If Not Now

Roberta Rubin agreed to talk with us about affordable housing and homelessness.

Roberta teaches a course at Northeastern University on Affordable Housing Law, as well as teaching a course at Tufts University on Homelessness and Housing Policy. She spent eight years working in-house with a non-profit organization that developed, managed and operated affordable housing and continues to do some legal work with a firm that focuses exclusively on affordable housing, She serves on Mayor Menino's Homeless Planning Committee in the City of Boston, the Housing Task Force for the City of Medford, and on the boards of 3 different non-profits.

As with all IF NOT NOW overview interviews, we focused on how individuals can help to solve problems. That portion of the conversation is printed here first, and then you can become better informed by reading the entire interview.

Rebecca: What can individuals do? For people who aren't lawyers or aren't developers, is there a way to make an impact?

Roberta: One way that individuals can get involved is by finding out what organizations are present in their communities and finding out whether any skills that they have would be useful to those organizations. Housing related organizations don't just need lawyers and accountants; they need people with sales experience to help them in their outreach; they need people who can fold envelopes, you know, stuff envelopes for a mailing; they need board members who can lend expertise - it doesn't have to be real estate - it can be party planning, it can be “gee, where do you go to get t-shirts silk screen printed?”; a lot of organizations are desperately strapped for money and need people who simply have time and energy to help them go out and find it; they need networking - particularly when there are government cutbacks in funding, organizations that help poor people get very pressed - and this is a difficult time for funding for housing related activities in an era budget cuts and other governmental priorities. So, it becomes even more important for non-profits to reach out to the community and even just telling your friends and neighbors about the existence of organizations; helping organizations to expand their mailing lists so that they can reach out to more people in the community. Successful organizations don't just survive on the largess of major donors; they survive on little contributions from lots and lots and lots of people, and so that's a way that individuals can get involved. Another way is by just finding out what's going on in your community. If there's a planning board, they probably have a website. In Cambridge, you can get on the email list of the planning board to find out what issues are coming up to the forefront. If there's a neighborhood group, get on their mailing list and just be a voice that is not NIMBY.

Recently, I learned that there was some controversy in Cambridge about an affordable housing project that was being planned by one of the major non-profits in the city; and they do good work, but they were running up against some challenges that were, for one reason or another, coming before the city council, and people were being urged, “Contact your city councilor to let them know that not everybody in the city opposes affordable housing”, because the voices that people in the city hear are the voices of those in opposition and all the people who don't mind it, think it's a good idea, are not heard from. So to help combat the feeling of legislative leaders that “Our city doesn't want this housing”, we need to hear other voices.

Rebecca: Would you talk a little about your background?

Roberta:I've been a lawyer for 20 years; as a child I always liked to argue and debate and I recognized that that was a useful skill. I wanted to do something productive in the world and saw that lawyers sometimes had a chance to do that. The first long term job that I was able to get out of law school was in a firm that did a lot of work in the field of affordable housing; that was part of drew me to that firm. About half of my practice while I was there was in the area of affordable housing.

Rebecca: Would you define Affordable Housing?

People don't always understand what affordable housing is because, for a lot of people, it's synonymous with public housing, which is certainly a form of affordable housing, but it's only one of many. Affordable housing can be rental subsidies in privately owned apartments that are anywhere in the community where the government is just helping people who can't afford those units with some financial assistance; it can be housing that is developed with some government assistance, whether it's cash grants or loans or tax breaks, that then it is rented at a below market rate to people who very often are working families. The typical standard is that affordable rental housing is going to be rented to people earning no more than 80% of the area median income. But in a high income area like Boston, that could be folks earning up to $60,000.00 a year, so an awful lot of the people who are occupying affordable housing are working folks, school teachers, secretaries, clerks, folks behind the counter at a McDonalds, folks pushing a broom, who just can't make it. . .

Rebecca: And on whose presence we count?

Roberta: On whose presence we count enormously. So the work that I was doing as a lawyer has focused on the production side. Trying to assure that there is an adequate supply of housing that, in one way or another, is within the means of people who can't afford what's out there in the marketplace. I've also worked on affordable home ownership, helping people who are economically stable enough to move into home ownership, but can't get past the enormous barrier caused by very, very high home prices in the area.

So I was with a private law firm for about 9 years. I was a partner there and then, when I had my first child, I realized two things; one was that I wanted to work fewer hours because I wanted to be with my daughter; and the other was that the hours that I did work, I wanted to be socially productive; I wanted to have exclusively devoted to affordable housing; that while it's nice and interesting to do luxury condos and shopping malls and even university buildings and so forth, where my heart was, was the affordable housing.

So I went in-house with a non-profit organization that developed and managed and operated affordable housing and I was there for about eight years. At that point, I really wanted to take what I'd been doing and focus more on the policy end. Throughout this period, I'd been involved with non-profit organizations, not just representing them, but also as a board member, as a volunteer. There's an organization called Project Hope, which is located and operating in North Dorchester in Roxbury, that was founded by an order of nuns, doing family health services in the community. When I first got involved with them, they were running a small family homeless shelter and food pantry and not terribly much else; and now it has grown into a multi-service community organization that does - it has a nationally accredited child care center, it trains women to run their own child care businesses in their homes, it does adult education, helps women on welfare transition into employment with career ladders. It does a whole lot of things and is very active in the policy aspects. I really wanted to work more on the policy end to work on issues of homelessness and poverty.

So, I left the non-profit. I'm still doing some lawyering with a firm that focuses exclusively on affordable housing, working with some former colleagues from the non-profit world, but I'm also teaching. I teach Northeastern Affordable Housing Law and I teach at Tufts, courses on homelessness and housing policy and I'm still active in volunteer work. I serve on Mayor Menino's Homeless Planning Committee in the City of Boston, the Housing Task Force for the City of Medford, and serve on the boards of 3 different non-profits, so I do a lot of things.

Rebecca: Can you talk about why is it that market forces don't work in terms of housing? Since we count on the people who push the brooms and the people are the policeman and the people who serve at McDonalds why is it that absent government subsidy, it doesn't work that as they can't afford to live in the area, we're forced to pay them more? Why is this not a market issue?

Roberta: I think what it is, is a way in which the market is broken. You know, the concept that the market will provide is dependent on a completely free market where all externalities are taken into account and everything is properly valued. In the environmental area, for example, if we took into account the true costs of using a gallon of fossil fuel, that gallon of fossil fuel would probably cost $25.00; but it doesn't because we don't take into account all of the costs. So as we value our workforce, we are valuing people based on the immediate value that they provide to the employer. And the employer has to go out there and provide a service or sell a good and can only get so much money for that service or good and, based on that, can only afford to pay the worker so much. That's really not taking into account all of the costs to society of having people who are impoverished and not able to afford housing. So that's one piece of it.

We've seen some very major shifts in employment in this country over the past 50 years, partly dealing with technology and with globalization. We've lost of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs as jobs have gone overseas; but we've also seen jobs moved out of cities and out to the suburbs, so you have a spatial disconnect between where a lot of low wage workers live and where the jobs that could employ them have moved to. As we've shifted from a manufacturing economy, which tended to have somewhat higher wages, to a service economy that tends to have somewhat lower wages, that's created a further disconnect.

We have an extraordinary level of income inequality between the highest paid workers and the lowest paid workers. If you go back 50 or 75 years, the highest paid workers were paid maybe 40 times what the lowest paid workers were in a company; now that ratio is 400 times. So - something's broken; but the thing is, I'm not sure it's in our power to fix that piece of it. There have been studies done to look at the so-called housing wage. What would employers have to pay somebody to be able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment? You know, being sort of the minimum family size apartment with a bedroom for the parents and a bedroom for the child or children, and have that family paying no more than 30% of their income for housing costs; and in the Boston area, that number's about $24-25.00 an hour. Well, when you look at that compared with the minimum wage, which even at the relatively generous state minimum wage of $8.00 - it's higher than most places in the country - you're not going to be able to ask employers to switch from paying $8.00 an hour to paying $25.00 an hour. That would bankrupt employers. Incremental increases in the minimum wage haven't led to widespread unemployment; but you can't triple the wage.

We have a real imbalance between housing costs and it's not just high cost areas like Boston. It's worse here, but there actually is no place in the country right now where a minimum wage worker can work a 40 hour week and afford a 2 bedroom apartment where afford means paying no more than 30% of income for rent.

Rebecca: It's obvious that stability is important. It's important for the human and it's important for the community, but let's talk about why it's so important. Why it isn't a solution to say, “The jobs have moved half an hour away, so let's move the people”. Is it not just that the housing stock isn't available, but also that you mustn't break up communities that way?

Roberta: Again, a complex answer. First of all, there's a lot of barriers to creating new housing closer to where the jobs have moved. Planning and zoning is generally a local thing. Local communities generally have a lot of opposition to developing new housing, partly because it's expensive. It's expensive to communities to provide schools and police services and fire services and infrastructure like water and sewer; and so, unless you have planning at the state or regional level, communities have very strong self interest in not doing that.

There's also a lot of NIMBY (not in my back yard) attitudes where communities say, “You know, we know the poor people have to go somewhere, but please, not here”. And communities that have traditionally been single family homes on large lots don't want to change the rules to allow more multi-family housing; the economics simply make it infeasible to develop housing that's affordable if you have to have an acre lot per dwelling unit. So, there are a lot of practical barriers to putting up affordable housing in the suburbs where many of the jobs have moved to.

Beyond that though, I do think there's a very strong value in community. If you look at low income communities, people tend to think of them as hellholes, but in fact, they are very vibrant places. They are often places where there are a lot of ethnic and cultural ties among the people who are there. People in a low income community are dependent on each other to care for each other's children, to help out with errand, to offer support; those community ties are really vital.

If you look at communities that are often criticized for lack of social capital - I think in Boston of some of the poorer communities such as Roxbury or Dorchester - these communities are full of cultural and artistic and community based organizations and institutions that really are a source of richness to the lives of the people living there, and displacement hurts.

Rebecca: If people are living one place and their jobs move to another place, does housing policy need to be tied to transportation policy?

Roberta: It definitely needs to be aligned with transportation policy. In Massachusetts, that is starting. There have actually been some legal developments at the state level trying to tie assistance to cities and towns to their willingness to rezone to allow greater density around transportation notes. So, for examples, if a city or town is willing to change their zoning to allow denser housing - denser meaning more dwelling units in a given area of land - near a railway station or a bus line, that they may be entitled to some cash payments from the state. So, it's starting to be thought about in a very tangible way. It's really critical to think about it that way because you often see low income people making a trade-off between living close to their jobs where it may be quite expensive to live, or living a very great distance from their jobs. You have a lot of people commuting into Boston from Worcester, Plymouth, Providence, Fall River, Lowell - coming very long distances - because they want to earn the higher salaries that may be available in the city. You know, these are often white collar workers, working in the city service sector, but not able to afford the housing prices here. As the cost of gasoline goes up though, you're seeing some of those households where the trade-off isn't so great anymore because they may be paying two and three and four times what other people are paying in transportation costs; not to mention the environmental impact of people who are forced to drive long distances because public transportation is not available.

Rebecca: What if more, better public transportation were available and what if the public transportation were more heavily subsidized for people in certain income brackets? Would that allow people to live in communities where they have a community around them, where there is the housing stock, and more easily get to communities where jobs exist?

Roberta: It would help. Part of the challenge would be addressing the fact that right now a lot of the employment that has moved out of the city has moved out to suburban office parks that are convenient to highways, but not to much else.

Rebecca: But why couldn't buses run?

Roberta: They could, but it would require not simply placing people on a rail line, but thinking about a whole network of transportation options that would lead into the suburban office parks; that would lead into manufacturing facilities that are located well outside of the center city; really thinking about transportation, not just as an urban phenomenon, but as a way to link people to employment, and I think that's a piece that we're really missing right now.

You'd still need to address the issue of where you are putting housing because, at least in the Boston area, we still really have a shortage of modestly priced housing.

Rebecca: So it's not just that it's in the wrong place, or that it needs to be rehabbed, it's that there just isn't enough?

Roberta: That's right. That's not a universal. There are cities where there is an excess of rental housing, but in this area, we still really have not built to meet the need. The population of this area has not gone up tremendously, but there have been some other demographic changes. With the divorce rate hovering around 50%, you can have the same population, but a need for twice as many housing unit, also, as the student population of the universities has increased, you have considerably greater demand for housing.

Rebecca: So now there's the new law in Boston that you can't have more than 4 students per unit. Does that mean that students will now take up more rental units?

Roberta: Probably. That puts enormous pressure on rents for families because if you have 4 students, each of whom is paying $500.00, that's $2,000.00 for a rental unit; and right away, you've created a rental unit that's completely unaffordable to the average working household, but they're competing with the students and the landlords want what they can get.

Rebecca: Sure. And now more states are looking at long term costs of instability and homelessness, and recognizing that it would be actually less expensive to try to find a home for everyone. How do the issues of where you put people and how you provide services to them play out? Is that something that can best happen within cities, or can it happen in nodes outside of cities?

Roberta: The concept of it being cheaper to house people than to provide services is something that homelessness providers have been saying for years. If you look at what it costs to keep a family in a supervised shelter setting as opposed to what it costs to pay the entire rent for that family, it's so different. For the people who are labeled chronically homeless - people who typically have a mental or physical disability, often co-existing with a substance abuse problem and have been on the street or in shelter for years - they can cost the system enormously in terms of emergency room use, hospitalization, detox, jails and it's been demonstrated that it is not only more cost effective, but more effective, to simply house people and that even substance abuse, even treatment for mental illness, is more effective and easier when somebody has a roof over their head than when they're trying to figure out where they're going to sleep that night.

The challenge then becomes where should that roof be? And the NIMBY phenomenon is a barrier. It is difficult enough to overcome community opposition to providing affordable housing that will serve working families. It is incredibly challenging to find communities that will welcome housing that will serve people with mental illness or people with substance abuse problems, so the philosophical goal of housing people rather than simply providing temporary shelter makes absolute sense, it makes economic sense, it makes sense in terms of humanity. I think there's a long road head to grappling with the fact that there will be some upfront costs in terms of housing people. It may be less expensive over time, but first of all you've got to find the housing. Even if the community says yes, and a lot of communities say no - communities have been developing more stringent zoning laws to keep out shelters, to keep out group homes - but even if the community says yes, all the neighbors have to do is sue and they can hold the project up for years as it runs its slow way through the court system.

Regulatory barriers are often cited as the problem with the market. The market would provide if only we got rid of all of these regulatory barriers. There is some truth to that. Some of the regulatory barriers, I think, are good. I'm glad we have building codes. I'm glad we have fire codes. I think it's probably just as well that we can't have a brothel next to an industrial facility, next to a single family home; but, some of the barriers have gotten so great that it's really difficult to build anything.

I think we need some regional planning and oversight to figure out what we need as we move into this new century and where to put it all? What can we ask of communities? Is there a fair share? They're important questions.

Rebecca: What about affordability and stability for the middle income family?

Roberta: It's also important. I think the middle income family has gotten squeezed over the past several decades in a way that it really wasn't when I was a child. It was always challenging to move into home ownership, but housing costs have gone up so enormously out of proportion to the increase in wages for middle income households, that it is no longer feasible for a lot of middle income people to buy homes; or if they are buying, they're stretching themselves too thinly. We see that with the foreclosure crisis that we have now: people were moving from rental into home ownership and found themselves stretched too thinly. Part of that problem, I think, we need to solve with tighter monitoring of what lenders can and can't do. They're a lot of people who were persuaded to make some decisions that were not wise decisions for themselves and their families and, while everybody may be free to make decisions, some people are really pushed without having good information.

Rebecca: It seems like the rents that a middle income family would have to pay are also a barrier to stability.

Roberta: They are. You know, you look at what fair market rent is for a 2 bedroom apartment and in the overall Boston area, it's about $1,300.00 a month and in the Cambridge or Somerville area, you could be talking much more than that. So, I think that we need to address affordability across a spectrum. For people who are at the low end of the wage scale, for people who are unable to work for whatever reason, you need to be looking at some fairly deep subsidies to make housing feasible. For middle income people, we need to think about shallow subsidies or ways to make it easier for builders to build modest cost housing. You can remove some of the barriers and create the profit motivation for the market to provide modest new homes. If you look at the new homes that are being built, they're like mansions. They're not 2 bedroom cottages. We need more 2 bedroom cottages or 3 bedroom colonials like the “starter homes” that our parents' generation raised their families in. In apartments, we need fewer 2,000 foot luxury, corian countertop apartments and more modest, decent, pleasant family-living apartments, and we need to create the market incentives for that to happen; and where for one reason or another that's not possible, we need, as a society, to think about helping out so that middle income families are making it too.