Introduction to Keeping America Housed, a Special Edition of Housing Policy Debate

Abstract

Keeping America housed is growing more difficult. For at least four decades, the United States has suffered an increasingly acute affordable housing crisis for lower-income people, who have endured untenable and unstable living conditions. The number of people experiencing homelessness has hovered around half a million on any given night, and the number of people living unsheltered is increasing (U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development, 2021). Many millions more live on the edge of homelessness, struggling with rent burden, low-quality housing, overcrowding, and the constant threat of eviction (Alvarez & Steffen, 2021; Gromis et al., 2022). The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the problem of housing insecurity, with unprecedented levels of unemployment that rendered millions of tenants unable to pay their rent, leaving them at risk of eviction and adding more to the rolls of the homeless. As more fortunate people hunkered down in their homes to avoid spreading the virus, thousands of vulnerable people found themselves forced to sleep in tents and on the streets, offering policymakers a graphic reminder of the significant housing precarity in our major cities. This special issue examines the challenge of keeping America housed and highlights a few approaches that emerged during the pandemic. The issue includes seven articles, starting with a description of the vast homeless emergency response system and efforts made during COVID-19 to enhance shelter capacity through the use of hotels. It then turns to homelessness prevention and the challenges with targeting these efforts. Recent years brought not only the pandemic but also a long overdue moment of racial reckoning. In response to the rallying call to end structural racism embedded in our systems, this issue concludes by examining how race plays a role in homelessness. The primary response when someone becomes homeless in the U.S. is emergency shelter, a temporary bed to sleep at night. People often think of shelter as a band-aid—the minimum we should do. Indeed, shelter can often be life-saving, protecting people from literally sleeping on the street. There is, however, a misconception that emergency shelter costs substantially less than providing housing, when studies show that providing shelter can be expensive (Spellman et al., 2010). In addition to being costly, emergency shelter is not a solution to homelessness, as it doesn’t provide a permanent place to live. Unfortunately, instead of a lean infrastructure set up to respond to emergencies and get people back into housing, crisis response has become a permanent part of our safety net, and a large one at that. As Culhane and An (2021) demonstrate in their study, the shelter “system” is a complex and sprawling industry. Yet—as the authors of this study point out—despite this investment, the need for shelter exceeds the number of beds available, and more than 200,000 live unsheltered on a given night (U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development, 2021). They estimate the annual cost of providing universal shelter would be $12.6 billion but caution policymakers to evaluate this number against the cost of permanent housing in the form of housing vouchers. The pandemic helped illuminate the public health need to bring people in off the streets and highlighted the challenges of preventing the transmission of the virus while providing temporary shelter in congregate settings. The unprecedented widespread use of hotels as emergency