Housing the Poor in a Postshelter Society

Abstract

The United States has completed a vast three-decade-long sweep of unprecedented housing achievement. While a relatively small proportion of record production levels was targeted directly to America's poverty population, the latter's housing condition improved markedly as a result of the much-maligned filtering process. But this success will face very serious inhibitors in the future. The breakdown of the traditional political housing alliance, the stagnation of real median family incomes, the growing number of persons under the poverty level, and a housing finance system subject to full market forces and credit competition—for the first time since the New Deal—characterize the early 1980s. Within this context, housing for the middle class is an issue of much more political potency than the housing needs of the poor. But without the reformation of a broad-based housing constituency, one of the great achievements of the last generation—the improvement in the shelter provisions of the poor—must quickly abort.

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References

1. A substandard housing unit is one which was either rated dilapidated by a census enumerator or lacked some or all plumbing facilities.

2. Over time there has been an escalation of the criterion of overcrowding, from a historical benchmark of 1.51 or more persons per room to the more recently employed threshold of 1.01 or more persons per room.

3. The 1980 census did not attempt to measure structure condition (dilapidation) directly. Thus the plumbing facilities standard must stand as a surrogate indicator of condition. For an analysis of the difficulty of measuring structure condition, see U.S. Bureau of the Census , Measuring the Quality of Housing: An Appraisal of Census Statistics and Methods, Working Paper no. 25 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1967).

4. Other deficiencies external to the dwelling unit— neighborhood conditions, access to employment opportunities, adequacy of public services, and the like—have become much more important than housing per se. See George Sternlieb and James W. Hughes , America's Housing: Prospects and Problems (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Center for Urban Policy Research, 1980).

5. Further analysis of Annual Housing Survey data reveals that the bulk of the removals sheltered low-income occupants.

6. In retrospect, the favored treatment granted to housing finance in the nation's credit markets was perhaps the greatest impetus to the overall housing progress of the last generation. The impact of the virtually complete removal of this priority status—and the subjection of housing to full market forces and credit competition the past three years—has not been fully appreciated.

7. By the beginning of 1982, the contractual obligations for outstanding reservations in the program over their potential life were estimated at over $100 billion.

8. As of this writing, it appears that 1982 housing starts will barely exceed 1 million units. During the decade of the 1970s, annual housing starts in excess of 2.0 million units were achieved four times.

9. For poverty-level incomes according to household size, see U.S. Bureau of the Census , Current Population Reports, Series P-60, No. 127, “Money Income and Poverty Status of Families and Persons in the United States (Advance Data from the Mar. 1981 Current Population Survey)” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981).

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10. Census-defined poverty statistics do not include the value of noncash benefits in determining income. Food stamps, subsidized housing, Medicaid, and other “in-kind” benefits are not counted as income. Inclusion of the latter may lower the poverty totals but would probably not alter the trend depicted in Table 6.

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11. The median family income in 1979 totaled $19,661. In contrast, married-couple families with wives working full-time had a median income of $26,196.

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12. See Katharine L. Bradbury and Anthony Downs , Do Housing Allowances Work? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1981). Though somewhat overbroadly titled, this provides a full description of the research.

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13. The descriptions were secured from Morton Schussheim , Susan Vonhorenbeck , and Grace Milgram , “Descriptions and Evaluations of Selected Housing Subsidy Programs” (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 1980).