Crossposted at Cottonmouth Press
This morning, our esteemed pretzeldent made an appearance in Nashville to tour a bakery and to make a speech at the Opryland Hotel. My office is not even a quarter of a mile away, and I could have walked down to the corner to join the protesters waving signs for the motorcade as it passed by.
But I didn't. Instead, I was feverishly drafting a three-page letter to another attorney on behalf of one of my clients, a gentleman with a mental disability who's about to be evicted from the subsidized apartment complex where he's lived for almost 30 years.
In addition to the obvious trauma my client would face having to find a new place to live, and the adjustment difficulties all his friends and family say he will have, I had a further concern - there is damn little housing for people who are surviving on Social Security disability. Every subsidized development he's visited has told him he'll be facing a waiting list of up to six months. That means he'll be effectively homeless for a period of time, but he's one of the lucky ones whose family will find him some room on the couch if worse comes to worst.
You will be shocked - shocked! - to learn that housing for the poorest among us has gotten significantly harder to obtain since GWB took office. Housing assistance has declined as a percentage of non-defense discretionary spending during Bush's two terms in office from 8.8 percent in 2001 to 7.7 percent in 2006. It was 10 percent in 2006. (Trying to remember who was in office then... hmm...)
First, they cut Section 8 assistance to local public housing authorities (PHAs). In case you're not familiar with Section 8, the voucher program provides direct rental assistance to poor families. A typical family with a Section 8 voucher pays about 30 percent of its adjusted gross income to the landlord, with the federally funded voucher making up the rest.
But not only did cuts to the program mean that families would have to pay a larger share of their housing costs, it also meant fewer vouchers overall. Not only are there waiting lists for vouchers in Nashville and throughout the state, but those waiting lists are so long that they're closed to new families. (There is hope for Section 8 now that Dems are in charge, but Bush will probably veto it.)
According to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, the Fair Market Rent (FMR) Tennessee for a two-bedroom apartment is $604 . In order to afford this level of rent and utilities, without paying more than 30% of income on housing (in other words, without becoming what we call "cost-burdened"), a household must earn $2,012 monthly or $24,149 annually. Assuming a 40-hour work week, 52 weeks per year, this level of income translates into a Housing Wage of $11.61.
My client gets a check of about $400 a month, significantly less than even minimum wage. In fact, the NLIHC says, for the first time since its research began in 1998, "the national average rent for a studio apartment exceeds the average Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payment." Get that? Even if my client could pay his WHOLE check for rent (eating is overrated), he probably couldn't find anything.
And I know that Tennessee is not even the worst of it - compared to a lot of states with more large urban areas, Tennessee's housing costs are probably positively reasonable.
What's that? You're asking why he can't just apply for public housing? Great question!
Nashville is one of the many cities that have embarked upon the housing experiment called "Hope VI." To fans of Hope VI, it means replacing blighted public housing with scattered-site development that fosters more healthy communities. To me, it means a loss of about half the public housing units in Nashville and waiting lists of three months were there were none previously. There is no one-to-one replacement requirement under Hope VI, which is why Nashville could get away with this. No one knows what happened to the many, many people displaced when their housing developments were torn down. Some got Section 8 vouchers. Some got transferred to other developments. Some got to move back in.
And some, no doubt, ended up sleeping down at Riverfront Park. But hey, that's not our problem, and isn't Sam Levy Homes beautiful now? Look at those bungalows!
The only good housing decision the Bush administration has made so far is to zero out Hope VI, although it's probably not for the reasons I have articulated so far.
And then there's the HUD program that funds my agency and my job, the budget for which has remained essentially flat for many, many years. We didn't get a grant in 2006, and if we don't get one in 2007, we're toast. I'm not sure who will write that three-page letter for my client when I'm managing a McDonald's somewhere. I'm sure something will get worked out.