Goodbye, supportive housing!

[from 1/5/11]

Last week I mentioned that Anitra “Cosigner” Freeman and I have moved out from rooms where we have lived together for 13 years, into a one bedroom apartment in a different building. When I mention that the old place was supportive housing, and the new place is nonsupportive housing, some people raise their eyebrows. “Why, Wes & Anitra? Why would you give up all that warm fuzzy support?”

Was I the kind of kid who hated Teddy Bears? Did I stick pins in them and kick them down stairs? Is that why I reject other people’s earnest efforts to help me through life?

Well, yeah, maybe. I was the kind of kid who could spot the lie behind Teddy Bears. Why do Mommy and Daddy give you a Teddy Bear to hug? Because they don’t want you hugging them.

Those earnest efforts aren’t always what they seem. Let’s talk about what supportive housing looks like to someone like me, someone who hates Teddy Bears. As usual I may exaggerate here and there, for the sport of it.

I got into supportive housing because I was homeless and have PTSD. That’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for those of you who never heard of wars, but I didn’t get mine from Vietnam, I got mine from my parents. The Teddy Bear bastards.

Theory was, an agency would provide permanent housing and also support tailored to my specific needs as one whose emotional wiring has been whacked. They would have professionals on staff for me, who understood me. So, at least, was it presented to me at the time I was offered the place.

I may have missed something in the fine print. After all I was homeless and I just wanted off the street.

However, looking back, I really think the best support I got was help leaving, just this past month.

For example, how is it supportive for someone who has PTSD to subject him to three room invasions per month?

To start, we had one monthly inspection. Because we’re all psychos, you see, we had to be forced to majorly clean our rooms once a month, instead of every Spring and Fall like normal people do. OK, I could see that if we really were all psychos, but guess what? PTSD doesn’t impair your ability to clean. It impairs your ability to tolerate room invasions.

Old time fans of Real Change might remember that Dr. Wes here once dabbled in the graphic arts. This ended roughly 1998, around about the time I moved the art supplies into my room. I set up an easel, laying down old newspapers to protect the floor. The room invaders cried, “Clutter! Awwwk!” Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1978. The easel had to be put away, the paints had to be put away, every month.

That and the woman upstairs screamed all night, and once even threw a chair through her unopened window, bringing glass and chair past my window to crash 3 stories below me, while I had flashbacks of Mommy screaming and torturing me. I complained for 2 years about the effect her disability was having on mine. She was finally evicted when staff decided she was too much for them to handle. I didn’t want her gone, I just wanted a quieter room, away from hers. So I could paint between inspections.

Then bed bugs invaded America, and we got an extra invasion per month because we had to be protected from bed bugs. Who’s the real bug in this room, I would ask.

Then we failed one annual inspection by Seattle Housing Authority, done by a retiring inspector who’d gone postal, and it was decided that to prevent that recurring the number of room inspections should increase by another 12, because by now they were just looking for ways to push my buttons?

I’m all for Housing First and supportive housing. But, can these agencies never learn that different people have different needs?

The Author Manifests Anti-Authority Tendencies

[from 6/23/10]

I've been frustrated in my dealings with a certain Seattle housing agency lately. I was going to keep my frustration to myself. Then I noticed a deadline approaching. I considered what else I could write about. It was all oil and soccer and Lady Gaga and oily soccer balls and Lady Gaga and balls. Dwelling on my own personal frustrations actually began to look good.

"Hey, Dr. Wes, how frustrated are you?"

Well, let me relate an incident that happened to me in the fine state of New Jersey 30 years ago. I had a beat up old car parked in front of my slum building overnight. I had to move it by 9 AM to avoid a parking ticket. I overslept exactly one hour and came out to find not one but five parking tickets, all from the same meter-maid/meter-lad, who must have just driven around the block between ticketings. I imagine his/her glee at discovering my crap car still there at each pass, seeing clearly how utterly poor I had to be driving such a piece of trash, and knowing with joyous certainty that each additional ticket would grind me that much further down.

So I gathered the tickets, walked calmly inside to my hovel, screamed, and broke my own hand punching my own knee in anger.

That's how frustrated I've been lately in my dealings with this particular Seattle housing agency of which I speak.

I won't tell you the name of the agency, because I'm still having dealings with them and I'd hate to mess those dealings up, but the name of the agency has the words "Seattle" and "housing" in it, and the agency calls itself not an agency but an authority. This is apt, as an experience in authoritarianism is definitely a component of my frustration.

I want to move out of where I am now into a place where I might not be kept awake all night by sirens. This agency offered such a place to me back in April. I use the word "offered" loosely. Real housing agencies show you the apartments they are offering, so you can say whether or not you'll accept the offer. This agency, not being a real agency, but, rather, an authority, said the apartment isn't ready, so you can't see it. Then they said, "You have to give 20 days notice at your current apartment building." They said, "Now." They said, "You have to."

The way it works when you rent from real housing agencies is, they not only show you an apartment, they show you a lease, you negotiate the terms, you sign the lease and pay deposit and initial rents agreed upon, THEN they give you your move-in date, and THEN you tell the place you're at what that move-in date is. That's your notice.

Otherwise, without a lease, the deal could fall through, 20 days later you could have no place to move to, and your current landlord could say, "Sorry, but since you said you were going to move out, we've promised your apartment to someone else, so you have to leave." This, by the way, is one of the ways people in the real world who don't wait to see a lease find themselves out on the street.

The way it works at the authority, they repeat, "You have to." There is no why.

The day came when I'd been shown the apartment and the lease was ready. Surprise! I was expected to move in immediately. I was even given the keys for two hours. Then I was told I had to give them back because it was discovered that I never gave 20 days notice at the old place. That's the why of it.

It turns out, 20 days notice means nothing to these people, it's just a formality. It would have been decent of them to tell me that before cruelly dangling an apartment in front of my face and snatching it away.

But Inspections Are Free

The saying on the street is "There's no such thing as a free lunch." You have to sit through the sermon, at least. It also applies off the street. My experience with subsidized housing is there's no such thing as a free subsidy, either.

People who live in subsidized housing live under rules and regulations that those who have never experienced them imagine only pertain to totalitarian states. I get a minimum of two invasions of my room every month. One for bug spray, one for "inspection." "You are not required to be present for this violation of your privacy." The rules for passing inspection are set by bureaucratic pinheaded suits who have never lived in a 200 square foot studio apartment, or visited one, or know anyone who has. Therefore the rules are insane, as rules tend to be that are not based in any way on any knowledge of reality. Therefore I'm always failing my "inspection" and required to be "re-inspected", at which time I must have corrected the cause of my "failure". So usually there are 3 invasions per month. Re-re-inspections are also possible.

Fortunately, at the re-inspection I can't fail anything I passed at the inspection. So, let's say I failed the inspection because the right side of the room was too cluttered. If the note says, "Your room failed inspection/ the right side was too cluttered/ please correct this for re-inspection on [Month/Day]," that means I can take all the junk on the right side and slide it to the left side. Now the left side is cluttered, but that's OK, because the left side passed previously. So sometimes the insanity works in my favor!

This month I have failed inspection because there isn't a 3-foot wide path from the entrance to my room to the window. The rule that I must have such a path, I've been told repeatedly, is based on the need of paramedics to get a gurney to my limp dying body when it's time for my last trip to Harborview before final discharge to my Eternal Studio in the Burning Pit of Hell. I will presently amuse myself by describing in print how bat spit insane the 3-foot rule is.

First of all, the entrance to my room is itself 2 feet 10 inches wide. So if the gurney is 3 feet wide it can't even get in the door. If they bring in a super-transformer-gurney that can tuck its sides in to get in the door, let the stupid thing tuck its sides in the rest of the way.

If they can't get to my limp dying body because my stuff is in the way, how did I get there? If I store stuff up near the window, that means I'm not going to be dying at the window. I'll be dying someplace I can get to. Do they think I'm going to climb over my stuff just before dying? What, just to make extra work for the paramedics? I don't think playing a lame practical joke on the paramedics is going to be a big priority when I'm choking on that pretzel.

If there's an earthquake and the building pancakes and I'm trapped in an air pocket with tons of rubble around me, am I going to be left to die on the grounds that a gurney can't be rolled up alongside me?

For that matter, if inspection is at 3 PM, and the earthquake was at 2:59 PM and I didn't clean up the mess by the time the inspectors arrive, did I fail? Answer: Yes! Because the rules are made by dumb-asses!

Meanwhile, suppose you don't live in subsidized housing. Let's say you're a serial killer who likes to chop your victims up and saves the variety meats in a freezer in your basement in your own house. Lucky you, you don't get inspected monthly! It's your reward for pulling your own weight in society!

Use Protection

I don't know what to say. I can't not be sardonic. It's too fahrfürfrappen easy. Seven hundred billion dollars! The Bushter wants to have seven hundred billion dollars of OUR money, to save the fortunes of very, VERY important rich people, without whom our economy (the machine that cranks out our wealth) would supposedly not be possible.

[Below: That's 7,000,000 of these.]

Well, you know, for the sake of MY wealth and all, I'd just as soon we keep the seven hundred billion dollars, if you don't mind, bitte, danke schön! Auf wiedersehen, vaya con Dios, amigo! Thank you very frappen much!

Our presidente seems to be under the wildly mistaken assumption that we would all be extremely alarmed if the prices of housing steeply plummeted in this country. Actually, this is far from the case. In fact, I would like very much to be able to buy a house for a dollar. I HAVE a dollar. I would not like to buy a house for 650,000 dollars, because I do not have that many. So if housing prices dropped from what they are now (a zillion per house, on average) to a dollar per house, on average, I'd go so far as propose we change the Constitution to be able to re-elect Bush as presidente, over and over again, until the Rapture.

That won't happen (the housing price drop), because nothing the presidente, nor the Republicans in general, nor Democrats are talking about doing about all this, involves making the price of housing lower. They're all about protecting the mortgage industry, and failing that, homeowners. Nobody gives a damn about home non-owners. Nobody's even TALKING about home non-owners. EXCEPT ME! DO I HAVE TO DO IT ALL?

Home non-owners are Americans, too. Why does no one else ever point this out?

Here's what's wrong with the Bush Administration. When they want to seize property from some poor jerk whose land is in the way of an interstate bypass or a CostCo, they just say "Eminent domain!" and "This is all you get in compensation," and, transaction completed. But when they want the junk assets of precious failing investment companies, it's, "Oh please, sirs, tell us how much you might require for your valuable investment properties, that they may be purchase-ed from you by our humble national government, using our peasants' accumulated pennies."

George's plan asks for the same deal he asked from Congress re Iraq. He wants his Secretary of the Treasury to be authorized to do anything at all with the 700 billion. No limits. The future is uncertain. There are terrorists among us. This is a post-9-11 world. Constitutional checks and balances are outmoded in this climate of fear and terror. Saddam Hussein must be defeated at all costs. We only ask authorization to do what is necessary in these dangerous times.

[Right: Forget those bankers, remember who our real enemy is.]

The Democrats, whom I am ordinarily fond of associating with, have seized upon this as an issue, and I give them credit for doing so. Yes, (big applause) if this screw is inevitable, we MUST HAVE safeguards! Lordy, if this deal is going to go down, please, please, dear government, put on a condom before you do it.

It's too much to ask either party, apparently, to demand that if we taxpayers spend that much for so-called junk properties, the properties be used for our benefit. Like, you know, ending our homelessness. Neither party seems capable of seeing that this crisis is an opportunity to end US homelessness in a year.

Instead, both parties are talking about these failed mortgage assets as bad investments that must be made good, i.e. must be turned into money, in the short term. Rather than shelter, which could improve lives, which could create human welfare, which could generate national wealth. That would take altogether too long. It would take as long as slow moving human generations and slow growing pink flesh. We don't have time for the needs of flesh. We have to make a profit this quarter.

No Market Cookie

Let's talk about the failure of the housing market! Housing statistics are about the most boring things I can think of, after corn futures! So let's go for it!

Seriously, my heart raced a little last week when I read the following 2 successive Harper's Index entries: "Chance that a U.S. home is currently vacant: 1 in 35," and "Rank of this among the highest recorded vacancy rates in U.S. history: 1." That's sounds informative, I thought! What does it mean?

I had no clue, so I did what Harper's must have done, namely consult the US Census Bureau data. The picture that emerged from that excursion into surveys, tabulations, and estimates was surprisingly interesting, as I will now attempt to convey.

The 1 in 35 bit refers to homes that would ordinarily be occupied by the owners, rather than rentals. Just that much vacant housing of that type alone accounts for something on the order of 2 million vacant homes, nationally. Given that there are only about 700,000 Americans homeless at any moment, says HUD, that means the entire homeless population could fit in said housing, one each to a vacant home, and still have enough left over to house the homeless of Canada, England, Australia, and probably Western Europe in the same plush way. Since the average home is meant to accommodate somewhere between 2 and 6 residents, you could probably house 10 times the US homeless population in the vacant homes we are talking about, even if HUD's counts are way off.

Now, that's not fair, because every market has to have unused stocks of goods to keep it fluid. But when you look at rental vacancies it's a whole different situation.

A full 1 in 10 of all rental units are going vacant in this country. That means that even though less than half of all housing is rental housing (now we're counting apartments, but NOT motel or hotel rooms and NOT summer cabins and NOT rooms at shelters) we're talking about a terrific mondo quantity of vacant units. Altogether, counting all such vacant units and adding in the vacant homes, 18.6 million units of housing are going unused in this country, as of the 2nd quarter of 2008, while the aforementioned homeless people try to find nice bridges to sleep under.

That means there are more than twenty empty housing units for every person in the country who desperately needs housing.

That's way too much unused stock.

What's a market failure?

A market failure is an American-style supermarket opened up in the middle of a Third World slum offering tomatoes at $3 a pound to people who make $3 a month.

A market failure is a Chad street vendor trying to sell jalapeños to drought victims.

What we have here is a failure of the US housing market to deliver affordable housing. To paraphrase someone I wish I never heard of, you don't house the people you want, you house the people you have.

Fun Exercises -- Learn Through Play!

1. Henry Ford had the idea to pay workers high wages to make cars so cheap the workers themselves could afford them. It worked. Why is that idea called liberal now? Why don't conservatives want to own the ideas that have been proved to work in the past? Isn't that what "conservative" means? Keeping what works?

2. This writer has offered no explanation for the failure of the US housing market. Try to think of your own. Here are a few suggestions: a) Aliens did it. b) We've been too chummy with the People's Republic of China, blame Nixon. c) We've been too chummy with the Saudis, blame the Bushes. c) Government housing regulations have something to do with it. d) Al Qa'eda.

3. An exercise in perspective. List twenty successful markets in America. Here are a few to get you started: The Japanese appliance retail market. The banana market. The energy drink market. The potato market. The politician market.

Brave New World

So. A scientific study, by a UW human, has confirmed what chimps knew 15 years ago, namely, a) housing regulations add to the cost of housing, and b) Seattle has housing regulations up the kazoo. Now watch developers try to blur the distinction between housing regulations and general building regulations.

What can we learn from this study? In order to answer this important question in a way that will burn up my week's allotment of 666 words, I'm going to belabor an analogy: Suppose books were supplied in a new world the way housing is supplied in ours, and you wanted one.

You might think, "I'll just go to a library and see the book for free." But in this new world, libraries are to books what shelters are to homes. In our world, when you ask for a bed, you get a mat -- the bare minimum. So, in our imaginary world, if you want a book you get one with a front cover, a title page, a reverse to the title page with the copyright date and ISBN number, and a back cover. If you complain, the library kicks you out for being a troublemaker.

So then you figure you should go to a bookstore. This world has book agents, instead. The book agent will take you out to look at books in the market. You'll see a lot of books that aren't really what you were looking for. All the books your book agent takes you to see will be too expensive. They'll cost about 10 to 20 times what you thought a book should cost. You'll want to know why.

A professor at the UW will do a study. He'll learn that books are so expensive because there are so many book authoring regulations.

For example, all authors have to apply for a permit to write a book. The permit won't be approved for a year or two, while regulators verify that the book will not violate any paper-use regulations. Of course there will be a synopsis, but that will have to run by the general public for comments. If any comments are received the comment period may be extended. If no comments are received in the time provided, the comment period may be extended.

The proposed book must comply with the state's Book Writing Management Act of 1990. During the comment period anyone may file a Petition for Review of the synopsis with the Hearing Board established by the act. The Hearing Board will study the proposal for the new book and determine how it fits among existing books.

Too many books on the same topic would be prohibited, as violating density provisions. In our world, Amazon.com lists over 9,000 murder mysteries. In the new world that would be trimmed down to a manageable 90. Books on altogether new topics may be prohibited because those topics have been designated as critical areas needing to be conserved for future generations of writers and readers.

Low supply will drive up prices. Readers will be forced to rent rather than buy. But the book writing regulations will also limit the availability of books to rent and drive the cost of renting up. Rich people will mitigate the high cost of renting books by joining together in condobiblia associations to purchase rental books. The rest of us will have to settle for renting cut-up pieces of used books. For what in our world you would pay for a brand new copy of War and Peace, in the new world you could afford to rent a chapter per month of a used copy. You'll finish the second epilogue in 2028.

You might decide you'd rather confine yourself to alternative street papers sold by homeless people. But in the new world vendors will be forced to apply for permits, increasing the cost of your weekly from $1 to out-of-reach, and the street paper will not exist.

In other words, the new world will look like Tacoma.