Commentary—

Housing Still On The Back Burner

By William A. Collins

Mortgage may be

Your lament;

I can’t even,

Find a rent.

America really has no set of housing principles, guidelines, or laws that one could possibly dignify with the term “policy.” Any rare government action supporting housing is much like its equally disjointed actions in other economic sectors…say, health care, transportation, food, fuel, or environment. It just sort of fills in here and there when the private sector runs aground.

And such planning as there is mostly gets done by lobbyists. At the federal level, this means tax breaks for big developers and landowners. At the local level, it means protecting nice neighborhoods against the intrusion of godless apartments. Plenty of conflicts ensue, but rarely do the interests of plain folk needing an affordable place to live rate high.

Emergencies do, of course, intervene. Just now it is homeowners who got stung with bad mortgages. Earlier this year, at the time of the annual homeless count, the desperately poor got a momentary headline or two. And now the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailout law includes a nice chunk of annual money promising to be used for rental housing construction. But mostly the housing sector is left to its own devices. And as we have lately seen, those devices generally operate at the pleasure of banks, builders, and the stock market.

Further, from the skewed treatment that housing receives in the press, one would never surmise that a third of all Americans live in apartments. These subprime citizens are virtually invisible to policy makers, lobbyists, and the media. Not being heavy on disposable income, they’re not a registered segment of the American Dream. It’s also assumed that they don’t vote much.

And tenants can indeed cause trouble. When the last housing bubble burst, it drove down rents for the cute old triple-deckers in the south end of spiffy West Hartford. This offered the opportunity of a lifetime for thrifty blacks and Latinos long trapped in neighboring Hartford’s unkempt tenements. Many moved over that unguarded border, automatically integrating West Hartford’s schools. The resulting hostility reigns to this day.

But regardless of their town or personal virtues, renters receive few federal subsidies. It takes God-fearing, voting, homeowning, mortgage holders to get them. And the bigger the mortgage, the bigger the subsidy. Only really poor Section 8 certificate holders do as well, though we’ll hope for improvement under the new law.

Could it finally be time for a big change? Well, Wall Street’s holy grail of homeownership has now run into trouble — high gasoline prices. Suddenly we realize that we shouldn’t be driving so far, so what’s the point of continuing to subsidize home loans that largely encourage tearing up still more farmland?

Instead, we might abolish that old mortgage-interest tax deduction and spend the savings on mass transit, local parks, and downtown schools. Why not drag those suburbanites back into the cities? This could help with local tax revenues, urban revitalization, and economic integration. Mother Nature would love us, too.

But the states would have to take some initiative. Control of housing development is now left mostly to the tender mercies of local government, which like any other capitalist-oriented creature wants to attract the rich and boot out the poor. Consequently, 99 percent of new rentals built in downtrodden Bridgeport are not affordable by any standard measure. Only the states possess the authority and (hopefully) the will to alter this scenario and set civilized housing rules for all the towns.

Fortunately, the oil companies and the sheiks are on our side. Their greed is forcing us to think small, to downsize, and to realize that homeownership may not be for everybody. If we’re all going to live cheek-by-jowl, then living conditions, even for renters, have to be decent. Let’s see, we ought to get all that accomplished by about Christmas.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)