By WAYNE LUSVARDI
Paul Tepper’s op-ed (“Welfare Checks Can’t Cover Rent for Downtown’s Homeless,” July 23) offers a superficial explanation of why there is homelessness in downtown Los Angeles.
Tepper tells us that it is “not rocket science” why monthly General Relief falls short of providing basic shelter needs. He points out that General Relief welfare checks ($221 per month) are insufficient to cover even the lowest monthly rent ($350 per month) for a room with shared bath and cooking facilities. But is this the symptom or the cause of homelessness in Los Angeles?
Tepper’s pure welfare economic explanation ignores the sociological realities of homelessness. They are homeless not purely for economic reasons but because they lack a social network of family, friends, church, etc., to provide housing in large part because their substance abuse and/or mental dysfunction have often alienated such networks.
Because General Relief only covers basic subsistence food needs for a month and not shelter, it encourages the homeless to find shelter from their family or friends or otherwise develop a social network.
What might be the unintended consequences and moral hazards of providing General Relief checks that would be ample enough for housing? Wouldn’t all those social networks that currently house the homeless dump them on the welfare system? Tepper doesn’t tell us.
Flophouses gone
Beyond that, there’s another and overlooked reason why homelessness is such a big and growing problem in Los Angeles. It is because flophouses and cheap hotels, which once served to house most of the homeless here, have largely disappeared. That’s due to our unmentionable social policy of turning over our old, small, and cheapest housing stock in the inner-ring of neighborhoods around Los Angeles to economic migrants who work in the wholesale markets close to the L.A. Central Business District, such as the wholesale produce, flower, toy, and clothing markets together with the tourist hotel districts.
Likewise, older inner-ring districts and suburbs of Los Angeles once provided smaller, older, “fixer” single-family homes to first-time buyers to get on the first rung of the housing equity escalator. That bottom rung of the housing ladder has been mainly taken over by economic migrants who pump up rents by doubling up.
Young family homebuyers are thus pushed out to the outer ring suburbs to find affordable housing at the second or third rung up on the housing ladder. The homeless, being the most vulnerable, are pushed out onto the streets.
What’s more, if a working class family decides to move back to the city core or to an inner ring neighborhood or suburb by buying a new condo or renting a new apartment, they will pay a hidden tax imposed by the Inclusionary Housing law. About every four buyers or renters of new condos and apartments in the many new mixed-use developments in downtown Los Angeles and places such as Pasadena must subsidize one inclusionary housing unit. Needless to say, this inflates housing costs.
Thus, to lessen our traffic and pollution problems by moving closer in to the job centers one must pay an inclusionary housing tax to house low-income people who ironically may have pushed you out to the suburbs in the first place. The housing affordability cognoscenti avoid telling us the double taxation realities of inclusionary housing, however.
What all this means is that there is no moral high ground in such a world where advocating low-income housing near jobs centers merely displaces workforce housing out to the far suburbs and edge cities. Paraphrasing economist Tom Sowell, “There are no affordable housing solutions, only tradeoffs.”
It is time we quit blaming greedy developers, rich gentrifiers, or even economic migrants for our housing affordability and homeless problems. It is our elected policymakers and their housing affordability cognoscenti, who have not told us the ramifications of our population and migration policies. And it is we who have fallen for the politically symbolic housing and homeless programs, inclusionary housing laws, and “smart growth” policies which mostly shift the problems around or worsen them.
Unless we can see our housing problems clearly we can hardly devise sound policies for their remediation.
Wayne Lusvardi is a writer and an independent real estate appraiser. He is a former low-income housing analyst for Los Angeles County and a former real estate representative for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. He lives in Pasadena.
