Guess what? Affordable housing is an election issue

About a dozen years ago, New York City saw the rise of a third political party that announced its platform in its name: The Rent Is Too Damn High Party. Minneapolis and St. Paul haven't spawned a similar force — yet. But the many mentions of affordable housing by candidates in this year's city elections suggest that somebody would be smart to register a similar domain name with "MN" attached.

All the campaign talk about affordable housing makes this weekend's visit to the Twin Cities by Matthew Desmond particularly timely. Desmond, a Princeton University sociologist, is the author of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City"; he was the featured speaker at a fundraiser Saturday for the Minnesota Housing Partnership and Alliance Housing.

The American city he profiled is Milwaukee, circa 2008 to 2011. His all-too-real stories about poverty, addiction, disability, mental illness, domestic abuse and just plain bad luck — and the landlords who exploit people in such circumstances — are shocking. My reaction — "That can't happen here!" — is typical of non-Milwaukee readers, Desmond told me in a conversation a few days before his visit. Many readers tell him that they don't believe similar struggles happen in their city, only to discover with just a little investigation that, sadly, they do.

My investigation found that in 2016, 8,976 evictions were filed in Hennepin and Ramsey County courts. That doesn't include all the informal evictions that don't involve the courts, which advocates report to be far more numerous. In the city of Minneapolis, there were more than 3,000 eviction actions in court last year. Two thirds of them typically result in "tenant displacement." That's 2,000 households a year booted from their homes on short notice, often with no place to go. In Minneapolis, nonpayment of rent accounts for more than 90 percent of eviction filings. The typical amount owed: $1,700.

Further, in the Twin Cities region, nearly half of renters pay more than 30 percent of their monthly household incomes for rent. That's the traditional standard of "affordability." One in four renters pay rent that consumes more than half of their incomes. Since 2000, Minneapolis renters have on average seen their incomes decrease and their rents increase.

That rent increase reflects a decreasing supply of affordable housing. According to a Metropolitan Council estimate, the city had 11,500 fewer units that were affordable to a family earning half the area's median income in 2014, compared with 2000. That's not because the city made no effort to preserve affordable housing. Rather, it's that the city's efforts did not keep up with the pace of gentrification in the years since the Great Recession — years that have seen Minneapolis become home to more renters than homeowners.

It's the same story in most American cities, Desmond said. "Incomes for most Americans have been flat, but housing costs have soared," he said. "Between 1995 and today, median rent has increased by 70 percent across America. It might be more in Minneapolis. Minneapolis is a high-cost market, a tight market. You have a lot more folks wanting to live there.

That squeeze is bad news in a region where a shortage of human capital is looming as the biggest drag on the economy in the next decade. Desmond said it's also news that often goes unnoticed. A large share of the Americans who don't live with this problem every day mistakenly believe that federal housing subsidies (aka Section 8) put vouchers in the hands of a majority of low-income renters, he said. In fact, Section 8 reaches fewer than 1 in 4 renters whose incomes are low enough to make them eligible for help.

The fact that nearly every Minneapolis and St. Paul politician this season is talking about affordable housing — and every one I've met calls it a "crisis" — should do something to boost local awareness of the problem. It's also building an expectation that city governments — not counties, the state or the feds — have a responsibility to intervene in a marketplace whose workings are not producing a humane result.

"The federal government has disinvested from affordable housing programs, and mayors wind up being the face of that disinvestment," Desmond observed. He wishes it were otherwise, he added. Section 8 "vouchers are responsible for keeping a few million people above the poverty line. Kids who live in vouchered homes eat better, they're healthier, they live in safer neighborhoods, they don't move as much. That program is pretty darned successful," he said.

He disagrees with those who say that the right response is to build more public housing. "We can't build our way out of this. We can't do it to the scale of the problem. Besides, there's no study in the universe that says we can offer housing of equal quality for less cost, than through the voucher program. it's the most efficient program we have."

Desmond may be right about the prospect for more publicly owned housing for the poor. But he'll find plenty of people in the Twin Cities this weekend who want state or local governments to help — or nudge, or compel — private or nonprofit developers to build more affordable units, often as part of a market-rate development. That "inclusive zoning" is one of the proposals most often heard this fall.

This is a crisis that has yet to produce much consensus about how to proceed.

A few months ago, the Editorial Board called for a gubernatorial-level commission to recommend a strategy for addressing the housing ills that are becoming a drag on prosperity throughout the state. I'd second that motion. And I'd say that no matter who wins the city elections on Nov. 7, mayoral-level commissions are in order in both cities to sort through the ideas that this campaign generated and offer guidance about which notions belong in a citywide housing strategy. If it could be a two-city or a regional housing strategy, so much the better.

"Evicted" makes a moving case for change. The people whose stories Desmond tells are evicted because they are poor. But they are also poor because they were evicted or otherwise abused by a housing system that's rigged against them.

Desmond said that since his book's release, he's met "so many people around the country who have given their lives over to this issue. They've been fighting to reduce family homelessness and prevent evictions for years and years. The book has opened some doors for them." He's proud to be their ally, he said.

If candidates for city offices are true to their words in this fall's campaign, Minnesota's advocates for affordable housing should find more allies in the twin City Halls come January.