On Homelessness

 There is a lot of talk in New York City these days about rising crime. Last week we had a random shooter in subway, and headlines every day express the fears of many New Yorkers. I not convinced that serious crime is much worse than it ever has been. Statistics are thrown around, but many of them are comparing 2022 with the pandemic years that came before and are more likely to reflect the unusual situation we are emerging from than a crisis today. It suits the narrative of the Murdoch owned papers and Fox News to spread fear of crime, and it is also a part of the narrative that helped Eric Adams to become mayor job. We should be cautious before we join the baying chorus.

 

What I do see with my own eyes is evidence of a rise in homelessness across the city. I often ride the E train, and one of its features is that it is the only line that never emerges into the open air. That is a mixed blessing. In winter our service is less affected by snowstorms than the other lines. But the relative warmth means that the E has always been popular to sleep in. One terminus is in the deprived area of Jamaica, and that probably adds to the number of folk using the line for shelter too.

 

There are certainly more homeless people riding the subway this year than I have ever seen before. After nine in the evening, it is rare to find a subway car without some rough sleepers in it, on the E line or any of the other lines I frequent. It is a sad sight to behold, and the dirt and smell can be very unpleasant. I can also understand how people can feel threatened, despite plenty of evidence that homeless people are often victims of crime and rarely perpetrators. Still, desperate people can do desperate things and I do try to avoid being the only passenger to share a car with a homeless person.

 

Recently the new mayor has started a campaign to evict homeless people from the subway system and to dismantle some informal camps where groups of homeless people gather overnight. While that will surely improve the optics of the situation, and perceptions do matter, it is hard to see how this campaign can solve anything. Where are these people supposed to go? A common theme is that few seem to be persuadable to sleep in the shelters the city provides, so in practice they wander around trying to escape the NYPD, becoming more vulnerable and desperate and even sicker as a result. I expect soon Adams will start playing the cynical game in which he tries to nudge the homeless out of his jurisdiction. Newark and other New Jersey neighbourhoods have been playing this game for many years. Obviously that solves nothing either.

 

The first level of root cause about homelessness must be an imbalance of suitable homes. When I lived in Holland, one of my bus routes to work took me through a series of poorer parts of The Hague. One memory is of how these districts were constantly being renovated and improved. Sometimes it seemed a thankless task, because the areas suffered from vandalism and clearly had social problems. But authorities persisted in a series of projects focused on homes, demolishing some, upgrading others and adding some new ones. These were never flashy but always functional, designed for occupants to enjoy a life of simple decency. During the ten years that I witnessed this, these areas were transformed, and it was clear that there were large spin off benefits socially. I do not know what the financial models for these upgrades was. No doubt there was some combination of municipal investment, developer subsidy and favourable rental conditions. Whichever of these options were involved, it felt to me like an excellent use of public funds.

 

Living in New York, I witness nothing like this. There are plenty of cranes and development projects about, but they are concentrated in areas which are already wealthy or rapidly gentrifying. The poor areas become gradually more and more run down. There is substantial public housing in the city, and no doubt it costs taxpayers a lot to maintain, but budgets are clearly very tight. There are also a lot of rent stabilised apartments in the city, initially designed so that people doing ordinary jobs could afford to live near their work. Finally, all new developments seem to be forced to include an element of what is called affordable housing.

 

These schemes are clearly not enough, evidenced by the mounting homelessness problem. Perhaps they even make matters worse. Once ensconced in a NYCHA or rent stabilised apartment, tenants have every incentive to stay there: trying to earn more would jeopardise means-tested based tenancy and involve a potentially massive leap in housing cost. A two-tiered system may have developed, with existing tenants blocking opportunities for others.

 

Margaret Thatcher’s most brilliant idea politically was to encourage public tenants to buy their own homes. This created an incentive for families to escape their situations and whole neighbourhoods improved as a result, while also reducing public expenditure. What Thatcher failed to do was to replace any of the sold-off homes, so newly arriving or newly challenged families still had a problem to access affordable places to live. There was plenty of homelessness in London in the 1990’s as a result.

 

I wonder if there would be scope for a scheme in which public tenants (or people in rent stabilised accommodation) could be incentivised to move into other private homes. There could be a carrot of a reduced rents for a period, but also a stick in that existing arrangements start to time out after several years. Potentially everyone can benefit: the moving families can upgrade their circumstances, the municipality can save money and encourage economic development, and, most important, a supply of existing dwellings would become available to those in need of them.

 

Much else can be done. Zoning and Nimbyism restricts supply of new homes. Progressive councils tend to make this worse not better by joining bandwagons against developers and gentrification and by distorting the market with rent stabilisation. Conservative areas let development rip, but that also leads to sprawling cities that harm the environment and entrench inequality further.

 

Then there are the eviction challenges, so wonderfully explained in one of my favourite non-fiction books, Evicted by Matthew Desmond. The housing support system is broken in much of the USA, and poor families end up in trailer parks or at constant risk of losing their home. It may well be that the proximate cause of the current visible rise in homelessness is the winding down of bans on eviction during the pandemic. These helped desperate people, but, without structural programs, will have obscured a growing problem that had to emerge into the open one day.

 

A laudable goal for developed societies would be to consider decent housing as a human right. I suspect that may be the starting point for programs like that in The Hague. In the US it is a goal that would be hard to make meaningful at a federal level, but instead could become part of state and local level progressive platforms. I suspect that only a stated brave goal can lead to the sort of wholesale change to housing policy that would be required to fix the chronic imbalances in US cities.

 

Beyond housing, there is a further level of root cause analysis that can be explored to understand homelessness and how to reduce it. That starts not with houses but with individuals and families at risk of becoming homeless. That will be for another day.      

Guardian Angels

 I have enjoyed a new experience over the last few months, as the producer of a musical stage show. I fell into the role almost by accident and was surprised at how complex and time-consuming it became, but I found I enjoyed every minute, even when I started losing sleep and noticing a racing metabolism in the days leading up to the performances. Thankfully everything went remarkably well and, two weeks later, my body rhythms have almost returned to normal.

 

As the project progressed and as show day neared, I had a wonderful recurring sensation that there was a guardian angel hovering over the production bringing it good luck. Whenever we needed a break, we got one. We needed a sofa and were flailing around trying poor substitutes, when suddenly a perfect sofa miraculously appeared backstage. The same thing happened for a bench and a platform. I realised too late that our dress rehearsal would be immediately preceded by a scout troupe meeting in the same venue and that would ruin our ability to set up in time, but once I started investigating, I was given the wonderful news that the scout troupe had decided to take that week off.

 

I could quote many similar examples, but perhaps the luckiest break came from Covid. Staging the production at all felt almost reckless at the time we had to decide; cancelling would have been almost devastating for our small choir. We left the choice as late as possible, and somehow all the trends started working in our favour. Only one performer missed rehearsals while isolating, and one other had to miss the performances, somebody who was not critical. In the end we even felt able to offer performers the chance to perform without masks (after everyone took a home test), which transformed the experience for the audience and many performers. A week earlier or two weeks later and we would not have been so lucky, with cases rising again now in New York.

 

This sense of having a guardian angel looking out for me or for a team I was involved in has happened a few times before, though I can’t recall feeling it quite as strongly as this time. It is a lovely feeling, and I took to quietly chuckling whenever one more problem seemed to solve itself in the nick of time. I had to be careful not to become complacent, while allowing the happy feeling to add a useful dose of confidence.

 

I have also experienced the opposite feeling, one where failure almost seemed preordained. It usually happens when I fall ill physically. I might catch a cold, and that might somehow lead me to trip up and then basic tasks would start to go wrong. My mood could become cruel and blaming and failure would mount on top of failure. Then I would start losing sleep, and the cycle would only get worse. It could take a few weeks to recover. It is weird but in these situations it even seemed as if all the sports teams I support were destined to lose as well. 

 

I have been part of teams where this negativity prevailed, but have also been in seemingly blessed ones. Ten years ago I was in a church choir run by a kind and hard-working lady. Her resources were thin and often unreliable, but that did not seem to curtail her ambition. She would repeatedly devise seemingly unachievable plans, without tight schedules and difficult repertoire. As the deadline approached, it seemed certain that disaster would occur. Yet time and again her guardian angel arrived in the nick of time to save her. Somebody steeped up in an unexpected way, something finally clicked, or some external event turned up to save us. I used to regard her good fortune as a series of minor miracles. Given the religious setting, it was occasionally tempting to look up to heaven wondering if the intervention might be a divine one.

 

But whenever I thought about it more logically, I could see various factors that combined to give that marvellous lady more than her fair share of luck. It was not luck at all. The saying that in life you make most of your own luck was borne out in that choir.

 

First, she worked very hard and always did more than her own share behind the scenes. Her repertoire was ambitious, but she had a vision for how the group might step up to perform it. She put in place structures to help people. Then she exuded a gentle confidence that rubbed off on the rest of us. Her confidence was never arrogant, or demanding, or entitled, but always trusting and supportive. We could see how she wanted us to succeed and we could see how she somehow deserved it, and somehow we usually stepped up and delivered, often coming up with a product we did not believe we were capable of. Afterwards she would humbly deflect the praise onto others. This was leadership in action.

 

So perhaps was I managing to exhibit some of the same qualities during my recent theatre project? I did at one point share my guardian angel theory with a teammate, who responded by stating that the theory was nonsense and the guardian angel was me, the nicest compliment I have received in a long time.

 

Reading the list of factors I just created for my blessed choir of a decade ago, I could never aspire to her serenity but perhaps I did find my own magic formula for a few weeks. I did work hard, set ambitious goals, develop plans and devise structures. I was able to utilise project management skills that became second nature during my corporate career. I suppose that may have encouraged confidence and trust in others and a willingness to go the extra mile for the project. Until the last few days I had a sense of being unusually productive, and at the end, when my body was starting to fail, my mistakes did not turn out to be crucial and others stepped up to share the load.  

 

So for a short time I discovered my leadership sweet spot. I should bottle it up so I can use it again, but of course it is not quite so simple. What is true is that the situation I found myself in turned out to be an excellent fit for my skills. Then we found some momentum and off we went. For a change I managed to avoid bringing out my disastrous leadership traits of cynicism and snide remarks, and we managed to ride our success all the way to the finish line, although my physical stamina was at its limit.

 

Many of us will have our leadership sweet spots and it would be a healthy exercise to try to engineer situations where we might be at our best. We cannot always make that happen, but we can increase our odds. Then when the momentum is with us we have to ride it as long as possible. Another momentum killer is any loss of tension owing to a premature declaration of victory. I remember from my bridge playing days that disaster would strike as soon as I envisioned myself in the winner’s enclosure. You often see that same mistake and the other momentum killers in sports teams as well.

 

I can also see how others can end up in a cycle of despair. Physical frailty makes everything more difficult, and physical problems have a habit of multiplying. Tough situations can follow people about. Confidence and its absence are equally effective in pervading around a team. People born into tough environments with physical challenges and who lack educational opportunities to develop their leadership toolkits deserve our sympathy, and, where possible, a leg up.

 

It is also easy to see how these seemingly lucky or unlucky people and the lucky or unlucky streaks we all enjoy or endure might lead many of us towards religious beliefs. I choose to see out more logical causes, but sometimes, as in my recent project, things go so well that the idea of a guardian angel feels like the only explanation. And that idea has the added benefit of encouraging humility too, so for now I am sticking with it. How otherwise can sofas appear out of thin air?      

The Global Happiness Report

 Every year the UN convenes a group of experts to publish a report about happiness in the world. The exercise started around 2005 so by now there is a wealth of data available. There survey is built around a single question asking people how happy they feel using a scale from zero to ten, undertaken in most of the countries of the world. The same survey captures some objective statistics, including about demographics, and asks some secondary questions to enable the researchers to form statistical links between happiness and its potential drivers.

 

For several years the analysis has yielded the same six key drivers of happiness. They seem to apply consistently over time to individuals within a country and between countries, so that the regression analysis model parameters change very little from year to year. What does change over time is how the different countries rank overall and according to the model, although that happens more slowly than one might expect. The model explains more than half of the variation in declared happiness, and by now the researchers can be rather sure that they have not failed to spot other important drivers, and that the remaining variation is probably accounted for by ephemeral things such as mood or even weather on the survey day, or by cultural differences.

 

Each year I remind myself of the six categories. They are a mixture of social and economic factors. Income is one variable, and healthy life expectancy is another. A third is a feeling of freedom to make life choices and a fourth is an experience or perception of corruption. The fifth factor is a feeling that a friend or society at large will arrive in case of need. The last factor is the least intuitive: people who claim to have recently helped somebody or a cause tend also to declare themselves happier. It makes for a fascinating list, one that suggests public policies that might be effective in improving wellbeing.

 

The country ranking is rather stable by now as well. Finland have been top of the table for five years, and the top eight comprise the five Nordic countries, Switzerland, Luxembourg and The Netherlands. The rich anglosphere cluster between 10 and 20, but Southern Europe languish between 20 and 60, with my chosen future residence Portugal ranking a disappointing 56. The bottom of the table is filled with African and south Asian nations.

 

Climbers and fallers are interesting to note, but here the stability in the study can become frustrating, because trends take so long to emerge. The researchers are inherently cautious and loth to draw conclusions without overwhelming evidence, and a three-year rolling average is used for their main indicator, which imposes a further time lag to the fact that it takes over a year to carry out surveys and collate the report. I spent the Trump years searching in vain for evidence of the US falling in the charts; clearly the smoothing of the data means that shorter-term swings from such things as political changes rarely show up.

 

Still, 15 years is long enough for trends to emerge. On the slow but sustained upswing are south-eastern European states such as Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia. This makes sense intuitively as these countries took longer to benefit from the fall of the Soviet empire and were slower to shake off corruption. The EU can take some credit, but Serbia’s inclusion on the list (as well as recidivist Hungary) shows that the EU does not offer the only recipe for success. On the downswing are crisis states such as Venezuela, Lebanon and Afghanistan, but it is also notable how both Mexico and Canada have gradually moved down in the rankings.

 

Covid tells an interesting story in the report. Already last year the researchers were surprised that the global happiness average did not seem to be dipping during the pandemic, and that absence of an expected trend persists this year. But now, after more analysis, the report can use its own model to start to explain this. It is evident that healthy life expectancy and income took a hit owing to the pandemic, and the study links a decline in happiness in some to terms such as poverty, unemployment and illness. But this applies only to a cohort of those surveyed, and often a small cohort, especially in more equal societies. The surprise comes from upswings in happiness owing to the social support and especially the generosity indicators. The pandemic has brought out the good in a lot of us, and that has made both givers and recipients happier.

 

The report this year cannot resist the allure of blowing its own trumpet. They point out how the report has become widely quoted as it has become more robust and established and how it has spawned other valuable research threads. The trend is for happiness and related topics to be quoted more and GDP and similar terms to be quoted less. This is indeed evidence of human progress. On the same topic, the gradual positive trend line of human happiness supports optimistic writes such as Steven Pinker who believe that litanies of bad news obscure the positive underlying maturation of our race.

 

Then the report follows some lines of research of its own. It investigates how social media can further expand its wealth of usable data points. It devotes a section to genetic traits that predispose happiness or its opposite. And it offers some initial analysis of low intensity happiness triggers such as balance, harmony and peace, finding that, while culturally these are associated with the east, they are indeed indicators of happiness everywhere.

 

I love this sort of report and look out for this particular one every year. At a time when the UN is once again being pilloried for its impotence over Ukraine – usually by those whose own actions have ensured that same impotence – the report is an example of the quiet, dignified long-term work that the UN supports day after day. I find it sad that this sort of work is so rarely quoted in political or media circles. Political campaigns based on a goal of happiness need not be merely utopian dreams these days, but can be linked to real policies and real measures. If the Democrats are looking for arguments to support Build Back Better or similar programmes, relating the measures to their impacts on happiness could be a useful hook. Of course the fact that it takes 15 years to reliably measure results is a mixed blessing, enabling opponents to mock claims but also giving some space to proponents to stick to their guns despite setbacks.

 

The age of a more mature policy debate and a better-informed politics has the potential to arrive very soon. Reports such as the UN global happiness report are leading us in the right direction. Intelligent publications like The Economist should follow the lead. At a time of sickening war, it is good to remind ourselves both of human progress already secured and the vast remaining potential to make human lives better.