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.