SARAH AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING
I read an article yesterday about a woman named Sarah who lives in Culver City, California. She is about 25, a college graduate, who has a job as an administrative assistant bringing her about $4000 a month. She has a car and I believe dresses well but she doesn’t have a home of her own. She isn’t homeless in the way many people think of when they think of a homeless person. She doesn’t sleep on the sidewalk or shuffle around town all day sitting in the public library to keep warm or visiting soup kitchens.
She just doesn’t have a regular place to sleep, a room or two that are hers where she has privacy. Sometimes she sleeps in her car, sometimes she sleeps in the garage of her grandmother’s house where her mother has been sleeping for 15 years, sometimes she watches TV in the house with her grandfather, sometimes when she has to have privacy she books a night in a hotel for $150.
She doesn’t have a home of her own for several reasons. One is because even very small apartments rent for about $2000, eating up half of her income. But even those apartments, which she would accept, are so few that even when she applies for one she is never accepted. Part of this is because credit card debt gives her a very poor credit rating and landlords are very choosy about whom they will accept.
But as I was reading her story, two things struck me. One was that I think of a house as home, a place where a family grows up, that you decorate and make cozy, that is almost an extension of your personality. It is you.
I don’t think of a house as giving you protection from the cold, a place where you can cook your own meals, take showers and sleep comfortably. This is a completely different way of looking at a house, as a place to get out of the cold and the rain, rather than a cozy nest. A house is a basic necessity. But in my naïveté I don’t think of it as a basic necessity any more than I think of clothes as a basic necessity, rather than a way to ornment yourself, or warmth as a basic necessity rather than a given, or food as a basic necessity rather than a pleasant form of stimulation.
But Sarah does see it as a basic necessity and she can’t have it. And this turns my feeling about housing upside down. Of course everyone should have a room of their own, everyone should have enough basic food, everyone should have health care, everyone should have an education. There are a number of things every person should have.
And yet we have a society in which many people have much more of so much of everything that they pile up things that they never use and certainly don’t need.
Homelessness is not a failure on the part of some people, it is failure on the part of the society that doesn’t provide everyone who needs it basic low cost housing. Apparently home builders don’t make money on low cost affordable housing as they do on luxury million dollar houses and so that is what they build.
And I realize that all the trends that work in my favor are working against Sarah. We bought a $60,000 house on College View Drive with a marvelous view over the mountains in 1990 but borrowed $30,000 from my parents which they never wanted us to pay them back. So we bought a house for $30,000 with a marvelous view which now lists on Zillow, I’ve been told for $300,000. I could not afford this house now and neither can Sarah. But the fact that my house has shot up in price is because all housing in Asheville has shot through the roof, which means that no one like Sarah can even rent an apartment. Plus, Asheville is a tourist town and anyone with a spare apartment is renting it out as an Airbnb for $200 a night so there are no apartments left to rent.
I am not exactly complicit, but my good fortune is Sarah’s, and any young single person wanting to live and work in Asheville’s bad fortune. So if people like Sarah are going to be able to rent a place of their own in Asheville then there needs to be so much affordable housing built so that the value of all housing will come back down to affordable levels for everyone. I am, very unfairly, doing well while others are homeless or housing insecure, going from place to place to find a place to stay. It is not a good thing when housing values go up, it is a good thing if they drop and drop. People like me shouldn’t have a house as an investment, it should be considered a basic necessity for everyone.
So that is the first thing that disturbs me about Sarah’s story, but a second realization disturbs me even more. Sarah’s monthly income and my monthly income are not that far apart.
On Sarah’s $4000 monthly income the apartment, if she could get one for $2000, and she could if she paid $3000, eats up almost all of her income. Her car, especially if she is still making payments, probably costs another $500. She needs nice clothes at work and it cost much more to each if you don’t have a kitchen. And she has to pay a lot for for occasional privacy by booking a hotel. Sarah is living on the edge. And since she probably doens’t have health insurance, a major or not major medical emergency could wipe her out. Sarah also doesn’t have any backup.
On a comparable income I don’t pay for housing, and in fact what she would have to pay for housing is enough for me to fly to Greece and live for a month, or to Morocco, or to Costa Rica or north India. And I can do that because I am not working. I don’t drive much and my cars are old so I have few automobile expenses. I don’t send money on clothes and can feed myself cheaply from Trader Joe. And because I have Medicare and AARP supplemental insurance I am protected from high health care costs. In addition I get about $2000 a month in Social Security which she doesn’t get.
So, our incomes are about the same and I am living the life of Riley while Sarah is sleeping in her grandmother’s garage and is deep in credit card debt. That is what strikes me the most about Sarah’s story.
It isn’t how much money you make, it is how much you have to spend and the freedom to travel that separates us. I know many retired middle class Americans have much larger monthly incomes than I do, but I don’t envy them because I have everything I want and the more I own the more what I own will burden me. I already have much too much stuff and have to get rid of things. I feel like I live on a mansion on the hill.
But Sarah’s story disturbs me because it seems unfair.
And then I think of the families living in the Ramesh Singh Boundary in Varanasi in plastic roofed and walled shelters 12 feet by 12 feet, six in a room and one huge bed and the kitchen in a corner. But I will think about that another day.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 