Our Affordable Housing Policies Must Reflect Our Values

In my mid-twenties I worked as an environmental advocate in Washington D.C.

Several times a week I visited dozens of offices of Congressional staff on Capitol Hill in an attempt to persuade their bosses--our United States Senators and Representatives--to work towards passing some sort of climate legislation to regulate carbon emissions.

It was 2005, the year Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and destroyed homes, livelihoods and lives--a sign of the more severe weather events that would become more commonplace as the century progressed. On the heels of Katrina, just at a time when families (especially Black families) were in more dire need of aid from our federal government, it instead passed a national Budget Reconciliation bill that gutted social safety net programs like SNAP and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

We could not convince Congress to pass that climate bill.

The primary argument? It was not economically feasible. Fossil fuels were cheap and plentiful, renewables were expensive, went the argument--again and again and again. That, and the fossil fuel industry would not be “happy.”

I couldn’t wrap my head around the callousness. But I felt a part of myself die inside a little every day as I went office to office to essentially be told the same thing: money mattered more than human lives, more than animal lives, more than our very planet--our only home. Maybe one day, in the future, we could address this issue. But not today. Never today.

The frustration dealing with these responses was how the economy was treated as an immutable force, rather than a human construct we could revise to reflect our evolving values. Fossil fuels are cheap because we subsidize them; however, renewables could be cheaper if we subsidized them at a competitive or superior rate instead. It was a matter of will.

Fifteen years later, our country has still failed to pass any kind of binding climate bill and our world is burning. The window to act aggressively to avoid catastrophic climate change is about to close, but at least our economy has remained in basically the same iteration, with the rich becoming ever richer and the poor becoming poorer and dying in greater numbers.

Why am I bringing up climate change in an op-ed that is supposed to be about affordable housing?

Because in my efforts to address Arlington’s stark affordable housing shortage by shoring up our inclusionary zoning (with Warrant Article #45) I hit the same wall of arguments: the economics of affordable housing just isn’t enough to make the industry (i.e., developers) happy.

It never occurred to Town officials how inherently insulting this argument is to me--a low income, disabled woman who lives in affordable housing--as one that is based on the reduction of people like me to commodities that were then deemed not valuable enough by the industry to properly invest in...and so, disposable.

And how has the collective commodification of human beings worked out for our society?

Our country has seen the loss of over a half-million lives due to the coronavirus, almost 18,000 in Massachusetts since March 2020. Our state has seen the loss of over 1 million jobs in the past year, with over 315,000 of those losses occurring in our metro area. Thousands of eviction cases have been filed in the Bay State, despite the CDC moratorium. Infection and mortality rates of COVID-19 have disproportionately impacted Black and brown people, poor people, and people with disabilities. It has exposed and exacerbated every inequity. And in almost no place is this more evident than in the area of housing.

Even before the pandemic hit, homelessness in the general region had increased by 40% in the past decade. And Arlington is culpable as well.

Our lack of genuine affordable housing has played a role in the larger homelessness crisis in the region. Locally, our inability to add much to our affordable housing stock--only a paltry .1% in 20 years--has contributed to our relative homogeneity.

Arlington is rapidly losing income and generational diversity and has not meaningfully added African American and Latinx households to our population since the turn of the century. We are quickly becoming a prohibitively affluent and highly exclusionary enclave.

To be sure, relying on the same unfettered market that caused this problem in the first place to solve it will not work. Building more and more luxury units will not trickle down to help the rest of us. And to be clear, the rest of us are not fringe. We are actually the majority. In Boston, more than half of all adults have an annual income of less than $35,000. Of Boston’s middle class, most make incomes in the $50,000 to $60,000 range.

Where are all these people supposed to live when the National Low Income Housing Coalition finds one must make nearly $70,000 a year to afford a modest two-bedroom in the area at the lower end of fair market rent in Boston metro? How do those economics work? Answer: it doesn’t.

Without affordable housing priced at rates accessible to the incomes of the majority, most people will be pushed out altogether, or forced into the streets or congregant settings like shelters, nursing homes and institutions. Many will die. Many have already died.

Yet, more and more funds that would otherwise go to lower income households instead are being funneled into so-called “workforce housing” programs that target households making close to or even above six figure salaries. To address this locally, we have a warrant (Warrant Article #21) to try to earmark a majority of funds in our Affordable Housing Trust Fund to go to those lower income households most in need.

Despite the industry argument that the economics do not favor increases in affordable housing (so similar to the fossil fuel industry’s argument that the economics is not favorable to carbon regulation or increases in solar and wind energy), this concern is overstated.

As an economics reporter who has covered the housing beat extensively, I’ve spent a lot of time elbow-deep in the peer review research. And the overall consensus is that if and when communities make strong commitments to affordable housing, and make concrete moves to adequately subsidize it, it can work.

In the past six months, there have been significant changes to the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program on both the state and federal levels that significantly increase the value of these credits and make creating more affordable housing a viable option for developers. Other new programs include $10 million in state funding dedicated to climate resilient housing that requires a quarter of the units in such developments to be affordable housing priced at or below 60% Area Median Income. And that is just a small sampling of the many new programs Arlington could potentially take advantage of if it decides to adopt our housing warrants.

What this issue inevitably boils down to is: what are our true values as a town?

People can say they care about low income people, disabled people, or people of color. But if we aren’t willing to create bold policies that actually enable them to live here as our neighbors, especially at this pivotal moment of moral reckoning against the backdrop of a once-in-a-century pandemic--then those words really don’t amount to much.

Because values are ultimately illustrated in actions, not with words.