America has a housing problem
Earlier this week, the business magazine Fortune reported on a young Philadelphia-area couple that has been looking for a house in southern New Jersey for the last two years, and have had absolutely no luck.
They have come up empty-handed even with a budget of $600,000, outdone in one furious bidding war after another. In one instance, they even wrote a pleading letter to the owners of a dwelling and included a photo of themselves holding an ultrasound image of their soon-to-be-born child. The owners were unswayed, and someone else got the house.
There had been some hope that the white-hot housing market would cool as the pandemic ebbed and interest rates rose, but many parts of America are plagued by a shortage of homes and dizzyingly high costs to rent even the tiniest apartments. Freddie Mac estimates the country is short of almost 4 million units of housing. A labor shortage is among the culprits, but home construction also slowed considerably following the Great Recession more than a decade ago, and has never caught up to pre-2008 levels.
This has meant that individuals or families that want to buy homes can’t, rendering them unable to take that important first step in building wealth over the course of their lives. And the high cost of housing has also pushed more people into homelessness, reaching the point that it has been described by some as a national crisis. According to a recent study by the University of California-San Francisco, a little more than 170,000 Americans are classified as homeless, which is more than the population of Charleston, S.C., Savannah, Ga., or the Kansas City on the Kansas side of the Missouri River.
This past week, The New York Times ran a story on how 2,800 homeless people are being evicted from hotels in Vermont they had been living in during the pandemic. The end of federal funding for emergency housing means the state has had little other choice but to send them on their way and, believe it or not, give them camping equipment that they can at least use during these warm-weather months. Much ink has been spilled on the crisis of homelessness in California, which is where an estimated 30% of the country’s whole unhoused population is engaged in a day-to-day struggle to find shelter.
Homelessness is an ever-present problem that seems to defy any kind of easy solution. Some people are left without a place to call home because they suffer from mental illness or have a serious addiction to drugs or alcohol. Some are escaping abuse. Other people simply have bad luck, losing a place to live because they’ve lost their job or have experienced some other form of financial hardship. The idea of reducing homelessness to absolute zero is almost certainly a utopian fantasy.
But there are actions we can take to help bring the number down. Connecting homeless people to social services and stabilizing their situation is an important step in getting them on the road to having a place to call their own. And, looking at the bigger picture, renovating blighted properties and creating incentives for developers to construct more affordable housing would help put more abodes on the market.
As the richest nation in the world, we can do better than having people live in tents.