Why Is America Still Falling Short on Affordable Housing?
How nonprofits, architects, and advocates are confronting the ongoing crisis
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A few months ago, Miss Stevens found herself in a shelter after being evicted from her apartment in Fort Worth, Texas. There was a mold infestation, and she’d refused to pay rent. “Rent was $1,400, which was way too much for me to pay under unhealthy circumstances,” she explains, referring to the mold that had been in her childrens’ rooms, had ruined her winter clothes in her storage closet, and had turned her ceilings brown. “I feel like I was bamboozled out of my apartment…. And when I tried to make the judge aware of why I hadn’t paid, they didn’t want to hear it.”
Stevens is part of the one in 10 households evicted monthly. This statistic has something to do with the fact that, in Texas, there is no “opportunity to cure”: Even if an individual like Stevens complies with an eviction notice—covers late fees, pays rent belatedly—there is no grace period or ability for a tenant to correct a breach in contract. “Texas is a very landlord-friendly state,” says Carol Klocek, CEO of Center for Transforming Lives, a nonprofit focused on disrupting poverty through housing and wraparound services like counseling and education. As she further explains, the average salary for a woman in Fort Worth is $28,000 a year, which translates to the ability to pay rent of no more than $720 a month. And yet only 13% of apartments in the city rent between $700 and $1,000.
Of course, Stevens isn’t alone. It’s no secret that we’re currently facing a national housing crisis. And while some may complain about being required to pay above asking price for their new family home, the real issue lies in the urgent need to house those who don’t even have a home to begin with. AD spoke with housing advocates, providers, specialists, and people who have directly experienced homelessness in Burlington, Vermont, Providence, Rhode Island, and Fort Worth, Texas, to understand both overlapping and unique problems, solutions, and trends that might better inform an affordable housing blueprint across America.
Like any systemic issue, the first step to deconstructing the housing crisis requires getting the terminology right. Since its conception in the 1930s, the general population has stereotyped public housing (in fact, DC’s Civil Rights Corps revealed recent documents from the MPD that list 24 public housing buildings as “gangs”). Racist and discriminatory federal housing policies, which flourished under the Reagan administration, afforded white people opportunities to ascend out of poverty by way of homeownership programs while simultaneously limiting low-income Black and brown populations through practices like redlining. “Advocates don’t say ‘public housing’ because there is just a stigma against it,” explains Corinne Yonce, a longtime advocate in Burlington. “We just don’t build housing like that anymore, there are so few opportunities for the federal government to fully invest.”
Alongside improving the general population’s housing literacy, many experts emphasize the need to prioritize housing that can accommodate residents from a range of income levels. “There’s such a stark economic divide [and] no empathy or compassion for people in [an unstable] situation,” Yonce says. “The neighborhoods that are visibly affluent and proclaim inclusion often are most vocally against housing policies that would offer equal housing opportunities.”
Mixed-income housing responds to this invisibility. For Crossroads, the largest provider of services and housing to individuals experiencing homelessness in Rhode Island, this looks like “scattered site” models, where providers and developers intersperse affordable housing across neighborhoods. For those who do not have a need for case management, counseling, or other wraparound services, Crossroads provides rental and financial support to help people find an apartment in the private market. Alongside architecture firm Kite Architects, Crossroads also renovates old, historic buildings (think 19th-century Victorian homes) that are design assets to neighborhoods, combating aforementioned stereotypes of government-neglected public housing.
In the redevelopment of some of these properties, Crossroads CEO Karen Santilli shares that they “went against the grain of traditional preservation of affordable housing,” keeping features like hardwood floors and molding. Maintaining the integrity of these historic homes physically contributes to a larger cultural shift, something Yonce, the Burlington activist, calls out as the most significant need in combating the affordable housing crisis: “We need people to learn to live with people who navigate the world differently than them, who come from different socioeconomic spaces, who raise kids differently, who communicate differently.”
Of course, by integrating communities who have not historically been exposed to one another, conflict does sometimes arise. As a connections coordinator for Evernoth, a Vermont housing nonprofit that assumes a developer role, Meghan Tedder says mitigating mixed-income conflict means creating opportunities for neighbors to get to know one another. “Transitioning from homelessness to an apartment can be really tough for people,” she says. Evernorth also seeks to create physical spaces and moments—like a community meal or craft in the kitchen—that lower the stakes and allow neighbors to have positive, safe interactions.
Participatory design combined with onsite services and support in affordable housing are integral to validating tenants’ agency and humanity—Tedder claims that this encourages housing retention. Building trust with tenants, both with each other and with developers or service providers, decreases conflicts that might escalate without a personal relationship; instead of a discontented tenant who becomes a “problem” receiving a lease violation (an indicator of housing instability), they get a referral. According to Tedder, designing spaces that meet tenants’ needs based on their direct feedback creates a “social support network, which is critical for people to remain stable.”
One of the design staples that Evernoth has witnessed in Burlington is a community room, for which focus groups for each building gathered feedback from tenants. When participants shared that they wanted to use communal space for making art, Evernoth built cabinets to store art supplies. When the organization learned that only one person used the bike storage room, they expanded the more frequently used rooms, like for laundry and trash. “It’s become a new standard in our design, which wasn’t always the case, that comes with a shift in our thinking to have a space where we can do programming,” says Tedder.
While these design improvements may not seem novel or revolutionary, tenants in affordable housing historically have had limited agency. “We need more opportunities for those most impacted by our housing shortage to voice their needs and have choice in how and where they live,” Yonce shares. She points to Northgate, an affordable housing unit in Burlington where residents organized to ensure it was resident-owned and operated, as a prime example. Approved tenants pay into a management company and are on the board so they can make decisions. This way, according to Yonce, “the management company can actually handle the nitty gritty issues and go over budgets with residents so they don’t all have to suddenly become tax accountants.” (This refers to the fact that co-op models can impose more of a burden on vulnerable communities.)
Through their design choices, Kite Architects works with Crossroads on varying affordable housing units to create similar communal safety and vibrancy. Kite’s principal, Christine West, describes a set of idyllic housing units, about 45 minutes outside of Providence in South Kingstown, for families with four or five kids. The site specifically responds to their needs: a couple of acres for children to run around, a long bike bath and playground to develop a sense of community, and a sustainable model that saves residents roughly $50 on an electric bill, which can instead go toward something like a doctor’s copay.
For their 35-unit permanent supportive housing in Providence, KITE’s features for Crossroads’ clients look like a healing garden, large windows for natural light, roll-in showers, reading lights operable from bed, open floor plan living rooms, and intercoms for calling front desk providers. Externally designed to “blend into the neighborhood,” West shares that they used affordable wood extrusion and then “deployed a brick pattern that essentially emphasizes gradients, creating an optical illusion that it's much deeper and dynamic.”
Alongside choices that preserve aesthetic integrity, West also underscores the need to “keep existing housing in good shape,” when working with the aforementioned Victorian homes. This requires looking at insulation, heating systems, and windows that are going to last for decades, because losing buildings to demolition or neglect certainly doesn’t advance solutions. West also notes that these combined decisions respond to the threat of gentrification displacing residents. Referred to as “development without displacement,” a Brookings Metro report revealed that Providence’s Federal Hill neighborhood was one of few that effectively developed the area without kicking primarily Black and brown folks out.
Nearly every conversation on this subject includes a line like, “There is no silver bullet for affordable housing.” An omnipresent theme is the need for a combination of solutions. Lauren King is doing just that as the CEO of the Tarrant County Homeless Coalition in Texas. As part of what’s called a Collective Impact Model, the entity works with about 40 partners who all wear different hats—from homeless prevention and affordable housing retention to street outreach teams that visit shelters—with a shared mission to ensure that all people experiencing homelessness have a home. “All providers enter into a central database, so we have cohesive client records,” King says.
By managing this data, TCHC is able to observe trends and propose policies to local legislators that respond to impacted folks’ needs in real time. One observation has been the need to move away from shelters, which are often considered temporary bandaids, toward a housing-forward approach. Another has been making formerly siloed providers more proximate. “In the past, homeownership and homelessness [providers] were asking, ‘Who is in more need? Who will have a bigger impact?’ But we don’t have to compete,” King adds.
On the advocacy front, King believes solving the housing crisis is a combination of providing financial incentives (“It’s much cheaper to find housing than it is to constantly provide services like ambulances or sending people to jail”); strategizing beyond the morality argument (demonstrating that housing people means the local business owner doesn’t have to navigate someone sleeping on their step); building land banks (the city can “bank” underutilized land for a specific purpose, like affordable housing) that lower costs for developers; and pushing back against archaic narratives about what it looks like to be someone who needs affordable housing and support.
“The cowboy way of life goes hand in hand with the idea of that bootstrap mentality; that’s part of the air we breathe in Fort Worth,” Klocek explains. “We’re helping people understand what life is like for the mom who’s living in her car, trying to keep a job, get her kids to school, pursue her own education. She’s not somebody who's ‘living off of the system.’ She is a remarkable hero of a human being.”
There’s a certain image that epitomizes the beauty of a movement for every person’s right to their own safe home. Around seven years ago, David Sylvia lost his job as a dishwasher and consequently lost his home (there’s only one city in Rhode Island where people on average make enough income to afford rent). Sylvia stayed at a few shelters, but, fatigued by constantly getting kicked out by 7 a.m., sharing a room with a stranger close by on the floor, and trudging through four inches of snow with chronic leg pain, he sought out Crossroads. Now a client of seven years, Sylvia lives in converted shared permanent housing, awaiting a move into one of the nonprofit’s new buildings, where he will have his own unit.
“Instead of getting kicked out of a shelter in the early morning, I ride my bike,” he says. “I can’t walk long distances because I have to stop and sit down for a while. My doctor told me it’s good [for my leg] to ride.” Sylvia shares a memory of riding 68 miles with a close friend on the Providence bike trail to the Mount Hope bridge in one day. I asked him what he did the day after. Unbothered, he slept.