How can we talk about housing after COVID-19?

2020 sucks: We’re not even five months in and we’re in an economic downturn, an election year, and a climate crisis. Housing is still expensive as hell. The already-constricted supply of quality homes in places proximate to jobs, services, and amenities is going to squeeze everyone, and everything, tighter. What people already couldn’t afford is cataclysmically out of reach now that unemployment claims are at an all-time high.

Housing has been a reliably zeitgeisty topic, nationally and in DC, for several years. Discussions about it get heated. It’s combative! It’s intensified, just like everything else, by COVID-19! So many people — residents, advocates, experts, elected officials — are stakeholders in how housing works. Given that, what are we all going to say about it now?

Everyone talks about housing, and yet almost nobody does

I’ve always found discourse around housing policy to be consistently thorny and wildly personal: Even the most objectively rigid person has a concept of home in their head, and a raft of their own experiences, that influences how they approach housing.

That’s true of other policy areas, such as health care, education, and criminal justice, but housing’s hand is much wider, and it’s something that everyone interfaces with daily. It’s easy to talk casually about housing—you do it when you complain about your rent, or your terrible landlord, or how you can’t afford to buy the kind of house you imagined yourself living in. And even though you probably do chat with your friends about your student loans or the stupidly byzantine process of healthcare claims, you probably do so less than you do where you live.

At the same time, housing has been marginalized relative to other topics in our political economy. National housing groups rightfully claimed victory for their advocacy last year when presidential candidates, for the first time in anyone’s memory, began to release housing plans. And experts were beside themselves when one question about housing made it to the national debate stage.

Closer to home, states and localities generally don’t fund housing. DC’s Housing Production Trust Fund, which pays for creating new affordable housing and preserving what already exists, is a real rarity. It’s one of only 400 such funds in the country, and has successfully transitioned from being funded solely by real estate transfer taxes (which meant that properties with greater sales prices contributed more greatly, which means that affordable housing’s best hope for financial support was…increasing property values and thus less-affordable housing) to a direct allocation of funds in the budget.

I think this contradiction is what has made spats between housing advocates, activists, and armchair experts, even in relative boom times, feel as if they were fighting over scraps. I also think that mindset is meaningless, and that it was a feature of an economic upswing, when we could step back and fuss over ideology rather than immediately allocate resources to direct services. (Yes, I am talking about housing Twitter, a corner of the Internet best characterized by reductive sniping.)

The economy may never be the same

COVID-19 has swiftly brought actual financial scarcity, though it’s not a carbon copy of 2008. I think often of how car loans are more of a financial bubble than mortgages now; student loans are an even bigger feature than they were 12 years ago.

The effects of the Great Recession are still lingering, and coronavirus is compounding the fact that lots of people, and lots of places, never fully recovered. But what we’re experiencing now is a labor and public-health crisis much more than a housing crisis.

That, of course, exacerbates existing inequalities — black and brown people are dying at a far greater rate from coronavirus — that most frequently demonstrate themselves in what people can and can’t afford.

We know that a one-time payment of $1,200 is almost laughable because most people reading this pay more than that in rent per month. We know that as you traverse through the US’s painfully stratified socioeconomic segments, it’s clear that those who have been historically marginalized are more likely to be affected not just by the health impacts of coronavirus, but by the economic fallout, too.

Yes, of course the DC region is going to become more divided after this.

Our society doesn’t really publicly support housing

In the US, we build subsidized affordable housing with complicated stacks of public and private money and local, state, and federal tax credits. We don’t build a lot of affordable housing, and we don’t directly or fully fund it with public dollars. Nearly all affordable housing projects are, essentially, public-private partnerships.

The Faircloth Amendment made it illegal, as of 1999, to add new public housing units in the US, unless a commensurate number of existing units were demolished. Most Americans live in market-rate housing that’s built by for-profit developers on land that they acquired (sometimes from governments, but mostly from other private owners) for that purpose. Most renters live in “mom-and-pop” properties, not ones owned by big corporations.

If there’s a squeeze in how much market-rate housing gets produced—like the one that we’ve experienced over the past decade-plus — then there are fewer homes for people to live in, and the ones that do exist, or get built, get more expensive.

In DC specifically, our Housing Production Trust Fund does the most heavy lifting to fund affordable housing development. But the HPTF isn’t the largest such fund in the country because of the mayor or the council’s generosity or graciousness. It’s because DC has close to 700,000 residents with a median income of about $85,000 whom it can tax to fund things like HPTF, the Affordable Housing Preservation Fund, and the Low-Income Rent Supplement program.

All that vanishes, or at least gets way, way harder to access, when the economy isn’t doing well. While I, personally, believe that there is a moral imperative to shove as much money into all of the above programs as possible — especially in a downturn, when people’s living situations are instantly much more precarious — I, personally, do not author or pass the city’s budget. Our fiscal resources for affordable housing are shrinking at the same time that the riskiness of building market-rate housing, which is what most people live in, increases.

What shakes out in the wake of Covid-19 is going to force us to get way more advanced than “put more money in the Housing Production Trust Fund” to bring housing universally within reach. Fortunately, money isn’t the only thing that shapes how housing works; a more expansive, more inclusive approach from the public sector is a mindset more so than a budget line item.

We should use this time to shift not just our laws but, perhaps more importantly, our goals and ideologies around how we build housing, where we build housing, and how people access it. Even more broadly, we should, as a city, reassess what we consider to be the highest and best use of land, and how we evaluate its worth.

“An endless discourse about the most perfect, most holy housing policy is a luxury we can no longer afford.”

As always, we need a bigger boat

But before we start talking about “innovative” “solutions,” we should be a lot more generous in how we talk to each other about housing, land use, and development.

Narratives are extraordinarily powerful in determining laws, and one of the most amazing things about organizing around housing is that it’s accessible. Mostly everyone can conjure a sentiment about home, whether positive or negative or totally neutral, if you ask them to. But personal sentiments don’t always match the policy, or approach, that works for the public more so than it works for an individual.

So, what we talk about when we talk about housing, or land use, or development, and how we talk about it, really does matter, both for building a better world and for the sake of our own mental health. And so I hope — probably foolishly, but I’m willing to be earnest here — that for at least a little bit, we can maybe not snipe over the quality and merit of policies that are, in reality, at their best when they are executed together.

Nearly all research has pointed toward a three-pronged strategy of producing housing, protecting residents, and preserving existing affordable housing as the best and most-actually-doable approach to the material realities of America’s existing housing crisis. I don’t think there’s much that of that to modify, even in a coronacession. “Produce, protect, and preserve” is fairly fundamental.

An economic regime that doesn’t rest primarily on profit might actually be the only thing that vanquishes, for good, the fact that housing can’t be both affordable and a good investment. Now is absolutely the time to scream about how our economic regime has privileged a rich few at the expense of a healthy society for all, and highlight how that has, in many ways, hinged on investments in housing and land. We have a prime opportunity to shove the window much, much wider, in a different direction; things that looked difficult before look possible now.

But a rhetorical pursuit of a more just housing system often manifests itself as people lining up on ideological sides of proposals for the redevelopment of McMillan, or Parcel 42, or 901 Monroe as if they are battles waged to be won. This will not keep people from, say, getting kicked out of their homes over the next few years, or losing their jobs and not being able to afford their rent.

I hope it’s clear by now that an endless discourse about the most perfect, most holy housing policy is a luxury that we have when our priority is posturing about our prior convictions. Getting people into places to live that they can afford — ones that don’t double-down on the spatial inequalities that we’ve allowed to persist — is about to become vastly more important now that the (low-wage! service-sector!) jobs that most people work to pay for a place to live have effectively evaporated.

At the same time that those of us who work on housing, and talk about it all the time, should stop the tiresome process of disagreeing with each other because we find someone else’s beliefs tiresome and annoying, our elected and appointed leaders can’t default to the grow-the-pie strategy of economic development. Tax breaks and other financial incentives don’t actually reliably spur growth nor staunch capital flight.

Even though we’re staring down a serious reshaping of how we interact with other people, there is not much reason to expect that the agglomeration, where people continue to move to successful, high-skill cities, which has always greatly benefited DC, will stop. I’d actually bet the opposite: High-cost, high-demand metro areas, like DC, are going to be even more magnetic. Housing is expensive in our region (in any top-tier region, really) primarily because people moved here, mostly for jobs that exist here and nowhere else, and we didn’t build enough places for them to live.

“I don’t know if we can make thorny policy areas more just and fair and allow people to get back to the world that they were used to.”

Even with bonkers-crazy-unprecedented unemployment, the socio-economic benefits of people near each other won’t go away. Nor will the way this trend benefits a few people but not all. They’ll probably intensify.

Now what?

I’ve been turning over whether COVID-19 will be an epistemological break, or not. French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser used that term to describe “an event in the history or practice of science involving a radical break or cut with previous, ideological conceptions.” It’s a fussy, theoretical term for what I think a lot of people would really like to see right now: a fundamental reshaping of how we operate American society, from leadership to budgets to the distribution of wealth and goods and services.

But just as many people see recovery not as a chance for revolution but, rightfully, an enormous threat. It’s just as reasonable to want to run to meet the new as it is to double-down on protecting what you’ve got.

I don’t know that we can have both the epistemological break that we probably need to make big, thorny policy areas like housing, and public health, and transportation (and transportation is basically a proxy for all mobility, both economic and physical) more just and fair and allow people to get back to the world that they were used to.

But I do know that there will be movement — sometimes forward, mostly backward, but definitely movement. This is less a call for unity and more an acceptance that coronavirus has made many, many things much more stark, while simultaneously accelerating their effects. It’s reshuffled spending at the state and local level, but it’s also exposed what our public decisionmakers prioritize.

Ultimately, we elect our representatives, who make the laws that determine how stuff like housing works. Whether people can afford to live here going forward will certainly flow downward from, say, DC mayor Muriel Bowser’s appointments to the Reopen DC teams.

But not entirely. Everyone who’s not in the room is just as much the embodiment of a local civil society as the people in the room are. Even chatter on Twitter can contribute to how narratives embed themselves into what we believe about how our world should work.

And even bigger than that: Casual discourse can grow or shrink our own capacity to do what we can of that work, and shape what we believe about who should benefit. Recovery efforts could break the lock that incumbents, both politicians and interest groups and constituents, have on the function of policy; coronavirus has shown that public policy needs to be truly public, or else it will only benefit those who have the capacity or privilege to speak up or show up, or those who people in charge believe to be the most deserving.

Fighting for scraps often occurs among people who are lucky enough to be in the metaphorical room, and those people often include you and I.