Most Vancouver residents, it seems, can agree that we have a housing crisis. The city in recent years has had one of the lowest vacancy rates in the state; affordability is a buzzword that influences public opinion and policy decisions; and homelessness is an issue that persists despite aggressive efforts from city officials and taxpayers.
But agreement that a problem exists is where the consensus ends. Discussions about solutions or about underlying causes inevitably devolve along predictable political lines. Conservatives blame progressive policies that, they claim, enable homelessness, drug use and mental illness. Progressives blame what they say is a lack of government intervention.
And amid these partisan efforts to score political points and appeal to their base, both sides are reluctant to point to a significant factor in increasing homelessness — federal policy.
In 1977, for example, a budget proposal from outgoing President Gerald Ford called for Congress to fund construction of 506,000 low-income housing units nationally. By 1996, under the Clinton administration, federal funding supported construction of fewer than 9,000 new housing units — less than 2 percent of the number from two decades earlier.
Starting with the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980, the budget of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has routinely been slashed over the past four decades. That has reduced publicly funded construction, rental assistance for low-income residents and maintenance for public housing.
Federal support for housing might sound like anathema to those who desire to cut spending (while also ballooning the federal deficit) — a philosophy that is a foundational aspect of President Donald Trump’s second term. But I was reminded of the issue by a recent article.
In The Conversation, Eran Ben-Joseph of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology headlines that, “There was a time when America built beautiful homes for workers to deal with a housing crisis.”
That was during World War I, when the federal government recognized that having workers live close to ship, vehicle and ammunition manufacturers was essential to the war effort. Through the now-shuttered United States Housing Corporation, the U.S. government became the largest housing developer in the nation.
“These weren’t hastily erected barracks or rows of identical homes,” Ben-Joseph writes. “They were thoughtfully designed neighborhoods, complete with parks, schools, shops and sewer systems. … Its architects, planners and engineers aimed to create communities that were not only functional but also livable and beautiful.”
In two years, the corporation designed and constructed more than 80 new communities in 26 states — including in Bremerton — and created shelter for more than 100,000 people.
Similar efforts took place during World War II — a story with which Vancouver is intimately familiar. Developments in Fruit Valley, Fourth Plain Village, Bagley Downs, Ogden Meadows, Burton Homes and McLoughlin Heights were spearheaded by the then-new Vancouver Housing Authority, providing homes for shipyard workers. Many of those homes are still standing, as are many constructed by the United States Housing Corporation.
“Instead of simply creating complexes of apartment units akin to the public housing projects that most Americans associate with government-funded housing,” Ben-Joseph writes, “the agency focused on the construction of single-family and small multifamily residential buildings that workers and their families could eventually own. This approach reflected a belief by the policymakers that property ownership could strengthen community responsibility and social stability.”
Today, a century after it was implemented, the policy sounds like a novel idea. But it seems that at some point Americans will have to re-embrace the role of the federal government in constructing housing in order to deal with the persistent social issue of homelessness.
