Federal housing programs enacted in the name of the poor have harmed, not helped, their ability to climb the economic ladder. It’s time to try something else.
The Democratic convention may have emphasized Joe Biden’s character and life story, but it’s well worth scrutinizing the details of his policy proposals, too. Take a close look at his proposed $645 billion housing plan — “The Biden Plan for Investing in Our Communities Through Housing” — and you’ll find warmed-over ideas that have failed before and would harm the poor and minority households they’re ostensibly aimed at helping. The plan’s fundamental flaw is the assumption that the private housing market fails the poor, when in truth government-subsidized housing bears the primary blame for harming the poor.
The Biden–Harris plan is premised on the idea that millions of households pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing, and that the 30 percent benchmark should be a ceiling on costs. This superficially unobjectionable idea has been a HUD goal for years, but has actually had pernicious effects. When low income serves to qualify households for subsidized housing, that provides an incentive for, say, the formation of single-parent households — which dominate public-housing and housing-voucher programs and have no reason to seek a second income, whether by marriage or just taking in a roommate. Higher income actually disqualifies households from getting into subsidized housing, leading to higher rents for non-subsidized units.
The 30 percent ceiling must be considered one of the causes of the high rate of single parenthood in the African-American community, which is disproportionately represented in all subsidized housing. Blacks comprise 42 percent of all public and subsidized households, only 4 percent of which include two parents and children, and 75 percent of which are female-headed. Biden would vastly expand the number of such households on housing assistance by providing a housing voucher to any household paying more than 30 percent of its income toward rent.
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Howard Husock is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where he directs the Tocqueville Project, and author of the new book, Who Killed Civil Society?
This piece originally appeared in National Review Online