expand the program, accelerating the upending of traditional public housing.

At least one member of Congress has been skeptical of the program for years. “I have long expressed concerns that the conversion of public housing, under RAD, will risk the long-term affordability of this important housing resource and this GAO report serves as confirmation that RAD is in desperate need of reform,” Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., said in a statement about the GAO assessment. Waters, the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee and one of the most outspoken critics of RAD, sent a letter to GAO in 2015 requesting a formal review of the program. A year earlier she had sent a letter to former President Barack Obama asking him to reconsider his RAD support, saying she believes it “may very well do more harm than good in diminishing a crucial public asset.”

RAD was one of a number of affordable housing programs to get a boost in the omnibus spending bill that Congress passed last month. The Obama administration first launched RAD seven years ago, and the program now boasts support from Democrats and Republicans, including HUD Secretary Ben Carson. It was conceived to address the biggest problem facing the nation’s 1.2 million public housing units: $49 billion in backlogged repairs and maintenance, leading to a permanent loss of 10,000 apartments every year.

Under the program, public housing authorities across the country are able to submit applications to HUD with requests to transfer all or some of their public housing stock to the private sector. If their applications are approved, they then negotiate RAD contracts, which are designed to renew every 15 to 20 years and require private developers to keep the units affordable for low-income tenants in perpetuity. Technically, all public housing tenants should be able to live in the private units if they want to, though housing advocates say this “right of return” is not always enforced.

Given the federal government’s refusal to sufficiently fund public housing — even Congress’s new $800 million investment in public housing rehabilitation will only make a small dent in the needed repairs — RAD supporters say privatizing the units is the best way to preserve the physical units over the long haul. Six years ago Congress authorized just 60,000 units, or 5 percent of the nation’s public housing stock, to be “converted” through RAD. Since then, Congress has repeatedly raised that capped number, most recently in the new omnibus bill, which bumps it from 225,000 units up to 455,000. In other words, 38 percent of the nation’s public housing has already been authorized for transfer to the private sector.

The federal government’s track record in privatizing public housing certainly warrants concern: When HUD launched a program in the 1990s to convert public housing units into mixed-income developments, the feds intentionally shrunk the number of affordable units, and thousands of tenants were permanently displaced. Another federal program launched in the late 1960s gave private developers tax credits and subsidies to build affordable housing, backed by 30-year mortgages. When those mortgages started to be paid off, many developers kicked out poor tenants and converted the buildings into middle-class and luxury housing.

HUD officials say they’ve studied their historical mistakes and have worked hard to design RAD in ways that will specifically avoid these past pitfalls. Indeed, RAD comes with a more robust set of tenant protections than other federal housing programs, but enforcement of these rights has been lacking to date. Last October, the National Housing Law Project sent a letter to Carson outlining a host of RAD oversight concerns, some of which were corroborated this month with the release of the long-awaited GAO assessment. For example, public housing residents who paid a flat rent are supposed to be guaranteed a phase-in of any rent increase under RAD exceeding $25, but GAO noted that HUD has not been tracking things like “changes in rent, as well as relocations or displacement of individual households.”

Tom Davis, the director of HUD’s Office of Recapitalization, which oversees the RAD program, told The Intercept that he finds the GAO report useful, but not too damning.

“One of the takeaways from the report is that given the scope of what they were looking at, their recommendations were really narrowly focused, and their recommendations were for things we have been already working on,” he said. “Their feedback is helpful, but these are also pretty on-the-margin kinds of critiques. We have tried to learn from history, and we think we have a pretty good scheme to avoid the risks to affordability.”

One of the findings of the GAO report was that HUD exaggerates how much private capital RAD generates. The federal housing agency claims that for every $1 in public money spent, RAD leverages $19 in private funds, while GAO estimates $1 in public money yields just $1.23 in private funds. Davis said the disparity results from a difference in methodology.

“We chose one methodology, the GAO chose another one, and we don’t think theirs is the best indicator of the impact of the program,” Davis said. “Theirs is legitimate, but we think ours is as well.” Their disagreement centers on issues like whether money that comes from private banks in anticipation of federal tax credits should be considered public or private dollars.

GAO also conducted some tenant surveys, reporting that RAD residents across its 14 focus groups said they had very mixed experiences in terms of transparency and assistance.

Davis said focus group data can be helpful in “identifying concerns” for HUD’s consideration, but noted the hazards of relying on anecdotal information. He pointed to a more formal survey HUD has commissioned on tenants’ RAD experiences, which will be released in late 2018 or early 2019. “A rigorous social science survey based on the evaluation of a statistical pool of participating tenants will give us a really strong sense of whether RAD is working for residents or not,” he said. “I think those lessons are going to be really important, so we’re really looking forward to that study.”

Aside from the GAO report, HUD published its own interim RAD evaluation in the fall of 2016. The study, conducted by a management consulting firm called Econometrica Inc., deemed RAD initially successful based off metrics such as the number of applications for conversion it processed, the amount of private financing it generated, and the number of RAD transactions closed. The interim report did not investigate the early impact of RAD on tenants.

Davis said the interim report “was very clear in affirming our view that this is a program that brings new sources of money to solve the problem of deferred capital housing needs.” While he acknowledged that GAO had identified some risks to affordability, he said they are not major risks, and expressed confidence in his agency’s ability to address those concerns. Davis also emphasized that not having RAD at all would pose far more risks to long-term housing affordability.

Jessica Cassella, a National Housing Law Project staff attorney who focuses on tenant protections under RAD, told The Intercept that one important issue highlighted by GAO is that HUD has been relying largely on local data collected by housing authorities and property owners. “As the GAO recommended, and as we think as well, HUD should have its own set of data,” Cassella said.

Last fall, HUD started requiring property owners to certify information about tenants’ experiences to the federal government. For the first time since the program’s inception, owners must now report how many residents came back to a converted RAD property and how many former public housing tenants did not return. To incorrectly certify information could be criminal fraud under the False Claims Act, punishable by thousands of dollars in fines and even prison sentences. Advocates view this new requirement as an improvement to the RAD oversight and monitoring process.

“Things always take longer to stand up than you think when it’s a government program,” said Davis. “Certification wasn’t initially required — [private companies] had to certify certain things at closing, but they didn’t have to come back after the project was complete to certify what actually happened [to tenants].”

Davis told The Intercept that this newly required tenant information has not yet been made publicly available because his team is “working through kinks and tweaking” data. He said HUD “discovered in the first few months of the reporting that some people interpreted questions differently, and we want to align that so the data is good when we make it public.”

But Cassella noted that HUD’s new certifications still fail to monitor all the rights that tenants are guaranteed, such as the right to relocate with a choice mobility voucher. Under RAD, tenants are entitled to request a voucher to move to any unit on the private market after living one or two years in a RAD-converted property.

“We have anecdotally encountered situations where housing authorities do not have procedures set up so tenants can exercise that right, and HUD does not have any way to currently monitor whether these moves are actually happening,” she said.

Cassella also pointed to GAO’s finding that roughly one-third of the public housing units chosen for RAD did not report making any capital repairs at the time of their conversion. “Given that there’s a $49 billion backlog, it’s hard to imagine how a third of those properties don’t need any repairs,” she said. “Maybe some of those repairs will be deferred to a later time, but when the stated purpose of RAD is to physically improve the properties, we would hope to see a lot more of those repairs happening early on.” It’s not clear how the federal government evaluates RAD applications that claim no immediate physical repairs are necessary.

Even if Congress one day lifts the cap on RAD to make all public housing units eligible for conversion to the private sector — as some groups have been advocating for — it is unlikely that every building in the public housing stock would make for a viable RAD candidate.

Some public housing units are in such bad shape that experts suspect not even tax credits or other federal subsidies will be enough to entice private developers to take over certain decrepit buildings. There’s a risk that, as RAD expands and most public housing units are converted to the private sector, those that aren’t converted will be the ones in the worst condition.

“If people had a bad image of public housing before, it’ll just get even worse,” said Alex Schwartz, a professor of urban policy at The New School, when I interviewed him about RAD in 2015. “It’s analogous to the health insurance pool — where all the healthy people leave, and then you’re just left with just those who have the most expensive health needs.”

Though HUD and affordable housing advocates don’t exactly see eye to eye, even the advocates are convinced that there might be no better option available at this time but to push for stronger HUD oversight.

“We’ve seen a number of problems, such as tenants being improperly discouraged from returning, owners or developers not accommodating people with disabilities, or the new construction not being suited to family needs,” said Brenda Castañeda, an attorney at the Charlottesville, Virginia-based Legal Aid Justice. “The RAD process could clearly benefit from active HUD oversight, as the GAO suggests.”

1,500 Affordable Housing Units Headed for Baltimore Could Multiply

Originally published in Next City on October 24, 2017.
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The state of Maryland announced in October it would provide 1,500 new affordable housing opportunities in high-opportunity parts of the Baltimore region, a victory for fair housing advocates who filed a federal complaint with HUD in 2011.

The complainants alleged that Maryland administered its Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program in a discriminatory way, steering families with children into high-poverty, black neighborhoods, while building a disproportionate number of affordable units for seniors, especially white seniors, in the predominantly white suburbs.

This legal settlement not only requires Maryland to build new units, but also to offer incentives to developers to build affordable family-size housing, and to consider subsidizing transportation alternatives in areas that lack quality public transit.

Fair housing advocates say that getting 1,500 affordable units off the ground will make it significantly easier to build even more units in high-opportunity areas going forward.

“Once you knock down these barriers, once the development community starts changing its business model to incorporate looking for sites in high-opportunity areas, once the units get built and the sky doesn’t fall — the political opposition tends to lessen,” says Barbara Samuels, a fair housing attorney with the ACLU of Maryland. “It builds up its own momentum, and we see these 1,500 units as a step that will lead to other future steps.”

The coalition that filed the complaint, the Baltimore Regional Housing Campaign (BRHC), didn’t expect their efforts to take as long as they did, but they did expect an administrative complaint to move faster than filing a lawsuit.

In 1995, the ACLU of Maryland filed a federal suit taking aim at Baltimore’s racially segregated public housing. Though the court eventually ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and as part of the legal remedy Baltimore has established one of the most successful housing mobility programs in the U.S., the case didn’t settle until 2012; the lawsuit approach took 17 years.

Meanwhile, the last two decades have brought about increased attention to segregation in the LIHTC program. Florence Roisman, a law professor at Indiana University, published a law review article in 1998 arguing that the LIHTC program, which is run by the Treasury Department, not HUD, was operating outside the confines of civil rights law. As LIHTC is the largest federal program to subsidize place-based affordable rental housing, Roisman urged corrective action.

In 2002, the Connecticut ACLU sued the state’s housing finance agency, arguing that LIHTC units in Hartford led to increased racial segregation, in violation of state law. In 2004, fair housing advocates in New Jersey sued their state, saying its LIHTC policies encouraged racial segregation, in violation of the Fair Housing Act. These and other developments influenced advocates in Maryland, who convened in early 2006, to explore what barriers prevented LIHTC units from being developed in higher-opportunity areas of their state.

It became clear then that one of the largest impediments standing in the way was Maryland’s policy of requiring local officials to sign off on LIHTC development, effectively empowering politicians with a pocket veto, no matter how important the affordable housing project was. A HUD study published in 2015 and conducted by New York University’s Furman Institute singled out Maryland’s local approval policy as one that led to notable increases in LIHTCs being deployed to develop housing in poor neighborhoods. Advocates tried to pressure Maryland to abandon this policy, but when efforts at voluntary persuasion failed, the BRHC filed its complaint.

In 2014, in response to the complaint and increased local advocacy, Maryland’s legislature opted to get rid of its local veto requirement. As part of the new legal settlement announced this month, the state has agreed to never reinstate it.

“If we can accomplish all this here, we can do it anywhere,” says Samuels. “You don’t need to go back far to remember when Baltimore was known as the city that killed [the] Moving to Opportunity [program].” Moving to Opportunity was a housing experiment that ran from 1994 to 1998 and involved moving individuals out of high-poverty areas with vouchers into low-poverty census tracts, to see how this would improve their lives. But politicians and racist homeowners in suburban Baltimore County rebelled early on, and U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland led the effort to kill funding to expand the program nationally.

Now, though, Maryland has a well-regarded mobility program, revamped LIHTC policies as a result of the BRHC fair housing complaint, and in 2016, Baltimore County settled another fair housing complaint, agreeing to spend $30 million over the next decade to support developers building 1,000 affordable units in higher-income neighborhoods. Baltimore County also agreed to establish its own mobility program, to assist families in predominantly black, poor neighborhoods in relocating to more affluent suburbs.

In 2015, a team of Harvard researchers published a study examining the long-term impacts of the Moving to Opportunity program. They found that poor children who moved to better neighborhoods were more likely to attend college and earned more in the workforce when compared to similar adults who hadn’t moved. The researchers also found that of the nation’s 100 largest counties, Baltimore ranked last in terms of facilitating upward mobility — partly due to its high degree of racial and economic segregation. Fair housing is no silver bullet, but Maryland’s renewed commitment to integrated housing is a bright spot for civil rights.