Freedom and personal agency are some of the most lauded virtues and policy goals in the American culture.  This post is neither going to address the broader philosophical/theological debate about free will nor if choice is an ontologically sound concept.  Instead, it will only look at the perception or assignment of personal agency and the power of choice between parties in policy debates.  In fact, the question of whether or not choice can exist in a true sense is irrelevant.  Both parties or neither party could possess free will, but it would not affect the relevance and power of using choice in rhetoric.  Specifically, this post will explore the impact of this rhetoric in housing policy.  Regardless of if this rhetoric is an insidious marketing decision or simply a powerful mythology about personal responsibility that has led well-meaning people to bad conclusions, the placement of choice and responsibility onto the least powerful in society has broad negative effects.

Before diving into the argument, it must be established as a premise that everyone in a society has a collective interest in seeing every other person in said society housed.  While there are moral arguments for this, they are not necessary to reach this conclusion.  It is unequivocally good for a society for its citizens to have stable living situations at prices that allow them to participate in society.  On the most extreme end, costs of homelessness on the rest of the taxpayers are quite high, in some cases even more than the cost of housing homeless people,[1] and that is without even bothering to calculate downstream effects such as higher crime rates or lost tourism and tax revenue.  The question is not whether it should be a public policy goal to house as many people as possible, but what are the most effective ways to accomplish this.

Beginning with a thought experiment from Arthur Leff, imagine a widowed woman with multiple children living in a house she bought with her late husband.[2]  He was the primary earner in the family, and after his death the widow struggled to make ends meet and has defaulted on the mortgage payment.[3]  Leff’s experiment begins in the courtroom with a judge making the heart wrenching decision of whether to throw this woman and her children out on the street or choose not to enforce the terms of her loan and allow her to be housed for a bit longer.[4]

Leff argues that if the judge allows her to stay, then lenders will identify higher risks in the case of defaults and increase interest rates.[5]  Additionally, a moral hazard is created, single mothers will feed their children chicken and maybe some occasional beef (something Leff appears to find horrifying) and miss mortgage payments, forcing lenders to increase their rates even more.[6]  This will ultimately hurt the class of widows who the judge is trying to protect.[7] Therefore, the moral decision for the judge is actually to throw the woman out.[8]   As a small attempt to salvage some humanity, Leff also suggests that due to the high prevalence of charity in our society, the widow will likely land on her feet.[9]

There is a subtle assignment of agency at the expense of the poor in this thought experiment.  The lenders are treated as purely rational calculators who will always find a way to extract a fixed income over the long run of all loans they give out.  The empathetic judge who allows the mother to stay in the house or the advocate pushing for more humane housing policy then are left with two choices: protect this woman at the expense of the broader class of widows or sacrifice this woman at the altar of capital in hopes that the rest of her class will see benefits.  If we accept these premises, it is possible that Leff is correct.[10]  Perhaps we are best off evicting/foreclosing on all people who are unable to pay because that is the only way to inspire the holders of capital to rent out their property at affordable rates.

However, consider the situation reversed.  What if the judge is the fixed outcome?  What if they cannot bear the personal sorrow of being the one to throw this widow onto the street?  We would have to accept that, for purely self-interested reasons, the judge always show mercy to the sympathetic defendant.  Leff’s own argument allows for the possibility that showing mercy or helping others can be a form of self-interest.[11] The banker now has two options: raise their rates and price out this class of individuals, ultimately leaving many on the street, or maintaining the same rates and accepting a lower profit margin but allowing many of these single mothers to become housed.  In this scenario, the social responsibility to maximize the number of people housed falls on the lender.   The judge is no longer responsible for putting their self-interest in feeling good about themselves to the side for the good of the majority.  Instead, the lender is asked to put their self-interest in profit maximization to the side for the same good.

In either case, the responsibility to make personal sacrifice falls only on the individual who is ascribed agency, and all other parties are absolved of any responsibility for the outcomes created.  Of course, this can have profound effects on policy.  We can choose to accept the lender’s interests as the default and construct our laws with the goal of maximizing how many loans are passed out.  Alternatively, we can accept the lender’s profit margins as malleable, and if the lender does not behave in a societally optimal way, his profession can be regulated to insure good behavior.

The relationship between the rhetoric of choice and the outcome of a policy being bad for the “chooser” is less explicit but still very present in the United States affordable housing programs. There are three main categories that affordable housing programs fall into: public housing, subsidies tied to specific units owned and operated by private parties, and subsidies tied to tenants for use at any approved unit in the jurisdiction.[12]  In 1998, the Clinton administration passed the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act.  This Act prevented any new public housing from being built and placed the bulk of the state’s housing funds into the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Program.[13]  Immediately clear from the words “responsibility” and “choice” is the emphasis on the low-income individual as the person being ascribed agency.

The HCV Program has two main stated policy goals.  Theoretically, it can alleviate some of the costs for the state by transferring acquisition and building costs onto private parties.  Second, it can improve people’s lives by enabling their ability to make better choices about where to live.[14]  There are ample critiques of these stated goals,[15] but this post will focus specifically on the aspect of making better choices.  Aside from the racist subtext that living in primarily minority communities makes people less able to help themselves,[16] there is a legitimate point to be made that lower-income areas often have less access to food, public transit, and good education.  There is data indicating that moving to higher income areas will improve life outcomes for children.[17]

The flip side is that the state now has no responsibility to provide any of the above listed services to lower income areas.  Since people now have the power to choose where they live, they are able to free themselves from poverty.  The reality is that this is not the case.  For one, HCV holders tend to be discriminated against in the open market. Black HCV holders are accepted at a far lower rate than their white counterparts.[18] In addition, most states allow landlords to reject applicants solely because they intend to pay their rent using their HCV.[19]  The result is that HCV holders often ended up clustered,[20] but now the state has no obligation to serve those areas.  The state has deferred the problem to the market by giving HCV holders the means to participate in the market. If they cannot make it work, then that is their problem and their own responsibility to fix.

Contrast the HCV program with a public housing development.  In the latter case, low-income individuals have no choice about where to live. If the state is serious about providing opportunities for climbing out of poverty, it becomes the state’s responsibility to construct an environment that can serve these communities and provide for their needs.  Of course, in reality the state does a very poor job providing services on public housing sites as well, but much of the reason for not doing so also stems from a societal attitude that poverty is broadly the fault of the victim.  This attitude drives at the heart of the problem.  Rhetoric around choice always shifts responsibility into the hands of the person making the choice.  Ultimately, this alleviates others of any responsibility to help.  In the case of shifting responsibility away from the state and onto disadvantaged individuals, this will have disastrous effects.  All people should maintain a keen awareness of when responsibility is being delegated through rhetoric, and it should always raise red flags on policy proposals.  “Look what you made me do” is the refrain of disciplinarians and abusers; it should not be the guiding justification of policy designed to defeat poverty.

 

[1] See Nat’l Alliance to End Homelessness, Ending Chronic Homelessness Saves Taxpayers Money (2017).

[2] Economic Analysis of Law: Some Realism About Nominalism, 60 Va. L. Rev. 451, 460 (1974).

[3] Id.

[4] Id.

[5] Id.

[6] Id.

[7] Id.

[8] Id. at 461.

[9] Id. at 459.

[10] Worth noting is his assumption about the availability of charity to help the widow land on her feet appears misplaced, given the large numbers of homeless people in the United States. See U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Dev., Annual Homelessness Report, Part I (2023).

[11] Leff at 459.

[12] These programs can take many forms, and breaking down every possible program is beyond the scope of this article.  Some of the most common include the Section 8 Program – which has both a tenant voucher program and a site-based subsidy program – and federal publicly owned housing described in 42 U.S.C. 1437 et seq.

[13] See Nena Perry-Brown, Why Privatization Has Become the Public Housing Solution Du Jour, Greater Greater Washington, Aug. 12, 2020. https://ggwash.org/view/78700/why-privatization-has-become-the-public-housing-solution-du-jour#:~:text=These%20efforts%20were%20codified%20in,any%20new%20public%20housing%20units.

[14] See Will Fisher, 5 Proven Benefits of Housing Vouchers – and How Vouchers Can Help Your State, Ctr. on Budget and Pol’y Priorities, Mar. 11, 2014. https://www.cbpp.org/blog/5-proven-benefits-of-housing-vouchers-and-how-vouchers-help-your-state.

[15] See e.g. Alena Samuels, How Housing is Failing America’s Poor, The Atlantic, June 24, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/section-8-is-failing/396650/; Langowski et al., Qualified Renters Need Not Apply: Race and Voucher Discrimination in the Metro Boston Area Rental Housng Market, Understanding Boston, July 20, 2020. https://www.tbf.org/-/media/tbf/reports-and-covers/2020/housing-voucher-report-20200701.pdf.

[16] There is a lot of literature on the effects of concentrated poverty.  These largely resemble classical racist critiques of disadvantaged groups simply having bad “culture” as the reason they are poor.  See Alex Moffet-Bateau, This Racist US Housing Policy that Tried to Fix Poverty is a Massive Failure, The Guardian,  Sep. 15, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2023/sep/15/failed-housing-policy-poverty.

[17] Lawrence Katz, Can Moving to a Different Neighborhood Improve Life’s Chances?, Econofact, Nov. 28, 2022. https://econofact.org/can-moving-to-a-different-neighborhood-improve-lifes-chances#:~:text=Children%20who%20moved%20to%20lower,move%20to%20lower%20poverty%20areas.

[18] See Langowski et al.

[19] See Langowski et al.

[20] U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Dev., Housing Choice Voucher Location Patterns: Implications for Participant and Neighborhood Welfare (2003).