By Joni Halpern
On January 17, 2025, I sat next to an elderly African-American woman, both of us waiting for the San Diego Housing Commission to start the board meeting. The woman was clothed in simple, attractive garb, her gray hair combed neatly. She sat with dignity, her chin lifted, her shoulders squared. She smiled and nodded when she caught my gaze.
The business of the meeting began with public comment. She was the first one to speak.
“Good morning, Honorable Members of the San Diego Housing Commission,” she began. “I live in City Heights with my husband.”
She struggled to find her notes, then added, “and we are both disabled. We had applied for Section 8 [federally subsidized housing] on November 2012, and on November 2021, we were told we were on a waiting list for ‘mod rehab’ for the elderly and disabled. Up to this point, we are still on the waiting list. I am here to request…uh…the Board to grant us a priority, based on our situation…uh…my husband is diabetic…”
She began to cry softly.
“He is diabetic and we cannot walk very well. We climb 29 stairs one way and sometimes twice.” She added that young people had moved into the building and they were loud. “They’re young, you know,” she explained with a shrug, wiping her tears with a tissue. “I am here to plead with the Board that they grant us a priority on the waiting list.”
Twelve years or more is a long time to wait for subsidized housing. But it is customary in San Diego and other cities in the U.S., after decades of failure by the Congress and the Presidents of both parties to meet our soaring need for affordable housing.
In President Ronald Reagan’s era, for example, he signed off on massive cuts that housing advocates described as “a complete abandonment of a 50-year bipartisan commitment to low-income housing.” He had spoken many times about his commitment to the “truly needy” while slashing housing vouchers by 96% and gutting funding for repairs of public housing units.
President Bill Clinton helped gain support for his time-limited welfare reform plan by promising to assist extremely low-income families with ancillary supports like child care and housing, which would ease the journey to self-sustaining employment. Nonetheless, Clinton signed legislation that froze public housing construction and, when combined with cuts to other programs, ultimately contributed to the annual loss of public housing units by 10,000 or more by 2020.
Even afterward, when Congress and the Executive Branch established new resources to fund housing for people in need, the deficit in available low-income housing units skyrocketed from political neglect of prior needs and inadequate funding of current needs. It is typical in cities across the country to have waiting lists of more than a decade for low-income families and individuals seeking housing assistance.
For agencies tasked with providing, subsidizing or finding affordable housing for those who need it, there is an emotional toll borne by service providers when they have to repeatedly tell struggling families, the elderly, and those who are ill or disabled that “You are only on Year Eight, and the waiting list is 15 years,” as a woman of 60 was told recently at the third-floor window of the San Diego Housing Commission.
“The hardest thing for our staff is the lack of sufficient resources,” said Ryan Clumpner, San Diego Housing Commission Board Member. “It’s just a daily shortage of ‘we do not have what we need’ to assist everybody who legitimately needs the assistance.”
The grossly inadequate funding of affordable housing for households described as “extremely low income,” “low income,” and moderate income is a stubborn and persistent problem in San Diego County and nationwide. But here, there appears to be a mismatch between a growing need for affordable housing and the decades-old philosophy of local government – namely, that if we incentivize developers to build thousands of new dwelling units, affordable housing at all levels of need will become available.
This has never worked to reduce the grave deficit in housing stock in the largest categories of need. It has resulted, however, in an abundance of market-rate housing with high rents, few parking spaces, and few, if any, amenities, clogging existing communities and leading residents to organize against “over-development.”
Moreover, it appears that many developers have sought to ensure that the income level of tenants in the “affordable units” of their developments is at the higher end of the affordable-income scale. Apparently, they have determined that high market-rate rents will not be as attractive in developments that are shared with very low-, or low-income, tenants.
All of this means that urban areas like ours are forced to open more shelters, especially in inclement weather caused by rain or low temperatures. The January report to the San Diego Housing Commission Board noted that year-to-date, since July 1, 2024, SDHC received 11,795 requests for shelter and placed only 1,461, or 12% in shelter beds.
Many housed residents of this county believe there are plenty of shelter beds, but people resist using them. However, people who plan for, and work in the shelters know there are not enough beds. While the net number of beds may seem available to all, they are not. Persons with impaired mobility cannot climb onto top bunks. Women cannot be housed with men. Elderly persons or those with pets may need other accommodations. There are many imperatives that guide appropriate placement, and all of these bear on whether an existing bed is usable for the person who needs shelter.
For those witnessing the reality of families and individuals trying hard to stay housed, it can be difficult to accept that the American public is so invested in mythology about how poverty is created and maintained. A great number of Americans seem to believe that poverty is created by bad choices and maintained by a desire to depend on the larger society for support.
But here’s a clue: To paraphrase David Ellwood’s statement in his book, Poor Support, most poor people work whenever they can find a job they are able to do, in a location they are able to get to. But the American economy is a merry-go-round running at top speed. Anything can make a working person fall off – illness of the worker or someone in their household, disability, loss of child care, loss of transportation, unexpected expenses that break a budget, children’s needs, and more.
There is also the reality that many people work at the bottom of the wage scale. Their jobs are easy to cut when the economy suffers even a hiccup. Picking oneself up and trying to grab hold of a merry-go-round running so fast is tough, and sometimes a person’s grip is only temporary. Thus, many people need housing assistance not because they won’t work, but because they are working at the lowest wage levels in jobs that are the easiest to lose when something goes wrong in the economy or in their own lives. And many others are too old or too ill to work.
As a people, we Americans seem not to realize that the lack of housing creates problems throughout the systems in which we live and operate.
I recall attending a school disciplinary meeting for a youngster 12 years old. He had been missing school a lot, despite the admonitions from teachers and principal and the pleas and threats of his mother, who worked as a housekeeper. They had been evicted from a few apartments due to rising rents and to the fact that one of the mother’s housekeeping customers terminated her services due to budget concerns. The last time they were evicted, he came home from school and could not find his mother. Their belongings were near the street, and she was trying to get help finding shelter.
In the school meeting, there were about 12 adults sitting around the table to address the young man’s absenteeism.
“You see we are all gathered here, son,” said the principal. “We all want to help you. What can we do to get you to come to school everyday?”
The boy laid his head on his arms at the table. He looked sideways at the principal and said nothing for a few seconds. Then he said, “If you could help us with the rent, then I wouldn’t have to worry if my mom was going to be home when I got out of school. If they kick us out of the apartment, where will she be when I am at school?”
“I’m sorry,” said the principal. “We don’t help with that. Is there something else we could do?”
“Maybe you could give my mom a bus pass so she could come to school with me,” said boy. “Then she could meet me after school and go home with me too.”
“We don’t really do that,” said the principal. “We don’t give out bus passes to parents.”
And so it went. The last time I saw the youngster, he was in a rural area of San Diego County, attending school only intermittently, living with his mom in a windowless shed behind a large home that the owner was paying for by renting out four different sheds, which were served by a rough outdoor cooking area and a portable toilet.
When I knocked at the door of the shed, I heard a rustling, then the door cracked open.
“He doesn’t want you to come in,” said youngster’s mother. “He is embarrassed. We have to sleep with our mattress on the floor, and he shares the bed with me. There is no chair or any place for you to sit.”
This is the cruel reality of our failure to see the reality of each other’s life struggles. The struggle for affordable housing is not caused by the failure of agencies like the San Diego Housing Commission. It is not the failure of government, for government will do whatever its people persistently demand. The problem is with us. We have memorized the catechism of office seekers who assure us that if we deprive people of things they desperately need, they will get the message that they must become independent. We have convinced ourselves that housing is not a right. It is a choice, and people who make the wrong choices lack housing.
Still, it is tempting to imagine what our communities would be like if we gathered our power as “the people” and insisted that affordable housing for those who live and work amongst us must be a top priority. Imagine the youngster moving from a shed to a real residence, one to which he could expect to return and find his belongings in place and his mother home. Think of the elderly woman who pleaded with the San Diego Housing Commission to prioritize her and her husband on the waiting list for affordable housing. Imagine her in a ground-floor apartment, walking right up to the front door without the torture of 29 stairs.
Have we forgotten what it is like to care for each other in America?
Joni Halpern is a resident of Point Loma
