It can take decades for the full effect of government policy to become visible — and decades for corrections to have an impact.
Such is the case with a lack of affordable housing and its contribution to our current homeless crisis. As part of a supplemental budget proposal, Gov. Jay Inslee has recommended targeted investments throughout Washington for programs to promote housing stability.
As The Seattle Times wrote editorially: “A lack of affordable housing has complicated the fight to end homelessness in large and small communities around the state. So it makes sense for state lawmakers to step in to help. Gov. Jay Inslee’s $800 million budget proposal is a good place to start the conversation.” The editorial was published Sunday in The Columbian.
As a quick trip throughout Clark County or any other city in Washington reveals, we have a problem. Unhoused people are populating makeshift tent communities and living in vehicles, making them vulnerable to squalor, crime and exploitation. The situation creates sanitation and health issues while diminishing the quality of life for all residents.
While Inslee is correct to note a “critical mass of public attention” is calling for action, the causes of the situation also warrant attention.
For many critics, those causes are distilled to overly simplistic explanations. But blaming Democratic leadership in cities facing a homeless crisis belies the complexity of the issue. It also ignores the role of the federal government in creating conditions that, over time, have led to increasing numbers of people being unable to afford housing.
As The Columbian wrote editorially this year: “Beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980, the budget of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has been slashed over the past four decades. That has limited rental assistance, along with maintenance for public housing, and has turned what was a cyclical phenomenon into a fixture of American cities. By 2010, the Obama administration released the first federal ‘Strategic Plan to End Homelessness,’ but it contained little strategic planning and no funding.
“One example of how the situation has developed: In 1977, a budget proposal from outgoing President Gerald Ford asked Congress to fund 506,000 new low-income housing units. By 1996, under the Clinton administration, funding supported fewer than 9,000 new units. The social safety net had been torn, left with gaping holes.”
As the libertarian Cato Institute wrote in 1990: “Federal housing assistance was reduced unmercifully during the 1980s. In 1981 the Department of Housing and Urban Development had budget authorizations of $32.2 billion; by 1989 they had been slashed to a mere $6.9 billion. … The federal government has abandoned its 50-year-old commitment to build public housing.”
That trend has continued over the past three decades. A philosophy that people simply need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps has been embraced by both Republican and Democratic administrations, ignoring the fact that those most in need don’t have boots. The long-term result is the crisis we are seeing today, particularly in desirable cities where population growth stresses the housing market.
Washington’s homeless crisis demands attention. But the actions of a single state cannot ease what is a national crisis — one that too many politicians are quick to write off as somebody else’s problem.
