Reading Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize winning Evicted has left me feeling nauseous and discombobulated. Thanks to a recent reading of Palma Strand’s article “’Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall…’: Reflections on Fairness and Housing in the Omaha-Council Bluffs Region as well as viewing of the Open Sky Policy Institute’s Policy and Equity Webinars, I had recently become aware of the effects of 1930’s redlining practices on Omaha’s current situation via statistics like these:
- Half as many Black households own homes as white households.
- Due to middle class wealth being accumulated by home-equity, the wealth of Omaha whites is 20 times that of Blacks.
- Due to our city custom of annexing private neighborhoods built by private developers, we have a severe lack of affordable housing in Western Omaha as well as a city-wide shortage. (There is affordable housing available for only 19% of households eligible for it).
- Our city’s Western-most school district is 88% white with 6% of students receiving free or reduced lunch while our Eastern-most district is 29% white with 74% receiving free and reduced lunch.
- Renters living in non-white census tracts are evicted at a rate of 41 per tract, per year compared to 17 for those living in white census tracts.
- Most of these evictions are in properties with open code violations, meaning the renters are awaiting the landlord to fix a roof, toilet, hole in the wall, etc. (the average critical code case is open 672 days in Omaha).
I wasn’t prepared for the above stats to be made flesh and blood through the stories of those affected by federal, state and local policies in Evicted. To witness trauma upon trauma being compounded by a complex system of access and denial, I was left frustrated and dismayed. The people I met in Desmond’s work are from Milwaukee, but I am sure their stories echo those of Omaha’s most unfortunate renters: not calling the police on domestic violence due to fear of being evicted for “nuisance calls”, deciding between utilities, food or rent, taking sponge baths with boiled water for lack of a functioning shower, five school transfers during middle school alone due to evictions and moves, sleeping five to a bed-less room, having to take what’s available because there are twenty other families who would happily take the apartment with a hole in the roof and a busted out window…
Why aren’t landlords being held to the standard of making sure apartments are habitable? Why isn’t local, state and federal government doing something to address the problem of evictions for the short-term? And long-term, why isn’t there enough affordable housing to keep the market competitive? Desmond provides options to address the affordable housing crisis:
- Provide legal counsel for all those going to eviction court. Studies have shown that evictions decrease up to 90% when legal counsel is provided. LB419, discussed last week in committee, addresses just this.
- Create federal housing vouchers to subsidize renters so that no one pays more than 30% of their income on housing. (Some pay up to 70% of their minimum wage income on uninhabitable shelter.) This would require a statute making it illegal for a landlord to discriminate based upon income level. LB196, also discussed last week, addresses income discrimination.
- Create more Affordable Housing. This will require brainpower, creativity and heartfelt intention.
I can already hear the complaints about subsidies, taxes and the need for hard work, but did you know that of the $190 billion the federal government spent in 2015 to help Americans buy or rent homes, the seven million households with incomes of more than $200,000 received more than the 50+ million households with incomes of less than 50k?
The rich are getting subsidies that far exceed those of the poor.
Of course they are, they have the means to lobby for their interests. They have access to health, wealth and education to keep the status quo, or to improve it in their favor. But is a growing divide between have and have-nots what we want as a nation? What does it mean to be American? Are our fates not entwined?
British- Nigerian author Nels Abbey says,
Racism is such a tax. It’s a burden on you. It’s a financial tax, it’s an emotional tax, it’s a spiritual tax, it’s a political tax.
I lobby to dump the energetic tax of racism and to increase our wealth taxes so that we as a united America can transform the structures skewed to advantage the already advantaged.
*photo credit to Philip Montgomery