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Our main entrance is on South Ave and requires one to climb 6 steps. If you require an accessible entrance, please notify us in advance by emailing info@familypromisemetrowest.org.

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Family Promise Metrowest - Volunteer Console

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Thank you for your desire to volunteer with Family Promise! Individuals who interact with our families are required to complete Volunteering 101 and 201. Volunteers who complete orientation say it is an incredibly educational and inspiring experience! They have shared that their experience with o…

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Weekly Lead Coordinator Contact Info (Includes names of Support Organization) 

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Metrowest Hospitals and Urgent Care Centers

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Metrowest Hospitals and Urgent Care Centers

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Metrowest Hospitals and Urgent Care Centers

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Incident Reporting Policy and Procedures

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Incident Reporting Policy and Procedures

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Shut out: Understanding the Affordable Housing Crisis in Metrowest

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Shut out: Understanding the Affordable Housing Crisis in Metrowest

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Rise in housing costs leaves MetroWest families shut out of options - Metrowest Health Foundation

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Unaffordable, unsafe, or unstable housing directly relates to negative health outcomes. Developing a regional strategy for affordable housing now will leave the door open for diverse and healthy communities.

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How a hard-working, middle-class family spiraled into homelessness

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How a hard-working, middle-class family spiraled into homelessness

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"I've never lived like this. I never thought my kids would be forced to," said Barchie. "I use to drive down the highway and see tent cities in Providence and not think anything of it. I was blind to it."

Both Barchie, 38, and Strong, 40, grew up in Rhode Island. Barchie earned her GED and attended classes at the Community College of Rhode Island. Strong didn't graduate from high school, but has worked in the trades for much of his adult life. Both are hard workers, self-sufficient, and proud of it.

A weekday briefing from veteran Rhode Island reporters, focused on the things that matter most in the Ocean State.

"We did nothing wrong. We're not asking for a handout," she added. "We're asking for someone who has an apartment to rent to us. . . . How is it that hard?"

It shouldn't be, but too often is. This is a story about how quickly in this dicey economy the known world can implode, how a family doing fairly well can find themselves out of options and out of a home.

The Strong family could afford the house in Warwick they'd been living in because they had a federalhousing voucher, which helped pay their rent. It had two bedrooms, so it was tight living, but they had made it work.

But in August 2021, their landlord told them he wanted them to vacate the rental, even though the family did not owe any back rent. He said a relative of hiswould be moving into the unit and he needed them to move out. Barchie had given birth to their fourth child, Andrea, just a few months before. Their toddler, Kiel Jr., was not even 3. Ariana, 10, and Briella, 7, were about to be homeschooled after a year of struggling with distance learning. They didn't technically have a lease, so the landlord legally only had to give them 30 days' notice to vacate. Barchie's housing voucher didn't expire until after the new year, so she told the landlord they'd try to find a new place.

The family searched, but they were unable to find another landlord who would rent to them or hadan apartmentthey could afford. Rhode Island's rental market is highly competitive. Strong said their credit score "needs building." Many landlords told them that an available apartment was "too small" for a family with four young children. Desperate to find a place, they increased their budget to around $2,100, maybe $2,500 if all utilities are included. But that would mean they would spend more than 37 percent of their income on housing, which would make them housing cost burdened, according to Housing Works RI at Roger Williams University. They had nowhere else to go and no one who could help them, so they stayed in the Warwick house and continued paying rent until they were legally forced to leave.

The eviction notice came in early January, a permanent red flag on their record, possibly making it more difficult for them to find a place to live, even though a judge had given them a letter saying thattheir case "should not be considered an eviction." They were finally forced out of their home in March.

It's expensive to struggle at the economy's edge. The Strong familykept applying for apartments, spending anywhere from $11 to $100 per application. Some landlords charged a fee for each adult who is named on the application. Some didn't charge at all. From August 2021 to mid-September 2022, the Strongs spent more than $5,000 in application fees alone. Once they left their home, they crowded into a hotel room so their children would have somewhere safe to sleep.

Jumping from hotel to hotel

Refuge in a shelter was not an option.Across Rhode Island, shelters for the homeless have been at capacity since the pandemic began. The few shelter beds designated for families have been full for years. The level of need has resulted in people staying at shelters, which are meant to be a temporary or emergency housing option, for several months and, in some cases, more than a year instead of just two or so weeks, according to providers. Thishas led to longer wait times for those in needof shelter, and forced hundreds of people, including children, to sleep in places considered by the state to be "unfit" for habitation, including cars or outside. There are only 45 shelter units for families across the state, but none in Kent County, which is where the Strongs live and work.

So the family jumped from one hotel to the next: a several-month stay at the Springhill Suites in West Warwick, the Best Western in West Greenwich, the Welcome Inn in North Kingstown, a short stint at the Comfort Inn Suites in West Warwick. Theycouch surfed in her mother's one-bedroom apartment, and ultimately ended up at the Motel 6 in Warwick. They hunkered down in each hotel for as long as the prices stayed low. When rates increased due to demand or holiday weekends, they would move on to the next.

I've never lived like this. I never thought my kids would be forced to. I use to drive down the highway and see tent cities in Providence and not think anything of it. I was blind to it."

From March to September they spent nearly $40,000 on hotel rooms - much more than the nearly $8,000 they would have paid in rent during that same time. They spent their savings, as well as most of each week's paycheck. They continued to search for an apartment, offering to pay more than what the landlords were asking, as they became desperate for some stability for their family.

Their car stopped working, and they couldn't afford to take it to a proper repair shop since they were trying to save money for an apartment. A friend took a look at it,but there was no ready fix. The family couldn't afford another car. A co-worker who lives nearby nowgives Kiel Strong a ride to work every day, so he can keep his job as a roofer.

When they lost their home, they alsolost their reliable, private, secure Internet connection, which meant that Barchie had to give up her remote job and the family lost its health insurance. The company said they'd rehire her when she could return with a suitable and private Web connection. She had no way of knowing how long that would be.

Keeping food on the table proved the next challenge. The only stores that sell food within walking distance of the Motel 6are inrundown-looking gas stations, where groceries cost much more than at a regular market and that offered no fresh produce or meat. One night, Barchie bought two cans of beef and vegetable soup to serve her kids. She paid $18.

The motel room had a microwave and a mini-fridge, but the motel's owner told the Strongs they'd be kicked out if they used a slow cooker in their room. For most of the two weeks they were there, the kids ate cereal for breakfast and microwavable macaroni and cheese for lunch and dinner. Barchie would often skip meals herself.

"I was never the cereal mom. I always made a hot breakfast," said Barchie, wiping away tears as she held Andrea, 1, in her arms.

There are other concerns -syringes scattered in the grass outside their motel room window, and people fighting in the hallways. "There's nothing good for us here," she said. "It's dangerous for my kids, who are forced to stay inside. This isn't safe. This isn't right."

Each time Barchie thought they had hit bottom, it kept getting worse.

Living outdoors to qualify for shelter

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development defines individuals and families as " literally homeless " if they lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence. The state follows this definition to determine which Rhode Islanders are placed on the shelter priority list. So although they were moving from one hotel to another and conditions may have been unsafe for the children, the Strong family technically had a nighttime residence they were paying for, which meant they weren't qualified for shelter.

By contrast, neighboring Massachusetts has, since 1983, had a mandate for the state to provide temporary emergency shelter to families who are eligible for services every night there is "no feasible alternative housing available" for them.

The Strongs' housing specialist from Tri-County Community Action Agency advised them that they would not qualify for shelter if they continued paying for hotels.

"We've been told the only way to get help and get on the priority list for shelter is to go sleep outside," said Barchie. "I can sleep in the woods anywhere. But what about my kids?"

It was scary to contemplate, but that's what they did.

They got a tent. A campground in West Greenwich had a space for them to stay, but to deter homeless campers they only allowed guests with tents to stay for two weeks. As each day passed, the Strong family knew they'd have to figure out what would come next.

While Barchie could finally cook again using a slow cooker hooked to extension cords, she was limited by what she could buy without a car and where she could store groceries without electricity. The late summer heat melted the ice in a cooler within hours. Meat went bad quickly. Their belongings - a pack-and-play for the baby, some clothing, and essentials - were piled on the ground. The owners of the campground asked them to hide the pile. They got another tent.

The McKinney-Vento Act defines a child as homeless if they do not have aregular and adequate nighttime residence. During the 2020-2021 school year, Rhode Island public school personnel identified more than 1,100 children as homeless. Of those, 66 percent "doubled up" with other families, 19 percent lived in shelters, 14 percent lived in hotels, and 1 percent were completely unsheltered.

Under the McKinney-Vento Act, the Strong children had been counted among the homeless, with all the troubles that can come with that.

Ariana, 10, and Briella, 7, could not start school in September, since they were living in a campground without a permanent address or access to transportation. Thanks to the pandemic, Briella had not yet set foot in a classroom in her life.

One day at the campground, Ariana turned to her mother and said, "I could go live somewhere else." Then maybe, the fifth-gradegirl said, there would be room for "all of you" to go somewhere.

They were all living in hope that shelter space would open up. But bythe time they had to pack up and leave the campground, the call still hadn't come.

Housing advocates call it 'a crisis.' The state calls it 'a mismatch.'

More than half of Rhode Island's lowest-income renters spend more than half of their income on housing alone, and are at risk of homelessness, according to "The Gap" report, which looks at the shortage of affordable homes across the country. According to the report, there are 49,032 extremely low-income households in Rhode Island and a shortage of 24,050 affordable and available rental homes.

Housing advocates call it a crisis. But in an interview in December, Rhode Island housing secretary Josh Saal told the Globe that people across the country face the same housing pressure that Rhode Islanders do. The problem, he said, isn't that Rhode Island is short thousands of affordable housing units, but that people are paying too much in rent.

We've been told the only way to get help and get on the priority list for shelter is to go sleep outside," said Barchie. "I can sleep in the woods anywhere. But what about my kids?"

"There's a mismatch between the price of housing and the incomes people make. It doesn't mean 24,000 units are missing. In other [states], it might be more," said Saal, the state's first officially designated housing secretary. "The governor said multiple times that everything we should be doing should look at how we raise household incomes, which will . . . lower that cost burden."

When the Strongs' situation was described to Saal in November, he said didn't understand how a family of six could be evicted through no cause.

"These stories are heart-wrenching," said Saal. He told the Globe he plans to look into reexamining how certain housing programs are implemented. "These aren't just numbers. These are families and individuals."

According to the Out of Reach report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Rhode Islanders in 2022 need to earn a minimum of $24.32 per hour to afford an average two-bedroom apartment at fair market rate. The report puts that rate at about $1,264 a month, but reality is quite different: prices for a two-bedroom in Kent County ranged from $1,300 to more than $2,000 a month in December. Barchie and Strong each earn more than $20 an hour when they are working.

Saal said the state won't be able to simply construct enough housing to get itself out of a housing crisis.

Barchie is having none of it. "There's all these empty buildings all around Rhode Island, but it's impossible for us to find an apartment," she said. "Shelters don't have space for my family, my children. . . . How is that not a crisis?"

When they were forced out of their apartment in March, the Strong family had put many of their belongings in a storage unit, which cost about $170 per month at the time. But that cost went up to $300 by June, and they fell behind on their payments. In late September, they had to decide: give up everything they had in the storage unit - including much-needed school clothes, their beds, and family photos - or pay about $665 and take everything out of the unit immediately.

They scrambled through the storage unit to find the PlayStation, which they pawned for $160. It gave them just enough money to cover the cost of renting a van to get their belongings. Barchie's mother lent her about $600 to pay off the storage unit.Now, most of their belongings aresitting outside on a family member's deck, partially covered by a canopy. Some items areexposed to the elements.The wind has scattered some of their things across the small, fenced-in yard.

Finally, in late September, the Strong family found a temporary place to stay, at Kiel Strong's cousin's home in Warwick.They pay about $800 each month for rent, plus $80 for Internet. At first, all six of them were crammed into one room; now they share two. Several other family members were also staying there and in a house next door, most of them one family to a bedroom.

Barchie now has private and secure Wi-Fi to get her job back, butit's been difficult to work. The children need so much of her attention.The older girls are struggling with school. One has to repeat a grade. And illness spreads quickly in such close quarters. The youngest two got RSV. For Kiel Jr., it turned into pneumonia. When she brought him to the hospital in early November, Hasbro Children's had reached over 100 percent capacity. She arrived at the emergency room at 5 p.m. one weekday night and waited until 9 a.m. the following morning for her toddler to be seen. Barchie ended up contracting pneumonia herself in early December. She had to wait until payday to buy the medicine she needed.

With so many people living in the same house, tensions run high. But if the Strong family has to leave, they have nowhere else to go. So they try to keep the kids quiet, and make do as best they can.

We did nothing wrong. We're not asking for a handout. We're asking for someone who has an apartment to rent to us... How is it that hard?"

Barchie was holding Andrea on her hip one recent day, while stirring a single package of ramen noodles in a sauce pot on the stove to feed three people. She was waiting for Strongto comehomefrom work.Meanwhile, their quest for a home continues. She hadtoured four apartments the week before. No one has called her back yet.

"Everything we've been through over the last year would break other people," said Barchie. "Yet here, Kiel and I know we are all we and our children have."

Globe staff reporter Alexa Gagosz can be reached at alexa.gagosz@globe.com

Alexa Gagosz can be reached at alexa.gagosz@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @alexagagosz and on Instagram @AlexaGagosz.

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How a hard-working, middle-class family spiraled into homelessness - The Boston Globe

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"I've never lived like this. I never thought my kids would be forced to," said Barchie. "I use to drive down the highway and see tent cities in Providence and not think anything of it. I was blind to it." Both Barchie, 38, and Strong, 40, grew up in Rhode Island.

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And why everyone's ignoring it

Updated at 2:52 p.m. ET on December 23, 2022.
When someone becomes homeless, the instinct is to ask what tragedy befell them. What bad choices did they make with drugs or alcohol? What prevented them from getting a higher-paying job? Why did they have more children than they could afford? Why didn't they make rent? Identifying personal failures or specific tragedies helps those of us who have homes feel less precarious-if homelessness is about personal failure, it's easier to dismiss as something that couldn't happen to us, and harsh treatment is easier to rationalize toward those who experience it.

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But when you zoom out, determining individualized explanations for America's homelessness crisis gets murky. Sure, individual choices play a role, but why are there so many more homeless people in California than Texas? Why are rates of homelessness so much higher in New York than West Virginia? To explain the interplay between structural and individual causes of homelessness, some who study this issue use the analogy of children playing musical chairs. As the game begins, the first kid to become chairless has a sprained ankle. The next few kids are too anxious to play the game effectively. The next few are smaller than the big kids. At the end, a fast, large, confident child sits grinning in the last available seat.

You can say that disability or lack of physical strength caused the individual kids to end up chairless. But in this scenario, chairlessness itself is an inevitability: The only reason anyone is without a chair is because there aren't enough of them.

Now let's apply the analogy to homelessness. Yes, examining who specifically becomes homeless can tell important stories of individual vulnerability created by disability or poverty, domestic violence or divorce. Yet when we have a dire shortage of affordable housing, it's all but guaranteed that a certain number of people will become homeless. In musical chairs, enforced scarcity is self-evident. In real life, housing scarcity is more difficult to observe-but it's the underlying cause of homelessness.

In their book, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, the University of Washington professor Gregg Colburn and the data scientist Clayton Page Aldern demonstrate that "the homelessness crisis in coastal cities cannot be explained by disproportionate levels of drug use, mental illness, or poverty." Rather, the most relevant factors in the homelessness crisis are rent prices and vacancy rates.
Jerusalem Demsas: Housing breaks people's brains
Colburn and Aldern note that some urban areas with very high rates of poverty (Detroit, Miami-Dade County, Philadelphia) have among the lowest homelessness rates in the country, and some places with relatively low poverty rates (Santa Clara County, San Francisco, Boston) have relatively high rates of homelessness. The same pattern holds for unemployment rates: "Homelessness is abundant," the authors write, "only in areas with robust labor markets and low rates of unemployment-booming coastal cities."

Why is this so? Because these " superstar cities, " as economists call them, draw an abundance of knowledge workers. These highly paid workers require various services, which in turn create demand for an array of additional workers, including taxi drivers, lawyers and paralegals, doctors and nurses, and day-care staffers. These workers fuel an economic-growth machine-and they all need homes to live in. In a well-functioning market, rising demand for something just means that suppliers will make more of it. But housing markets have been broken by a policy agenda that seeks to reap the gains of a thriving regional economy while failing to build the infrastructure-housing-necessary to support the people who make that economy go. The results of these policies are rising housing prices and rents, and skyrocketing homelessness.
When we have a dire shortage of affordable housing, it's all but guaranteed that a certain number of people will become homeless.
It's not surprising that people wrongly believe the fundamental causes of the homelessness crisis are mental-health problems and drug addiction. Our most memorable encounters with homeless people tend to be with those for whom mental-health issues or drug abuse are evident; you may not notice the family crashing in a motel, but you will remember someone experiencing a mental-health crisis on the subway.

I want to be precise here. It is true that many people who become homeless are mentally ill. It is also true that becoming homeless exposes people to a range of traumatic experiences, which can create new problems that housing alone may not be able to solve. But the claim that drug abuse and mental illness are the fundamental causes of homelessness falls apart upon investigation. If mental-health issues or drug abuse were major drivers of homelessness, then places with higher rates of these problems would see higher rates of homelessness. They don't. Utah, Alabama, Colorado, Kentucky, West Virginia, Vermont, Delaware, and Wisconsin have some of the highest rates of mental illness in the country, but relatively modest homelessness levels. What prevents at-risk people in these states from falling into homelessness at high rates is simple: They have more affordable-housing options.

With similar reasoning, we can reject the idea that climate explains varying rates of homelessness. If warm weather attracted homeless people in large numbers, Seattle; Portland, Oregon; New York City; and Boston would not have such high rates of homelessness and cities in southern states like Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi such low ones. (There is a connection between unsheltered homelessness and temperature, but it's not clear which way the causal arrow goes: The East Coast and the Midwest have a lot more shelter capacity than the West Coast, which keeps homeless people more out of view.)

America has had populations of mentally ill, drug-addicted, poor, and unemployed people for the whole of its history, and Los Angeles has always been warmer than Duluth-and yet the homelessness crisis we see in American cities today dates only to the 1980s. What changed that caused homelessness to explode then? Again, it's simple: lack of housing. The places people needed to move for good jobs stopped building the housing necessary to accommodate economic growth.

Homelessness is best understood as a "flow" problem, not a "stock" problem. Not that many Americans are chronically homeless-the problem, rather, is the millions of people who are precariously situated on the cliff of financial stability, people for whom a divorce, a lost job, a fight with a roommate, or a medical event can result in homelessness. According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, roughly 207 people get rehoused daily across the county-but 227 get pushed into homelessness. The crisis is driven by a constant flow of people losing their housing.

The homelessness crisis is most acute in places with very low vacancy rates, and where even "low income" housing is still very expensive. A study led by an economist at Zillow shows that when a growing number of people are forced to spend 30 percent or more of their income on rent, homelessness spikes.

Academics who study homelessness know this. So do policy wonks and advocacy groups. So do many elected officials. And polling shows that the general public recognizes that housing affordability plays a role in homelessness. Yet politicians and policy makers have generally failed to address the root cause of the crisis.

Few Republican-dominated states have had to deal with severe homelessness crises, mainly because superstar cities are concentrated in Democratic states. Some blame profligate welfare programs for blue-city homelessness, claiming that people are moving from other states to take advantage of coastal largesse. But the available evidence points in the opposite direction-in 2022, just 4 percent of homeless people in San Francisco reported having become homeless outside of California. Gregg Colburn and Clayton Aldern found essentially no relationship between places with more generous welfare programs and rates of homelessness. And abundant other research indicates that social-welfare programs reduce homelessness. Consider, too, that some people move to superstar cities in search of gainful employment and then find themselves unable to keep up with the cost of living-not a phenomenon that can be blamed on welfare policies.

But liberalism is largely to blame for the homelessness crisis: A contradiction at the core of liberal ideology has precluded Democratic politicians, who run most of the cities where homelessness is most acute, from addressing the issue. Liberals have stated preferences that housing should be affordable, particularly for marginalized groups that have historically been shunted to the peripheries of the housing market. But local politicians seeking to protect the interests of incumbent homeowners spawned a web of regulations, laws, and norms that has made blocking the development of new housing pitifully simple.
Voters will tolerate disorder for only so long before they become amenable to reactionary candidates and measures, even in very progressive areas.
This contradiction drives the ever more visible crisis. As the historian Jacob Anbinder has explained, in the '70s and '80s conservationists, architectural preservationists, homeowner groups, and left-wing organizations formed a loose coalition in opposition to development. Throughout this period, Anbinder writes, "the implementation of height limits, density restrictions, design review boards, mandatory community input, and other veto points in the development process" made it much harder to build housing. This coalition-whose central purpose is opposition to neighborhood change and the protection of home values-now dominates politics in high-growth areas across the country, and has made it easy for even small groups of objectors to prevent housing from being built. The result? The U.S. is now millions of homes short of what its population needs.

Los Angeles perfectly demonstrates the competing impulses within the left. In 2016, voters approved a $1.2 billion bond measure to subsidize the development of housing for homeless and at-risk residents over a span of 10 years. But during the first five years, roughly 10 percent of the housing units the program was meant to create were actually produced. In addition to financing problems, the biggest roadblock was small groups of objectors who didn't want affordable housing in their communities.
Annie Lowrey: The U.S. needs more housing than almost anyone can imagine
Los Angeles isn't alone. The Bay Area is notorious in this regard. In the spring of 2020, the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published an essay, "It's Time to Build," that excoriated policy makers' deference to "the old, the entrenched." Yet it turned out that Andreessen and his wife had vigorously opposed the building of a small number of multifamily units in the wealthy Bay Area town of Atherton, where they live.

The small- c conservative belief that people who already live in a community should have veto power over changes to it has wormed its way into liberal ideology. This pervasive localism is the key to understanding why officials who seem genuinely shaken by the homelessness crisis too rarely take serious action to address it.

The worst harms of the homelessness crisis fall on the people who find themselves without housing. But it's not their suffering that risks becoming a major political problem for liberal politicians in blue areas: If you trawl through Facebook comments, Nextdoor posts, and tweets, or just talk with people who live in cities with large unsheltered populations, you see that homelessness tends to be viewed as a problem of disorder, of public safety, of quality of life. And voters are losing patience with their Democratic elected officials over it.

In a 2021 poll conducted in Los Angeles County, 94 percent of respondents said homelessness was a serious or very serious problem. (To put that near unanimity into perspective, just 75 percent said the same about traffic congestion-in Los Angeles!) When asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how unsafe "having homeless individuals in your neighborhood makes you feel," 37 percent of people responded with a rating of 8 or higher, and another 19 percent gave a rating of 6 or 7. In Seattle, 71 percent of respondents to a recent poll said they wouldn't feel safe visiting downtown Seattle at night, and 91 percent said that downtown won't recover until homelessness and public safety are addressed. There are a lot of polls like this.

As the situation has deteriorated, particularly in areas where homelessness overruns public parks or public transit, policy makers' failure to respond to the crisis has transformed what could have been an opportunity for reducing homelessness into yet another cycle of support for criminalizing it. In Austin, Texas, 57 percent of voters backed reinstating criminal penalties for homeless encampments; in the District of Columbia, 75 percent of respondents to a Washington Post poll said they supported shutting down "homeless tent encampments" even without firm assurances that those displaced would have somewhere to go. Poll data from Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles, among other places, reveal similarly punitive sentiments.

This voter exasperation spells trouble for politicians who take reducing homelessness seriously. Voters will tolerate disorder for only so long before they become amenable to reactionary candidates and measures, even in very progressive areas. In places with large unsheltered populations, numerous candidates have materialized to run against mainstream Democrats on platforms of solving the homelessness crisis and restoring public order.

By and large, the candidates challenging the failed Democratic governance of high-homelessness regions are not proposing policies that would substantially increase the production of affordable housing or provide rental assistance to those at the bottom end of the market. Instead, these candidates-both Republicans and law-and-order-focused Democrats-are concentrating on draconian treatment of people experiencing homelessness. Even in Oakland, California, a famously progressive city, one of the 2022 candidates for mayor premised his campaign entirely on eradicating homeless encampments and returning order to the streets-and managed to finish third in a large field.

During the 2022 Los Angeles mayoral race, neither the traditional Democratic candidate, Karen Bass, who won, nor her opponent, Rick Caruso, were willing to challenge the antidemocratic processes that have allowed small groups of people to block desperately needed housing. Caruso campaigned in part on empowering homeowners and honoring "their preferences more fully," as Ezra Klein put it in The New York Times-which, if I can translate, means allowing residents to block new housing more easily. (After her victory, Bass nodded at the need to house more people in wealthier neighborhoods-a tepid commitment that reveals NIMBYism's continuing hold on liberal politicians.)

"We've been digging ourselves into this situation for 40 years, and it's likely going to take us 40 years to get out," Eric Tars, the legal director at the National Homelessness Law Center, told me.

Building the amount of affordable housing necessary to stanch the daily flow of new people becoming homeless is not the project of a single election cycle, or even several. What can be done in the meantime is a hard question, and one that will require investment in temporary housing. Better models for homeless shelters arose out of necessity during the pandemic. Using hotel space as shelter allowed the unhoused to have their own rooms; this meant families could usually stay together (many shelters are gender-segregated, ban pets, and lack privacy). Houston's success in combatting homelessness- down 62 percent since 2011-suggests that a focus on moving people into permanent supportive housing provides a road map to success. (Houston is less encumbered by the sorts of regulations that make building housing so difficult elsewhere.)

The political dangers to Democrats in those cities where the homelessness crisis is metastasizing into public disorder are clear. But Democratic inaction risks sparking a broader political revolt-especially as housing prices leave even many middle- and upper-middle-class renters outside the hallowed gates of homeownership. We should harbor no illusions that such a revolt will lead to humane policy change.

Simply making homelessness less visible has come to be what constitutes "success." New York City consistently has the nation's highest homelessness rate, but it's not as much of an Election Day issue as it is on the West Coast. That's because its displaced population is largely hidden in shelters. Yet since 2012, the number of households in shelters has grown by more than 30 percent-despite the city spending roughly $3 billion a year (as of 2021) trying to combat the problem. This is what policy failure looks like. At some point, someone's going to have to own it.
This article has been updated to clarify the percentage of homeless people who reported having moved to California from out of state. This article appears in the January/February 2023 print edition with the headline "The Looming Revolt Over Homelessness." When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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university of washington professor gregg colburn

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billionaire venture capitalist marc andreessen

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And why everyone's ignoring it Updated at 2:52 p.m. ET on December 23, 2022. When someone becomes homeless, the instinct is to ask what tragedy befell them. What bad choices did they make with drugs or alcohol? What prevented them from getting a higher-paying job? Why did they have more children than they could afford?

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Guidelines and Helpful Reminders for Shelter Volunteers

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Guidelines and Helpful Reminders for Shelter Volunteers

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Guidelines, Policies & Helpful Reminders

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Boston is paying landlords to house formerly homeless people

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Boston is paying landlords to house formerly homeless people

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"When they handed me the keys and I walked through the door for the first time, I was overwhelmed," said Flaherty. "To have a warm place to sleep, to not have to wonder where I'm going next - it feels like a second chance."

For that, he can thank a new component of Boston's efforts to confront homelessness that is tapping an unlikely ally: landlords. Dubbed the Landlord Incentive Program, the initiative offers cash to property owners who agree to lease units to tenants who are transitioning out of homelessness. Property owners can collect signing bonuses equivalent to two months of rent, up to $4,000, and the city covers the security deposit and any cleaning and damage costs.

The idea, said Nathan Satish, a housing development officer in the Mayor's Office of Housing who has worked on the program, is to provide landlords with enough financial motivation to outweigh any negative perceptions or hesitancy about renting to residents who were recently homeless.

"Some property owners worry about formerly homeless tenants making regular rent payments," he said. "We're trying to get past those concerns and bring more of our housing stock into the reach of our homeless population."

Satish describesit as a win-win: residents most urgently in need of housing have their name on a lease and a stable living situation to get back on their feet, while landlords get enough financial backing to cover their bases and then some.

The program is in its second year and still relatively small, backed by roughly $1 million in federal pandemic relief dollars and city funds. But it has so far placed more than 160 people in rental units, equivalent to about 10 percent of the 1,545 homeless people counted in the city's annual homeless census in 2022.

That figure, said Christopher Frangolini, a housing search supervisor at Pine Street Inn, is significant, because it represents people who'vemoved into units that offer some permanence in the form of a year-long lease, rather than a shelter or transitional housing program that may limit the duration of stays.

Participants housed through the initiative sign the lease themselves, and are generally able to make rent because they all qualify for Section 8 rental assistance vouchers, even if they haven't yet secured a steady paycheck. In Flaherty's case, he pays $120 a month out of his own pocket, and Section 8 - which contributes up to $2,300 a month for a one-bedroom in Hyde Park - covers the rest.

"There's a narrative out there that our homeless residents should be fully capable of simply getting a job and pulling themselves out of their situation," said Frangolini. "That doesn't account for the instability that comes with not having a home. With this program, we're giving people the tools to get their lives trending in the right direction. It all starts with a place to sleep at night that you can call your own."

Flaherty, for example, has spent years battling alcoholism after a falling-out with his family left him with nowhere else to go but the streets. It was rough, he said, never knowing where exactly he was going to sleep or how he'd stay warm in the winters. He also had several run-ins with the law.

Over the last couple of weeks, he said, "I've started to feel more like a regular guy."

Crucially, the program worksbecause it offers property owners enough to be financially beneficial, said Gina Casey, deputy director of New Lease for Homeless Families, the organization that has been brokering conversations with property owners.

There are no stipulations preventing rent hikes or evictions,said Casey, but often the signing bonus and guaranteesmeanlandlords make more money through the program than they would leasingto market-rate tenants.

"That has been the best selling point," she said. "We're not just asking these landlords to offer up their properties for nothing. There's skin in the game for them."

It also helps that tenants housed through the program still receive regular counseling from a caseworker - much as in the "permanent supportive housing" buildings operated by Pine Street Inn around Boston - something Casey said can help diffuse some of the hesitation property owners may feel about leasing to homeless people.

But, she said, it isn't enough to make landlords participate in the program for financial reasons alone. There is still some inherent risk, she said, and the property owners they've worked with to date - a mix of mom-and-pop landlords and larger real estate firms - have all been cause-motivated as well, meaning that, to some degree, they want to help get people off the streets.

"They want to be part of the solution," she said.

That's the case for J&J Companies, a real estate firm that owns and manages more than 100 apartments in and around Boston. Sharon Quiroz, operations manager at the firm's management company, said they used the program to fill a host of vacancies during the pandemic, and have now leased more than 20 units to formerly homeless people, most of whom still live in those properties.

"It works out great for us," said Quiroz. "We fill up our vacancies, and they're able to place their families. It puts us in a situation where we are able to help out people who are in need. That's something that we feel good about at the end of the day."

Nowadays, Boston's rental market is much tighter, so program administrators have to rely on financial incentives, rather than an abundance of vacancies, to lock down units.

Of course, said Frangolini, the program on its own won't solve homelessness in Boston. In fact, it's set to run out of funding later this year if the city doesn't up its contribution. But it demonstrates that there is a way to use privately owned housing stock to transition people out of homelessness, said Frangolini, and could lay the groundwork for future efforts.

For his part, Flaherty is plotting out his next steps. He's thinking of getting a job, and beyond that, hoping for a better future.

"I'm a lucky guy," he said. "I know a lot of guys who are still out there. Maybe this is where things turn around for me."

Andrew Brinker can be reached at andrew.brinker@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @andrewnbrinker.

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Boston is paying landlords to house formerly homeless people. Will it help? - The Boston Globe

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"When they handed me the keys and I walked through the door for the first time, I was overwhelmed," said Flaherty. "To have a warm place to sleep, to not have to wonder where I'm going next - it feels like a second chance."

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Community limits on multifamily housing affects access and affordability 

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Community limits on multifamily housing affects access and affordability 

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The odd headlines about little towns in the San Francisco Bay Area just keep coming.

First Woodside, a tiny suburb where several Silicon Valley CEOs have lived, tried to declare itself a mountain lion habitat to evade a new California law that enabled owners of single-family homes to subdivide their lots to create additional housing.

Then wealthy Atherton, with a population of 7,000 and a median home sale price of $7.5 million, tried to update its state-mandated housing plan. Until very recently, 100% of Atherton's residentially zoned land allowed only single-family houses on large lots. When the City Council considered rezoning a handful of properties to allow townhouses, strenuous objections poured in from such notable local residents as basketball star Steph Curry and billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

A council member argued that the town should "express and explain the specialness of Atherton ... to succeed in reducing [the state's] expectations of us."

On first glance, these might seem like extreme cases of privilege, oddities from quirky California. But as our new book on the politics of housing shows, the ability of small suburban municipalities to limit multifamily housing is more the rule than the exception.

Small governments' big role in limiting housing

Adding new housing is one of the few ways to limit the escalation of rents and home prices in high-cost metros like San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C. Even new "luxury" apartments or condos can reduce competition for older units, taking some pressure off rents for people with lower incomes.

However, locating new apartments and townhomes near jobs can be difficult. It means building them in existing communities, where small local governments often constrain housing development.

To study the impact small governments' opposition is having on housing, we used census tract data from California's metro areas to examine multifamily housing development between the Census Bureau's 2008-2012 American Community Survey and its 2014-2018 survey, a time when the housing market was rapidly recovering from the Great Recession.

Over that span, according to our statistical estimates, a typical neighborhood-size census tract located within a city of 100,000 residents saw the development of 46 more new multifamily units than an otherwise very similar census tract located within a smaller city of 30,000 residents. In other words, smaller cities, which typically are suburban in nature, added far fewer multifamily units.

An extra 46 new apartments might sound like a small number, but it can make a real difference at the neighborhood level. Nearly half the census tracts in our sample - each with around 1,200 to 8,000 residents - gained five or fewer multifamily units.

Cities across the US face similar struggles

This pattern of slower rates of multifamily housing development in smaller jurisdictions is hardly unique to the Bay Area.

When we examined census data from metro areas nationwide, we similarly found that neighborhoods in small jurisdictions gained fewer multifamily units. We took into account a lengthy list of economic, geographic and demographic factors that could influence neighborhood growth rates, as well as the size of the jurisdiction.

Most big American cities in high-cost regions - think Boston, Denver and Los Angeles - are surrounded by a sea of mostly small independent suburbs.

In many of these communities, residents actively participate in local politics to fight increases in density and multifamily housing. As proposals for new housing are deflected away from these small communities, housing either doesn't get built, thus raising rents by limiting residential supply, or it gets pushed to far-flung exurbs that are distant from most jobs.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, the communities with relatively high increases in housing in our study tended to be at the urban fringe, while many close-in suburbs had stagnant housing development or even a decline in units.

Inner suburbs could offer housing closer to jobs

Just because a suburb is small in population does not mean that it is far off the beaten track or irrelevant to a region's economy.

Atherton, for example, maintained its estate-style residential zoning for decades, smack-dab in the middle of a job-rich area. In fact, our data shows that among the Bay Area municipalities with the best geographic proximity to employment, about half are small suburbs of 30,000 or fewer residents.

Transportation is the largest single contributor to U.S. carbon emissions, yet many people end up commuting long distances because housing is so limited and expensive in job-rich areas. However, many inner suburbs' land-use plans were set decades ago in vastly different economic eras, and many now claim to be "built out" and done with adding housing.

What's standing in the way?

Why does a municipality's size matter so much for how many apartments and condos get built? In a word, politics.

Homeowners tend to be the dominant political interest in small suburbs. They may worry that larger or denser residential buildings will decrease their property values, increase traffic or strain local infrastructure. Fears about even minor projects - like the proposal for 16 townhomes near Curry's estate in Atherton - can get magnified.

To be sure, many homeowners in big cities have similar worries. But in a large, diverse city, anti-growth voices often are counterbalanced by pro-housing interests active in city politics, such as large employers, developers, construction unions or affordable-housing nonprofits.

And though a growing set of YIMBY activists - those advocating "yes in my backyard" - agitate in favor of more housing, suburban elected officials typically feel much more political heat from longtime homeowners than from YIMBY activists.

How to unlock more housing where it's needed

State legislators can unlock the potential for new housing by requiring local governments to relax single-family-only zoning and similar land-use restrictions. Colorado's governor proposed doing that in 2023, and California has passed similar laws. However, that can be politically risky. Local control of land use is an article of faith in many states.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul's effort to enact land-use reforms that would push localities to rezone for more housing hit a dead end in that state's Legislature in 2023. In California, meanwhile, lawsuits by local governments and neighbors of proposed projects proliferate. And some cities - like Woodside, with its mountain lion sanctuary - attempt to creatively dodge state rules.

States could also create incentives for local governments to approve more housing. Certain types of state-collected revenues, such as sales taxes or gasoline taxes, could be distributed to local communities based on each community's count of bedrooms, with additional credit given for affordable units. This type of incentive might lead local officials to view new apartments as improving their community's bottom line.

Another approach is for state governments to create metro-level mechanisms designed to represent the needs of housing consumers throughout the region.

States could set up regionwide housing appeals boards authorized to reconsider and potentially overturn anti-housing decisions by cities and towns. Oregon took a more ambitious approach in its largest urban region, Portland. Voters created and then strengthened an elective metro government to not just plan but actually carry out key regional land-use priorities.

With that big-picture view and authority, Portland can put more housing in locations most accessible to jobs and transit while protecting sensitive countryside in outlying areas from vehicle-dependent sprawl. In other words, it can put housing where it's needed.
Paul G. Lewis is Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University and Nicholas J. Marantz is Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy, University of California, Irvine. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Wealthy suburbs are crushing housing market supply and choking off affordability, say researchers who looked at nationwide data

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There's a clear pattern in census data of slower rates of multifamily housing development in smaller jurisdictions, especially wealthy ones outside cities.