A couple thoughts on the housing crisis we face:

First, the status quo is insane, and it’s insane to pretend it’s normal for 25%+ of the city to be poor enough for public housing but to have a 10 year long waitlist that you can’t even get on because *it’s been closed for years.*

As @bcappelbaum wrote, it does not actually have to be this way.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/opinion/sunday/homeless-crisis-affordable-housing-cities.html

Cities can’t do it alone, but the first step is refusing to accept this as some natural, immutable fact of life.

There are structural causes, and it’s within our grasp as a country to actually make ‘housing is a human right’ more than a slogan.

Instead, cities like Philly operate from the fact of extreme scarcity and oversee ‘affordable housing’ systems and homelessness programs that are grotesquely mismatched to the actual need.

It does no one any favors to ignore or obsfucate that.

Our 10-year housing plan does not meaningfully seek to quantify the actual unmet need for safe, stable, affordable housing or assess how we could rework our systems to reach radically more people. That’s because the problem is believed to be far too big.

https://www.phila.gov/media/20190115161305/Housing-Action-Plan-Final-for-Web.pdf

But that leaves us pretending that a system that is fundamentally designed to ration scare resources, where we spend too much money to create too little housing and set up roadblocks meant to ‘prioritize’ those believed to be ‘most deserving’, is sane.

It’s not.

Finally there is major new organizing around housing. Figuring out where we go from here—how we win a #HomesGuarantee & rethink public housing that was gutted by bipartisan admins & upend our approach to homelessness—it’s gonna be messy & hard. But it couldn’t be more important.

Also: although the problem is bigger than any one city’s tools, we still have choices we make every day and every budget cycle.

How we fund housing and things that reach the root causes of safety is inextricably linked to the question of how much we invest in mass incarceration.