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Commentary By Howard Husock

Obama's Plan to End Family Homelessness May Make the Problem Worse

Culture, Culture Poverty & Welfare, Poverty & Welfare

President Obama’s proposed FY 2017 budget, unveiled this week, will again be dead on arrival on Capitol Hill.  But that doesn’t mean that it’s  not revealing in ways worth appreciating.  One of those is the President’s proposal to spend  $11 billion over 10 years to  end “family homelessness”, which as per the New York Times account,  is “a phenomenon that is closely linked to the dearth of affordable housing in New York and other big cities”. It’s  hardly illogical to conclude that the combination of an increasing number of low-income families  and increasing rents, in turn  increases  the need for housing assistance—which is a big part of  what Obama is proposing:  specifically $8 billion over 10 years for housing vouchers, which allow families to pay no more than 30 percent of their income in rent.  It’s already the largest part of the Housing and Urban Development department budget.

The proposal certainly seems to make sense for the nation’s largest city, where HUD Secretary Julian Castro took  part this week in the city’s annual count of the street homeless this year.  The number of low-income New Yorkers has increased from 1.4 million in 1990 to 1.7 million today, even as the number of very low-rent apartments has declined.  As my colleague Stephen Eide has pointed out in his  cogent overview of the city’s homelessness policy, Streets Are Not Shelters:  Clarifying New York’s Debate Over ‘Homelessness, the city’s least expensive rentals–small, single-room occupancy apartments—fell (from around 1950 to 2002)  from 200,000 to just 35,000.

But it’s also worth considering a quite different analysis of the family homelessness problem—one that suggests that the proposed cure for family homelessness risks encouraging more of it.

To understand why, it’s important to understand that the problem of “family homelessness” is not one of parents and children living on the street but, rather, that of their not being able to afford their own place to live. These are not two-parent two-income families, or even two-parent one-income families. As the Eide report notes, in New York, “over ninety percent of sheltered homeless families with children, are headed by single mothers.” This is in line with the demographics of those households, other than the elderly and disabled, who also dominate public housing and use the housing vouchers whose number the White House proposes to increase.

Might it be possible that the more space we provide in shelters, or the more housing vouchers we offer, the more we inadvertently encourage the formation of low-income single-parent families who need them? Herein lies a conundrum.

We are drawn to provide assistance to those in need—and low-income single-parents living doubled-up with relatives, or moving from one place to another ahead of the rent payments, certainly fit that profile. We hope for their children to thrive. At the same time, by providing for these “homeless” (that is, those who lack their own home, even if they’re not living on the street), we risk signaling the establishment of a social norm: that single-parenting is a fact of life that we, through government, will seek to accommodate and make more comfortable.

This is no small matter—mainly because of the impact on children of being raised by a single parent. As the Annie E. Casey Foundation puts it in its Kids Count project: “Children growing up in single-parent families typically do not have the same economic or human resources available as those growing up in two-parent families. Compared with children in married-couple families, children raised in single-parent households are more likely to drop out of school, to have or cause a teen pregnancy and to experience a divorce in adulthood.”

In an exceptionally careful essay, two of the nation’s top social science researchers, Sara McClanahan of Princeton and Christopher Jencks of Harvard, review the research on the long-term life chances of those raised with only one parent—focusing, particularly, on boys raised without fathers. They write that, “. . .a father’s absence increases antisocial behavior, such as aggression, rule breaking, delinquency, and illegal drug use. These antisocial behaviors affect high school completion independent of a child’s verbal and math scores. Thus it appears that a father’s absence lowers children’s educational attainment not by altering their scores on cognitive tests but by disrupting their social and emotional adjustment and reducing their ability or willingness to exercise self-control. The effects of growing up without both parents on aggression, rule breaking, and delinquency are also larger for boys than for girls. Since these traits predict both college attendance and graduation, the spread of single-parent families over the past few decades may have contributed to the growing gender gap in college attendance and graduation. The gender gap in college completion is much more pronounced among children raised by single mothers than among children raised in two-parent families.” This, again, is no small matter at a time when 70% of African-American children are born to single mothers.

In this context, should we risk signaling that female-headed single-parent families, undeniably economically needy as they may be, should have their housing needs accommodated, lest they be counted among the “family homeless”? In other words, might the very existence of family shelters, or housing assistance for the poorest households, send a signal? It’s notable that, currently in New York (again, according to the Eide report), only some 40% of those seeking emergency housing are found to be eligible for it (based on income and other factors).

In other words, thousands of New York City households think life in a shelter is worth seeking; they are aware of the shelter system and attracted by it. Such is the reflection of an established social norm—a sharp contrast to what was once the American norm of self-reliance and non-dependency. In that same vein (again, as per Eide), there were fewer than 1,000 sheltered families in 1970 New York, even though the city’s housing vacancy rate at the time was far lower than it is today.

Of course, that may mean that more of that housing was available for those of modest means, or that, if safe and sanitary shelters had been available, poor families would have eagerly and gratefully sought them out. But it is undeniably the case that, today, according to the city’s Department of Homeless Services, the vast majority of the 58,000 New Yorkers living in city shelters, have not come in from the streets but are children and one of their parents who were living somewhere inside. So it is that, New York and many other cities can be said to serving the needy—but are, at the same time, facilitating life choices that lead to the persistence of that very need—and reinforce it as a social norm.

This is not to say that the housing voucher program the Obama Administration proposes to expand might not be adjusted in ways that might help it achieve its stated purpose of ending family homelessness. One good start: making all housing assistance short-term, instead of the unlimited benefit which those who receive it currently enjoy. Doing so would send a new message—that households are expected, over time, to become financially independent. That may, in turn, start to change a social norm of single-parenthood that housing assistance may, inadvertently, be encouraging.

This piece originally appeared at Forbes

This piece originally appeared in Forbes