Homelessness 2023

A number of posts have dealt with homelessness.  

HUD Annual Homelessness Assessment Report:

• On a single night in 2023, roughly 653,100 people – or about 20 of every 10,000 people in the United States – were experiencing homelessness. Six in ten people were experiencing sheltered homelessness—that is, in an emergency shelter (ES), transitional housing (TH), or safe haven (SH) program—while the remaining four in ten were experiencing unsheltered homelessness in places not meant for human habitation.
• Experiences of homelessness increased nationwide across all household types. Between 2022 and 2023, the number of people experiencing homelessness increased by 12 percent, or roughly 70,650 more people.
• The 2023 Point-in-Time (PIT) count is the highest number of people reported as experiencing homelessness on a single night since reporting began in 2007. The overall increase reflects the increases in all homeless populations. Homelessness among persons in families with children experiencing homelessness rose by 16 percent. Similarly, the rise in individuals experiencing homelessness was 11 percent.
• People who identify as Black, African American, or African, as well as Indigenous people (including Native Americans and Pacific Islanders), continue to be overrepresented among the population experiencing homelessness. People who identify as Black made up just 13 percent of the total U.S. population and 21 percent of the U.S. population living in poverty but comprised 37 percent of all people experiencing homelessness and 50 percent of people experiencing homelessness as members of families with children. 

SHH.. Maybe "Broken Windows" Was Right After All

A number of posts have dealt with homelessness.  California's failure in this respect is noteworthy.

Virginia Postrel points out that homelessness is two problems, not one.  The first is housing availability, which government can remedy by opening the way to more housing.  The second is public order.

A Ninth Circuit court decision equating bans on living on sidewalks and parks with cruel and unusual punishment limits what public authorities can do. (When the court recently affirmed the matter en banc, its conservative judges issued scathing dissents.) Along from the legal restrictions, there is a powerful cultural taboo against considering the public order aspects of homelessness, as opposed to its humanitarian dimension. We’re supposed to choose empathy over order, as though they can’t coexist.

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[P]olicies to address the housing problem, however worthy, do not make complaints about the public order problem illegitimate. Normal people want to safely use the sidewalks, parks, subways, and bus stops that supposedly exist for everyone’s benefit. Safe camping sites, like the ones San Diego has opened, are a constructive alternative—but they’re paired with restrictions on “unsafe camping” that push people to use them. More could be done to provide similar safe spots, with toilet facilities, for people living in RVs they don’t want to give up in return for inside shelter that might later disappear. (In their situation, I’d make the same decision.)

If you want to build political support for the “mostly stable people who are quietly living in cars,” you can’t do it by pretending you’re addressing the visible problems that scare normal people. The current bait-and-switch breeds resentment, undermines civic institutions, and drives away the productive inhabitants on whom flourishing cities depend.

Homeless in California and Texas

Marisa Kendall at CalMatters:

Texas as a whole last year recorded a 28% drop in homelessness since 2012, while California’s homeless population grew by 43% over the same period. In Texas, 81 people are homeless for every 100,000 residents. In California, the rate is more than five times worse.

And that’s despite the fact that Texas spends far fewer state dollars on homelessness. Last year, not counting federal money, Texas put $19.7 million into its three main homelessness programs – equal to about $806 per unhoused person. California, on the other hand, poured $1.85 billion into its three main programs – or $10,786 for every unhoused person.

How do residents view homelessness in each state? The difference is stark: Homelessness is the No. 1 issue on California voters’ minds, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll. In a 2020 poll of Texas residents, it didn’t even crack the top 10.

From the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority

The 2023 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count results were released today, showing a 9% rise in homelessness on any given night in Los Angeles County to an estimated 75,518 people and a 10% rise in the City of Los Angeles to an estimated 46,260 people. While this year’s increases are slightly lower than previous year-over-year increases in the homeless count, they continue a steady growth trend of people experiencing homelessness in the annual Point-in-Time Count (PIT Count).

The rise in LA County’s homeless population coincides with increases in major cities across the United States. Chicago and Portland saw double-digit increases (+57% and +20% respectively), while several Southern California counties experienced increases larger than Los Angeles, including San Bernadino (+26%), San Diego (+22%), Kern (+22%), and Riverside (+12%).

While the number of unhoused people in interim housing held steady at 20,363, the rise in the number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness coincided with the overall increase in the PIT Count.

Leaving California

 Benjamin Oreskes at LAT:

The findings of a new poll from a consortium of local nonprofits aiming to take stock of the state’s mood point to a contradiction playing out across the Golden State: People are pleased by the bounty the country’s largest state had to offer and mostly favor its liberal attitudes on social issues, but are also far more concerned about their livelihoods than last year.

Nearly half of those surveyed (46%) said they struggle to save money or pay for unexpected expenses even as they scrape by — a jump of 6 percentage points since April 2022 when residents were asked the same question. About 35% said they live comfortably and 18% said they find it difficult to make ends meet every month.

More than 40% of residents say they’re contemplating moving out of California, with nearly half of them saying they’re considering that “very seriously.” About 61% pointed to the high cost of living here as the reason they’d go. People of color are far more likely to say that the expense of living in California is the reason they might leave. About 71% of residents who are either Black or Asian/Pacific Islander and considering relocating cited the cost of living.

Homelessness in California

A number of posts have dealt with homelessness.  

 A release from UC San Francisco:

The University of California, San Francisco BenioffHomelessness and Housing Initiative (BHHI) today released the largest representative study ofhomelessness in the United States since the mid-1990s, providing a comprehensive look at the causes and consequences of homelessness in California and recommending policy changes to shape programs in response. 

The California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness (CASPEH) used surveys and in-depth interviews to develop a clear portrait of homelessness in California, where 30% of the nation’s homeless population and half of the unsheltered population live.

The study found that, for most of the participants, the cost of housing had simply become unsustainable. Participants reported a median monthly household income of $960 in the six months prior to their homelessness, and most believed that either rental subsidies or one-time financial help would have prevented their homelessness.

...  

The study found that the state’s homeless popula`on is aging, with 47% of all adults aged 50 or older, and that Black and Native Americans are dramatically overrepresented. Contrary to myths of homeless migration, most were Californians: 90% of participants lost their last housing in California and 75% of participants live in the same county as where they were last housed. Nine out of ten spent time unsheltered since they became homeless. The median length of homelessness was 22 months.

One in five participants entered homelessness from an institution. Of those who hadn’t been in an institution, 60% came from situations where they weren’t leaseholders, such as doubling up with family or friends. Participants were disconnected from the job market and services, but almost half were looking for work.

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 Participants had experienced multiple forms of trauma throughout their life, increasing their vulnerability to homelessness and contributing to their mental health and substance use challenges. Two-thirds reported current mental health symptoms and more than a third experienced physical or sexual violence during this episode of homelessness. More than a third had visited an Emergency Department in the prior six months. One in five who used substances reported that they wanted substance use treatment—but couldn’t get it. 

College Inequality

Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality. The effects of inequality reach many corners of American life.

Ari Pinkus at The American Communities Project:

Nationally, just 34% of Americans ages 25 or older have a four-year college degree. The numbers are very uneven around the country. The range runs from 42% in the affluent, multicultural, professional Urban Suburbs to 16% in the young, rural, and low-income Native American Lands.

In College Town counties, 38% have college degrees, just above the national average. These 171 counties, often located in and around more rural, settled areas, present a good example of varying educational levels colliding. After all, many are not yet college graduates. Others hold master’s, professional, and/or doctoral degrees. Still others outside the college structure may not have nor be on track toward a bachelor’s degree. It’s not uncommon for town-gown relations to be strained, even contentious at times.

Meanwhile, in Rural Middle America and Aging Farmlands, comprising 896 counties in the Plains and the country’s upper tier, many have derided college and are pushing for a broader educational focus on the trades. In each county type, just over 20% have college degrees. While bachelor’s degree percentages are lowest in Native American Lands, bachelor’s figures are also low in young, rural, Hispanic Centers in the West, Southwest, and Florida; Working Class Country, lower-income communities in Appalachia; and Evangelical Hubs, lower-income communities in the South with high numbers of Evangelical adherents.

In 2020, Barabara Jacoby wrote at Inside Higher Ed:

The “new normal” we’re all talking about entails huge changes to residence halls and residential life. But, with or without COVID-19, the stark reality is that less than 15 percent of college students live on campuses. And their number is likely to shrink this fall as more students have to commute from home because of coronavirus-related family and financial issues or are forced into off-campus housing as a result of reducing dorm density.

Commuter students are defined as those who do not live in institution-owned housing on campuses. They make up more than 85 percent of today’s college students.

Their numbers include students of traditional age who live with their parents, those who live in rental housing near the campus, adults with full-time careers and parents living with their own children. Forty-one percent are 25 years of age or older, and 39 percent attend part-time. As many as 70 percent of full-time students work while enrolled in college, as do almost all part-time students. Those characteristics are more likely to apply to commuter students and, despite COVID-19’s disruptions, are also more likely to hold true in the upcoming academic year.

New York and California are Losing Affluent Taxpayers

 Justin Fox at Bloomberg:

New York has been losing people to other states for a while. But something new happened during the pandemioc: The people who left had higher incomes than those who stayed behind — much higher.

The 2020-21 numbers here were released in late April by the Internal Revenue Service. They sort taxpayers by whether and where they moved between filing their taxes in 2020 and filing them in 2021; the adjusted gross incomes are for the 2020 tax year. It has been two years since May 17, 2021 — that year’s belated income tax filing deadline — and a lot has changed. But New York has continued to lose population, and if the trend depicted above were to continue, even in less extreme form, it would be disastrous for the finances of a state that relies on income taxes paid by those making $200,000 or more a year for almost half its revenue. (That is, before the pandemic in 2019, personal income taxes accounted for 65% of state revenue, and those making $200,000 or more paid 71% of the income taxes.)

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The role of taxes in driving interstate migration is often exaggerated, but it’s not nothing. In a couple of recent papers, Joshua Rauh of the Stanford Graduate School of Business has shown that the percentage of very-high-income taxpayers leaving California jumped in the wake of one, a 2013 increase in the state’s top income tax rate, two, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Job Act’s curtailing of state and local tax deductions and three, the pandemic. Still, that’s not many people and for years those leaving California and New York have been mainly lower— and middle-income residents for whom expensive housing and other cost-of-living issues probably played a bigger role than tax rates per se.

In New York, the initial pandemic exodus was led by those who could afford to leave quickly and could work remotely. The composition seems to have shifted since then, with affluent Manhattan gaining population from mid-2021 to mid-2022, according to Census Bureau estimates, and the state’s poorest county, the Bronx, losing the biggest percentage of population. (The recent New York Times analysis showing an accelerating exodus of college graduates from the New York City metro area relies on different Census numbers that aren’t available yet for 2022.) New York has been finding all sorts of different ways to drive away all sorts of different people — and it looks as if that’s about to start seriously hampering the state’s ability to pay its bills.

Government Data Visualization

 Philip Bump at WP:

The office of Los Angeles County Controller Kenneth Mejia is an exception.

Mejia, elected to the office last year, has a dedicated portal at which his team shares visualizations it has created. Below is a grim example, showing the locations in the city where unhoused residents have died in recent years.

(Los Angeles City Controller)

Sergio Perez, chief of accountability and oversight for Mejia’s office, explained that the visualizations were part of an effort to make the large amount of information gathered by the office more accessible. There are public-facing ones, like the map above, and ones created for policymakers that remain private.

“We think that the data should be leading public policy decisions, not assumptions or untested beliefs,” Perez told me when we spoke by phone on Friday.

That means a particular focus on housing issues, obviously a key concern for Angelenos and an issue that overlaps with homelessness. The controller’s office also has a map of affordable housing agreements enacted by the city over the last decade, essentially providing an index of places that housing is not (necessarily) egregiously expensive.

(Los Angeles City Controller)

The person behind these visualizations is the office’s director of technology and innovation, 19-year-old Kyler Chen. (“I’ve never felt older than when I’m in a meeting with him," Perez told me.) He and two interns collect and organize data before creating the presentations that are shared with the public. The intent, Perez said, was to “fill public data vacuums” that exist either because data is inaccessible or out-of-date.

A map showing areas where unhoused people are prohibited from congregating. (Los Angeles City Controller)

Segregation in Kansas City

Mark Dent at WP:

The Chiefs, who play the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday in a Super Bowl featuring two Black starting quarterbacks for the first time, have a proud legacy of elevating Black talent. The franchise’s early teams were stocked with overlooked stars from historically Black colleges and universities. Lamar Hunt, the team’s owner, saw the NFL’s racial biases as a market inefficiency to exploit.

But the city wasn’t nearly as hospitable. Black players such as Garrett struggled to find housing in a metro area that was among the most redlined in the country.

No place epitomized segregation like the Country Club District. In the first half of the 20th century, developer J.C. Nichols built a wonderland of posh homes, tree-lined vistas and cul-de-sacs that spanned more than 5,000 acres, emanating from the middle of Kansas City, Mo., into Kansas, where he planned several more suburban communities. “If Webster was asked to provide another synonym for city planning,” wrote one New York City journalist in 1925, “his answer would be Jesse Clyde Nichols, Kansas City, Mo.”

Restrictive covenants were key to Nichols’s neighborhoods. He legally bound entire subdivisions to ban Black people from buying homes. To ensure no one broke the covenants, he created homeowners associations to enforce the rules. Nichols wasn’t the first person to use these innovations, but he was the first to apply them over such a large area in a systematic fashion, and he spread his techniques across the country as an influential member of various real estate trade groups.

 The story of Nichols and Kansas City’s extreme segregation, exemplified by a de facto dividing line at Troost Avenue, have become an increasingly discussed subject among residents over the past decade. What is less known is how those policies were applied to Kansas City’s emblem of pioneering equality in the NFL: the Chiefs.

Homeless in California

A number of posts have dealt with homelessness.  

The problem is highly visible in California.  Because of its high cost of housing, the supplemental poverty measure puts its poverty rate as the highest in the nation.

Emily Hoeven at CalMatters:

California accounted for 30% of the country’s homeless population in 2022, despite making up less than 12% of the total population, according to federal data released Monday. It was also home to 50% of the country’s unsheltered people, or those living in places such as streets, cars or parks.

Based on a biennial point-in-time tally of people sleeping in shelters, cars and on the street — which California cities and counties conducted earlier this year for the first time since 2019 due to pandemic postponements — the U.S. Department of Housing and Community Development estimated that more than 172,000 Californians experienced homelessness this year. That represents an adjusted total of raw numbers first calculated in October by CalMatters housing reporter Manuela Tobias. Nationally, the homeless population ticked up by 0.3% to more than 582,000.

The federal government also awarded California first place in a number of other categories: 

• It had the country’s highest homelessness rate, with 44 people out of every 100,000 experiencing homelessness.
• It had the largest increase in its homeless population of any other state from both 2020-22 (6.2%) and 2007-22 (23.4%), whereas Florida — a state often in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s crosshairs as he spars with its Republican governor Ron DeSantis — saw a 5.6% decrease from 2020-22 and notched the country’s biggest decrease from 2007-22 (46%).
• California had nine times more unsheltered people than Washington, the state with the next highest number (115,491 people compared to 12,668 people).

Homelessness in California

A number of posts have dealt with homelessness.  

The problem is highly visible in California.  Because of its high cost of housing, the supplemental poverty measure puts its poverty rate as the highest in the nation.

 Emily Hoeven at CalMatters:

It’s the white whale of California politicians and policymakers, the problem that only seems to intensify no matter how much attention and money are devoted to it: homelessness.

About six in 10 Californians said the homeless population has grown in their community over the past year, according to a recent Public Policy Institute of California survey. A whopping 70% of likely voters identified homelessness as a big problem — a warning sign for candidates in the Nov. 8 general election — and 14% of residents described the issue as the most important facing the state, second only to the share who chose jobs, the economy and inflation.

But do people’s perceptions square with California’s homelessness reality?

Yes, according to a new story from CalMatters housing reporter Manuela Tobias, the first to reveal a statewide snapshot of California’s homelessness crisis since the onset of the pandemic three years ago: The number of people in the Golden State without a stable place to call home has increased by at least 22,500 since 2019, to 173,800.

The Tragedy of the Projects

Many posts have discussed the unanticipated consequences of public policy.

 Howard Husock at Reason:

The clearance of the thriving, legendary African-American neighborhood in Detroit known as Black Bottom, circa 1950, was not caused by natural disaster, gentrifying developers, or a destructive riot by its residents. The slowly gathering public policy that led to its demolition included an element of racial animus in the city's politics, but more than anything, the death of a neighborhood replete with black-owned businesses and owner-occupied property stemmed from the ideas of progressive housing reformers.

They began to build in the 1890s, when Jacob Riis, a New York police reporter deeply versed in sensationalist journalism, portrayed New York's Lower East Side in How the Other Half Lives as nothing but squalid, showing no interest in the vibrant upward mobility of its immigrants.

Riis inspired the now-obscure Johnny Appleseed of American zoning, Lawrence Veiller, who convinced communities across the country that the density that makes housing affordable (without government subsidies) must be limited. The formula that brought housing within the reach of the poor—what Boston settlement house pioneers Robert Woods and Albert Kennedy rightly celebrated as a "zone of emergence"—would be cast aside.

Its replacement—literally in the cases of Detroit's Black Bottom, Chicago's Bronzeville, St. Louis' DeSoto-Carr, and so many other healthy neighborhoods—would be public housing. The "projects" were and still are the rotten fruit that grew from seeds planted by progressive public intellectuals. The premier modernist architect Le Corbusier envisioned high-rise urban campuses without streets or stores. Less well-known but still essential figures in American housing policy history were University of Chicago sociologist Edith Elmer Wood and self-styled reformer Catherine Bauer Wurster.

In her 1934 paper "A Century of the Housing Problem," Wood led the ill-fated charge that would guide New Deal public housing policy. She inveighed against the private housing industry broadly—even arguing against the idea that homeownership was one of the means for the poor to improve their station. "The housing problem is an inevitable feature of our modern industrial civilization and does not tend to resolve itself," Wood wrote. "Supply and demand do not reach it, because the cost of new housing and the distribution of income are such that approximately two thirds of the population cannot present an effective demand for new housing."

Poverty 2020

 Courtenay Brown at Axios:

In one of the worst years ever for the economy and labor market, America's poverty rate dropped, per one measure that takes into account pandemic-era aid, the government said Tuesday.

Why it matters: It underscores the colossal impact stimulus checks, expanded unemployment payments and other benefits had on households in 2020 — even as millions lost jobs. Without them (and other safety nets, like Social Security), the poverty rate jumped for the first time in five years by one percentage point to 11.4%.

The big picture: The poverty rate typically cited each year focuses solely on cash income. But an alternate rate that includes major aid programs took on new significance given the flood of pandemic-era stimulus injected into the economy.
That measure fell to 9.1% — the lowest rate since the government started publishing this estimate in 2009.

By the numbers: Stimulus checks lifted nearly 12 million Americans out of poverty, while expanded unemployment benefits lifted over 5 million.

Of note: There was no statistically significant change in the uninsured rate last year from 2018, the data shows. If someone lost their job, they were able to get coverage through Medicaid or other heavily subsidized individual health insurance.

David Wagner at LAist:

According to new U.S. Census Bureau statistics, California — once again — has the highest poverty rate of any state in the country.

However, despite the heavy economic toll of COVID-19, the state's poverty rate actually fell last year.

Why? Largely because of federal aid.

“Federal stimulus payments and unemployment insurance kept millions of citizens out of poverty,” said Caroline Danielson, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.

“We can see that those programs really did make a big difference,” she said.

The census measures poverty in a few different ways. Its supplemental poverty measure takes into account regional cost of living, as well as the effects of government aid.

Using this approach, California consistently has the highest poverty rate in the country — eclipsing states such as Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana.

And 2020 was no different. The latest supplemental poverty measure puts California’s poverty rate at 15.4%. No other state had a higher rate (though the District of Columbia came in at 16.5%).

Unaffordable housing costs are primarily to blame for California’s nation-leading poverty rate.

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Preference for Living Farther Apart

Vianney Gomez at Pew:

Americans today are more likely than they were in the fall of 2019 to express a preference for living in a community where “houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, stores and restaurants are several miles away,” according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted July 8-18, 2021.

There has been a corresponding drop in the share saying they would prefer to live somewhere with smaller houses that are “closer to each other, but schools, stores and restaurants are within walking distance.”

This shift has occurred during the coronavirus outbreak and the accompanying period of telework, remote schooling and pandemic-related restrictions on indoor dining and other indoor activities. Today, six-in-ten U.S. adults say they would prefer to live in a community with larger homes with greater distances to retail stores and schools (up 7 percentage points since 2019), while 39% say they prefer a community with smaller houses that are closer together with schools, stores and restaurants within walking distance (down 8 points since 2019).

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As in the past, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners to say they want to live in a community with larger houses even if there are greater distances to schools, shops and restaurants. Today, 73% of Republicans say this, up from 65% in September 2019. About half of Democrats (49%) now say they would prefer to live in a more widely spaced community, up from 42%. In 2019, a 58% majority of Democrats expressed a preference for communities with smaller houses and greater proximity to schools and amenities.

Also note other effects of COVID. Because people can now get feature films on streaming video on the same day they come out in theaters, they have less reason to go out on Saturday night.   Consumers also got into the habit of buying more goods online, meaning fewer trips to the store. 

And rising homicide numbers in major cities may have made urban life less appealing.

Inequalities: Wealth and Age

Dion Rabouin at Axios:

The economy and stock market are diverging.

• The Nasdaq's 42% rise year to date in the face of a U.S. economy expected to contract by 3% is perhaps the most jarring example yet. But economic growth has been softening for years as equity prices — especially for Big Tech companies — have boomed.
• Since the global financial crisis in 2008, U.S. GDP has averaged 2% growth, while the Nasdaq has averaged an 18.1% gain, not including 2020.
• From the Nasdaq's inception until 2009, the index averaged a 10.6% annual gain while the U.S. economy had grown by an average of 3.1%.

The fortunes of the young and old are diverging:

• Higher housing costs mean more equity and higher resale values for homeowners, but also higher rent. Similarly, advances in health care mean older people are living longer and able to accrue the benefits of rising asset prices rather than passing them on to the next generation.
• That directly benefits older Americans largely at the expense of younger ones, who are moving out of large metros like New York and LA on the coasts and toward places like Phoenix and Denver that still offer vibrant cultural life but lower rent prices.
• The median age of all U.S. homebuyers has risen from 31 in 1981 to 47 in 2019.
• The slow recovery in the labor market and real economy also is impacting childbirths, researchers at Brookings say.
• They estimated in June that the U.S. would see 300,000-500,000 fewer births this year. They noted in an update last week that the declining availability of child care and school closures could be worsening the expected 2020 "baby bust."

Segregation in Housing

Many posts have discussed inequality in housing.

At Axios, Aja Whitaker-Moore explains racial segregation in housing:

How it worked:

• Racial covenants: Starting in the 1920s, realtors and developers wrote language into deeds to prevent anyone who wasn't white from buying property.
• Redlining: The federal Home Owners’ Loan Corp. created "residential security maps" in the 1930s based on evaluations from lenders, developers and appraisers.

• The lowest-rated, "hazardous" areas were outlined in red. The maps reinforced racial and income segregation, deterred investment in non-white communities and depressed home values — a dynamic that still exists in a majority of redlined areas today.

Realtors: The profession required racial discrimination.

“A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.”— The Realtor Code of Ethics, 1924-1950

• The National Association of Realtors recently issued a public apology for its past.

• The big picture: Redlined maps are gone but the inequality they helped create has endured. Limiting the ability to build wealth through the value of a home touches future generations since houses can be passed on as inheritance and also tapped for anything from college funds to seed money to start a business.

Wealth Inequality

Briana Sullivan and Donald Hays at the US Census:

Wealth inequality between homeowners and renters continued to be remarkably pronounced in 2017: Homeowners’ median wealth was nearly 89 times larger than the median wealth of renters and not entirely because of home equity.

The 2017 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data shows continued disparities in wealth – the value of assets owned minus the liabilities (debts) owed – revealed in last year’s report on household wealth in 2015.

Biggest contributors. Just two assets — home equity and retirement accounts — accounted for 61.7% of households’ wealth in 2017.

The median value of home owners’ wealth in their homes was $118,000, and the median household retirement account balance was $65,000.

While many households owned these assets, others did not: 38.2% of households did not own a home and 42.7% of households did not have a retirement account. This gap of ownership in two key assets contributes to wealth inequality.

• Bank accounts. Some commonly held assets made up a small portion of household wealth. In 2017, 93.7% of households had bank or credit union accounts. However, the accounts made up only 8.9% of total household wealth.
• Home Ownership. Home equity did not fully account for the difference in median wealth between homeowners and renters. Households that owned their home had a median wealth of $269,100, substantially more than that of those who rented their homes ($3,036).  Even when home equity was excluded from total wealth, the median wealth of homeowners was $109,000, a staggering 35.9 times more than the median wealth of renters.
• Health insurance. Households with people who did not have health insurance all or part of the year had dramatically lower median wealth ($18,750) than households in which all members had coverage for the full year ($140,500). Those without insurance also had 50% less in their checking accounts and 74% less in their retirement accounts.
• Marital status, age and gender. Unmarried female householders (those who own or rent the home) of any age had a median wealth of $28,290. That represented 75.9% of their unmarried male counterparts’ median wealth of $37,290 and only 12.1% of their married counterparts’ median wealth of $233,100.Such disparities between genders and marital status persisted over most age groups.
• Race and Hispanic origin. Relative to Black and Hispanic householders, non-Hispanic White and Asian householders had higher median household wealth.Non-Hispanic White householders had a median household wealth of $171,700, compared with $9,567 for Black householders and $25,000 for Hispanic householders. Asian householders had a median household wealth of $157,400, which was not statistically different from the estimate for non-Hispanic White householders.
• Education. Higher education was linked to higher median household wealth. Households in which the most educated member held a bachelor’s degree had a median wealth of $198,000, compared with $34,460 for households in which the most educated member only had a high school diploma. Those with graduate or professional degrees had just over twice the median wealth ($396,900) of bachelor degree holders.
• Employment. Households in which at least one member was unemployed or worked part-time during the year had less wealth. Households in which at least one person had a full-time job for the entire year had a median wealth of $114,200, compared with $81,150 for households in which one or more members had a part-time job during the year, and $19,490 for households in which one or more people were unemployed.

 

Inequality, Coronavirus, and Close Quarters

Jason DeParle at NYT:

With the pandemic exposing and compounding inequality in matters large and small, access to private, controllable space has emerged as a new class divide — more valuable than ever to those who have it and potentially fatal to those who do not.

Inmates, farmworkers, detained immigrants, Native Americans and homeless families are among the discrete groups whose dilemmas have attracted notice. What they share may be little beyond poverty and one of its overlooked costs: the perils of proximity.

In addition to heightened risk of contagion, close quarters can worsen a host of ills, from flared tempers to child abuse and domestic violence.

...
Among those disproportionately affected are the incarcerated, with outbreaks hitting the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City (more than 850 cases among inmates and staff), the Cook County jail in Chicago (more than 350 cases), and the Oakdale Federal Correctional facility in Louisiana (at least five inmate deaths). Mounting evidence also indicates the virus disproportionately hurts minorities, with data from New York City suggesting blacks and Latinos dying at twice the rate of whites.

The share of poor families doubled up has been rising for at least two decades, said Hope Harvey, a Cornell University sociologist. After the Great Recession, researchers at the Census Bureau found 20 percent of children were living in shared households, including three-generation homes headed by grandparents. In urban areas, as many as half of children live in doubled-up housing by age 9.

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Since infection rates among children appear to be low, the pandemic is often described as a blight that is sparing the young. But the social risks inherent in crowded housing may suggest the opposite. Research on the 2008 recession found evidence that rising foreclosures led to increased child abuse. And with schools closed, there is less monitoring.

Warning Signs for the American Dream

Erica Pandey, Courtenay Brown at Axios:

• The cost of higher education is ballooning. From 1978 to 2017, the Consumer Price Index grew fourfold, but the price of college increased 14-fold, according to research by Ana Hernández Kent, a policy analyst at the St. Louis Fed.
• The price of homes is rising much faster than incomes. Per a study by real estate company Clever that looked at census data from 1960 to 2017, U.S. housing prices have skyrocketed 121%, but incomes have increased just 29%.
• Wage growth has been sluggish. Wage growth in the U.S. has decelerated since 1979 — and the middle and low ends of the wage spectrum have been hardest hit, the Economic Policy Institute reports. Average hourly wages for all American workers grew 2.2% from 1947 to 1979, but just 0.7% from 1979 to the present.
• And socioeconomic mobility is at an all-time low. As we've reported, fewer Americans are faring better than their parents did — and more are doing worse. Per a recent UPenn study, around 60% of people born in the 1940s did better than their parents, compared with 40% of those born in the 1980s.

Housing in California

 In November, Noah Buhayar and Christopher Cannon reported at Bloomberg:

The median price for a house now tops $600,000, more than twice the national level. The state has four of the country’s five most expensive residential markets—Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Orange County and San Diego. (Los Angeles is seventh.) The poverty rate, when adjusted for the cost of living, is the worst in the nation. California accounts for 12% of the U.S. population, but a quarter of its homeless population.

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Local jurisdictions in California hold enormous sway over what gets built. Officials have often caved to NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) pressure against new development, much of it in the name of protecting the environment or preserving “neighborhood character.”

Parts of the state were downzoned starting in the 1970s, making it harder to build dense urban areas and contributing to racial segregation and sprawl. Three-quarters of the residential land in Los Angeles is restricted to single-family homes, according to UrbanFootprint, software that helps government and businesses understand cities and urban markets. In San Jose, the figure is 94%.

California also has a distinct burden: Proposition 13, a measure approved by voters in 1978 that limits property-tax increases on homes until they’re sold. That’s been a boon for Baby Boomers who’ve lived in their houses for decades and aren’t assessed at anything close to their property’s market value. But it’s especially unfair to their children, who are in effect subsidizing their parents’ generation.

Prop 13 also created a fiscal incentive for many cities to favor new commercial development over residential construction—and heap fees on developers to fund budget gaps.

For decades, many Californians have just moved farther out of town to find cheaper places to live. But as climate change increases the intensity and frequency of wildfires—leading to devastation and billions of dollars in costs—officials may decide to put some areas off-limits for new construction.

 Thomas Fuller at NYT:

The reasons for California’s high costs, developers and housing experts say, begin with the price of land and labor in the state. In San Francisco a construction worker earns around $90 an hour on average, according to Turner & Townsend, a real estate consulting company.

But non-construction costs also weigh heavily.

Not taking into account the price of land, around one quarter of the cost of building affordable housing goes to government fees, permits and consulting companies, according to a 2014 study by the California Department of Housing and Community Development.

For a building to be defined as affordable housing it typically obtains tax credits and subsidies. A single affordable housing project requires financing from an average of six different sources — federal, state and local agencies, said Carolina Reid, a researcher at the Terner Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of a forthcoming analysis of affordable housing costs.

She called the process “death by a thousand cuts.”

 Some cite the California Environmental Quality Act.

California law permits anyone to object to a project under the act, which when it was signed by then Governor Ronald Reagan in 1970 was seen as a landmark effort to protect the environment from reckless development.

Today the law is often used as a legal battle ax by anyone who wants to slow a project down or scuttle it altogether, Mr. Jones and many developers and experts say.

“At very little cost one individual can take a project and tie it up in years of litigation,” said Douglas Abbey, a lecturer on real estate at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.