Food, Clothing and Shelter
The basics of life. We need food for nutrition to keep our bodies going. We need clothing to cover our bodies for a sense of modesty and in the winter warmth. We need shelter as a place to rest our fed and clothed bodies. Everything else is a luxury. Cable, Cars, and even my iPhone – all luxuries. For many in our society they don’t have the three basics, most notably shelter.
My first class back at SLU this Fall is a law class called Housing & Community Development. Our reading for today was on the right to housing. Do we have a right to be provided shelter if we are outside the margins for private housing?
The goal of the Federal Housing Act of 1949 was a “decent home…for every American family.” That is a tall order. Since that act became law government has had many programs designed to accomplish that goal. Everything from building housing to rent vouchers have been tried. Yet we still have Americans that are homeless and others with less than decent shelter.
Clearly the private market doesn’t work for everyone. Was the goal of a decent home for every American family simply too ambitious? Well, I have reading to finish – discuss.
It’s a cold reality that the market does fail a small percentage of the population; people that work three jobs but are still homeless. On the other hand, many homeless people are there because their alcohol/drug/mental problems prevent them from holding a job and finding shelter. Until the government and other groups realize that they can’t just take a homeless person and give them shelter and expect them to transform into a 9 to 5 worker raising a family and living the American dream, and that these people must have their substance and mental problems addressed as well, we will continue to see the sad state of homeless people.
Last I checked, there is no right to housing in the Constitution.
Sadly, we will never be able to prevent the causes of the vast majority of sub-standard living situations–stupidity and bad choices.
I’m afraid the goal of the Federal Housing Act was flawed from the very start. Even Jesus Himself said we’ll always have the poor with us. (I hope its okay to bust a biblical reference in here 🙂 The first line of defense has to be the family. I’m sure most readers have assisted family members who have been “down and out.†We’ve had two different occasions where family members have lived with us for a year at time. And currently we’re legal guardians for another. My only reason for sharing is to demonstrate that while it isn’t easy, it can be done.
However, we’ve also been burned a few times and have had to sever ties with folks. Ultimately, it can be a cruel world and people do fall through the cracks. But as to the question at hand: Do we have a right to the three basics? No. But if people do the right thing then hopefully the basics wouldn’t even be an issue. I think Thoreau had it right when he said: “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.â€
As my wise old uncle once told me – “The world doesn’t owe you a damn thing”. He was correct.
What’s particularly interesting locally is the perception that there’s actually a lack of affordable housing around here. Go to realtor.com, put in St. Louis and a $20,000 maximum cost and you get 298 possibilities. Do the same thing with Denver (a similar-sized metro area) and you get 1 condo for $18,450! Increase the threshold to $50,000 and you increase the total pool in Denver to 93. In either city, are some money pits? Of course! And are some in crime-ridden neighborhoods? Yes. But if the choice is between under a bridge or a roof over one’s head, the choice should be pretty obvious. And the math is pretty easy – for a $25,000 property, 10% down is $2500 and the monthly payments should be less than $200, less than many car payments! So, yeah, you can’t fix stupid/undo bad choices, but if you can find and keep a job, even a minimum wage one, you can find a place to live – the whole trick is in the job part.
Short answer, no, you don’t have right to a home. Anything that calls for the subjugation of others can’t be a right. Same goes for health car. Someone has to provide it and some one has to pay for it. Forcing anyone to do either would be wrong. What many see as an arguement for government action actually make a better arguement for charity. Beyond that I think we can look to the “mortgage” crisis to see the end result of all these laws and moves to put everyone into a house.
“Beyond that I think we can look to the ‘mortgage’ crisis to see the end result of all these laws and moves to put everyone into a house.”
.
there’s a difference between having a reasonably decent home and buying a mcmansion that you don’t need and can’t afford.
“there’s a difference between having a reasonably decent home and buying a mcmansion that you don’t need and can’t afford.”
True enough, but if you think this “crisis” exists totally of people that buy homes you find athestically appalling you’re kidding yourself. Big Brother said “lend to those that are on the margins” and so they did. Then Big Brother said “how dare you prey on those on the margins”. But lets just cover that for you with the taxpayers money. The “crisis” was created by the government, not the free market. Anyone that calls Freddie and Fannie free market is lacking an understanding of the term.
The “mortgage crisis” was caused by mortgage companies packaging and selling bundles of mortgages as investments. Hence, they didn’t care if the mortgages were good deals or not once they sold them, so they gave mortgages to people unlikely to pay them. Thats the whole story.
.
Anyway, In NYC, they’ve demonstrated that for the chronically homeless, its cheaper for society to just give them housing. It dramatically reduces their use of things like emergency rooms, etc.
.
For the not chronically homeless, I think most zoning policy over the last 40 years has negatively affected the dev. of new, low cost housing. There are indeed many “affordable” old places in St. Louis, but there are fewer, newish, smaller, utilitarian homes and apartments, because in many places its illegal, zoning wise, to build them.
Jim Zavist: Excellent, EXCELLENT, point you raised. To talk about a lack of ‘affordable housing’ in St. Louis is a joke. A quick scan of CraigsList or Riverfront Times reveals many apartments in decent areas such as one-bedroom units in south city…while in Boston $400 can’t hardly rent a cardboard box in an alley. Actually I was told by a Boston realtor that anything less than $1,000 will be a studio in a rough area. St. Louis has some of the most affordable housing stock in America.
Tim, your W A Y off in your assessment of the mortgage crisis… it’s much more like the description given by Scott, but there’s even more to it than that. Big Brother? Big Brother had little to do with it, unless you consider private business activity to be Big Brother. The government really can’t very effectively provide ‘decent’ housing for everyone, for very long, so the best hope is that the government can assist those who can work (following whatever transition from unemployable to employable that is needed) to raise their sails so the coming wind can get them out of the doldroms. Health care is another issue, I believe, and is M U C H more reasonably proposed to be administrated by the government, and of course there are plenty of global examples to be observed. If charity were the answer, it would have already proven to be the solution, and I wouldn’t dismiss the need, often sudden, for relief of insufferable agony or otherwise unaffordable care to be something that Thoreau would describe as lightly esteemed. Some matters simply transcend libertarian math, whether you can agree or not.
“Don’t apologize when you make a loan above the prime rate to someone that has a marginal credit rating,” Texas Republican Phil Gramm, then chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, told a group of bankers in 2000. “In the name of predatory lending, we could end up denying people with moderate income and limited credit ratings the opportunity to borrow money.”
– –
When George W. Bush took office, that push became a pillar of his “ownership society” campaign. “We want everybody in America to own their own home,” Mr. Bush said at a housing conference sponsored by the White House in October 2002. Earlier that year, he issued a “challenge” to lenders and others in the industry: Create 5.5 million new minority homeowners by the end of the decade. In 2003, he signed the American Dream Downpayment Act, creating a program that would offer money to the poor so they could secure a first mortgage.
– –
Countrywide and other lenders soon were promoting mortgages that allowed subprime borrowers to buy homes with little or no money down. The percentage of subprime borrowers who didn’t fully document their income and assets grew from about 17% in early 2000 to 44% in 2006, according to data from First American CoreLogic, a research firm in San Francisco.
– –
HUD says minority homeownership has increased by about 3.1 million since mid-2002, two million shy of President Bush’s goal. The Bush administration coupled cheerleading for homeownership with pressure on government-sponsored mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to provide funding for riskier mortgages. Both Democrats and Republicans stood by as Fannie and Freddie invested heavily in securities backed by subprime loans.
to whoever said that you can afford $2500 down adn $200 a month on a minimum wage job, i challenge you to put pencil to paper and prove that hypothesis. Having working in University City and Saint Louis Public Schools for 6 years now, i’ve definitely had an upclose look at poverty in our area. Poverty is a vicious cycle that it is very difficult to break. Think for a moment; if you weren’t raised with the working class/middle class values of your parents, would you be where you are? If you were “raised” by crack addicted parents who survived only with welfare, would you have made the same decisions you did?
Clearly there are many who care to offer their opinions in this forum with whom I’ll likely never agree, and again many that I will usually agree, but I have to tip my hat to both and declare Urban Review one of the greatest conversational assets we have. Some of the smartest and caring people show up here regularly, and I have to say thanks for the opportunity to contribute to this great ongoing discussion of St. Louis. Blog on.
I realize the question was supposed to be whether or not housing for all is a right, but I suggest that regardless we can still choose to make it a goal to strive for.
The biggest problem that I’ve seen does not come from lending policies, market pricing, or the availability of units. I’ve read statistics that peg the percentage of mental illness among the “chronically homeless” at 90%. This of course assumes that substance abuse issues can qualify as a mental illness which I realize is a whole different debate. I wonder how many people could be given a shelter only to wind up back on the streets anyway.
Those of us in south county are quite familiar with the skinny blonde homeless woman who regularly walks down Gravois, Watson, Tesson Ferry etc. My understanding is that she has a home but simple gets off her meds and starts wandering again. All rumor, but you see my point.
Much like teaching someone to fish rather than handing out salmon, I think we first must address the health problems that these people suffer from or they will never be able to maintain anything the government or “the market” gives them. But that is a difficult challenge in and of itself. Some people don’t want help, and even if you wished to help them against their will, the ACLU would complain.
“True enough, but if you think this ‘crisis’ exists totally of people that buy homes you find athestically appalling you’re kidding yourself.”
.
i made no such claim, but in my opinion those for whom a two-car garage just isn’t enough are more accountable than those for whom a park bench just isn’t enough.
Fannie and Freddie are government sponsored. They don’t pay state or local taxes. It is believed no matter what the government will bail them out. True, they don’t provide mortgages but they do buy mortgages with mortgage backed securities. This is another example of calling government back business “free market” and then trying to solve the problems created with more regulation. It’s a mess designed to get messier.
I can’t help it…I have to quote Neal Boortz here.
Every day it seems we hear endless stories about the mortgage and foreclosure crisis. The MSM just won’t give you the whole story. Just a few facts to chew on today as you listen to more foreclosure and bad loan horror stories.
This whole mess started because the media and liberals in congress were rattling their sabers over the lack of mortgages being offered to people with bad credit, limited incomes and poor job histories. So .. the loans were made, and now you see what happened. If the mortgage market had been left to operate without the threats of government interference things would have been quite a bit different.
In 1999 only about 62% of privately owned homes carried a mortgage. Not sure what the figure is today, probably a bit higher. But of all the homes out there with mortgages, 97% of those mortgages are up to date .. that means not in default. That means that when you hear the media bleating about the mortgage crisis you could be talking about 3% of 62% of all privately owned homes. For those of you educated in government schools that would mean about 1.86 homeowners out of every 100 that are having a problem. This is NOT a crises.
There are a lot of people out there who own homes who should be renting.
In about two years you’re going to hear the bedwetters in congress and the media together with some liberal “activist” groups griping about the lack of available mortgages for people with bad credit, limited incomes and poor job histories … and this whole mess will get cranked up again.
“about 1.86 homeowners out of every 100 that are having a problem.”
But,but,but….if there is no crisis how will they justify the “war on foreclosure”? If we don’t stop the mortgage crisis the terrorists win!!!!
If you can’t help but quote Neal Boortz, then you REALLY have some serious problems.
Wow, just like the war in Iraq, the poor economy, and high gasoline prices, it looks like the mortgage crisis is all because neo-liberals are somehow running the country from behind the curtain. It’s all part of their secret agenda.
Neo-liberals = American style Neo-conservatives for those who may be confused. Americans refer to liberalism as it pertains to the political left, but throughout the rest of (at lest G8 world) the term liberal refers to what Americans call conservative.
And I’m sure predatory lending practices and taking advantage of people’s lack of knowledge about mortgages, oh and lets not forget burying details in 60 pages of legal jargon had absolutely nothing to do with this crisis.
Exactly.
“Community Reinvestment Act”….this would be the source of the “predatory lending practices” of which you speak. When the Federal Government insists you lend to those that no right thinking person would lend to this is what you get. Any entity sponsered by the government is not part of the “free market”.
Thanks to you