Rent increases will boost misery, not independence
Too bad when HUD Secretary Ben Carson visited Memphis in April, he didn’t get to talk to Tony Whitfield.
If he had, Carson would have seen a living contradiction to the stereotype that’s shaping his housing policies.
Two years ago, Whitfield, who struggled with homelessness after a divorce, helped organize a service called Lawn Chicks. He and other homeless and formerly homeless people mow lawns, pull weeds and do other horticultural work to make money.
“We’ve been doing it (yard work) every day, that’s why I’m worn out,” Whitfield said during a recent meeting of HOPE — Homeless Organizing for Power and Equality — and on a day when temperatures topped 90 degrees.
To hear Carson tell it, boosting the rent on people who live in federally subsidized housing — a change that would triple the rent for the poorest families from $50 to $150 a month — would make more of them self-sufficient.
But Whitfield, who ultimately found housing when his Social Security kicked in, and Cynthia Bailey, whose job in home health care pays too little for her to afford unsubsidized rent, said the problem isn’t that poor people don’t want to work.
The problem is that the jobs don’t pay enough — and the MATA bus system doesn’t go far enough to jobs that may be 35 miles from where they live.
Which means that many of the 10,600 Memphis households whose rent would increase under Carson’s plan wouldn’t be pushed into independence, but into the streets.
“We’re always talking about jobs, and about how jobs can make a difference, but there’s no jobs out there that pay a living wage,” Whitfield said. “That’s why we started Lawn Chicks. … We don’t want to work for no $7.25 an hour.”
On top of that, many people receiving subsidized rents are like Bailey. They work but don’t make much money.
But under Carson’s proposal, their rent would rise from 30 percent to 35 percent of their income. They also would lose deductions for their children, as well as expenses such as day care and medical costs.
That proposal doesn’t consider reallife struggles of people trying to escape poverty, Bailey said.
“Think about this. If MATA keeps changing the routes, and that person is staying in Section 8 housing and their rent goes up, they’ll have to get another job. But if that job is suddenly not on the route, what will they do?
“You have mothers who don’t have that much income already, so you’re raising the rent on people who are already struggling.” That’s wrong.
On one level, Carson has a point. The goal of any subsidized help, whether housing or otherwise, is to temporarily help people survive poverty.
But the only way that works is if other systems bolster their climb out of poverty. And in Tennessee, where the minimum wage is stuck at $7.25 an hour, and in Memphis, which is already the eviction capital of the nation and where people must rely on an unreliable bus system, Carson’s proposal will bolster desperation, not independence.
Whitfield and Bailey could have told him that. They could have told him that if he really wants to fix this issue, the answer is to fix the economic and social system that keeps many people impoverished.
Because people aren’t in subsidized housing because they’re trying to beat the system, but because they’re trying to survive it.
Sad that Carson and others like him choose to see it the other way around.