AM Supports Call for a Better Housing Future

Associated Ministries has joined with 30 local nonprofits to endorse an inspiring Op-Ed by Michael Mirra that was published in the Tacoma News Tribune on May 24:

Imagination needed to fix Tacoma housing injustices beyond COVID-19
By Michael Mirra, executive director of the Tacoma Housing Authority

The pandemic is causing widespread hardship. In response, the nation is spending a lot of money on emergent needs, such as emergency shelter.

Doing that is essential. Yet, local and national governments also need to invest so we come out of this crisis stronger, and better, than just more shelter.

Before COVID-19, our housing markets and civic systems were weak and unjust. Nearly half of Tacoma and Pierce County’s renters could not afford their housing. Home purchases were unaffordable for many first-time home buyers. A notable number of people and families had no housing.

This failure weakened almost every other civic interest: education, child welfare, health, wage and economic development, transportation, justice and racial justice. It deepened our racial disparities. Although persons of color constitute about 25% of Pierce County’s population, they constitute 45% of persons experiencing homelessness.

The pandemic made this worse. It reminded us that housing is necessary not only for personal health, but also for public health. It created a wave of newly impoverished families that now need to find housing in a market that was not serving them before.

In our pandemic spending, we should not seek to rebound merely to the prior level of failures. We should imagine a better future, and invest in it.

There are precedents. Our nation made some of its wisest investments in its own future during crises. During the Civil War, when that conflict was not going well, Congress invented the land grant program to finance public universities.

Congress planned the transcontinental railroad. It created the homestead program for white families that settled the Midwest (all this on land taken from native people).

In the Great Depression and World War II, Congress invented Social Security, public housing, the National Labor Relations Act, Bonneville Power Administration, Tennessee Valley Authority, Security and Exchange Commission, G.I. Bill, and the subsidized home mortgage market, which helped create the white middle class.

This work was not necessary to survive crises. Indeed, the payoff for these investments was years ahead. Congress made these investments in a re-imagined future.

The COVID-19 pandemic should also be an occasion for a similar re-imagining, investment, and leadership.

Those past investments and the resulting generations of prosperity, however, excluded people of color. This further baked the nation’s legacy of racial oppression into these new housing markets, segregating them on purpose.

This historic exclusion helps explain why black families today on average have one-seventh the assets of average white families.

There is not only a lot of work to do. There is a lot of work to undo.

A better, more equitable, housing future is not hard to imagine. The City of Tacoma and Pierce County have both commissioned thoughtful studies recommending local strategies, of three types:

* We need to make it easier to build housing of all sorts for all incomes. This requires more inclusive zoning that allows appropriate densities in more places. It requires easier and more predictable permitting.

* We need to give adequate and smart incentives to developers to allow and, in some cases, require them to include affordable units in market-rate housing.

* Tacoma and Pierce County need local housing trust funds to help finance the purchase or construction of housing that’s removed from the speculative rental market through public or nonprofit ownership.

For these same purposes on a national scale, Rep. Denny Heck is sponsoring H.R. 5599, the Fulfilling the Promise of the Housing Trust Fund Act, and Sen. Maria Cantwell is sponsoring S. 1703, the Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act.

These strategies for all incomes would provide a community resilience that will serve us well, through the next crisis and beyond. It would provide a measure of racial and economic justice we would recognize.

More emergency shelter is essential. But more shelter alone is not the future we need.

This Op-Ed is endorsed by these organizations:

Amara

Asian Pacific Cultural Center

Asian Pacific Islander Coalition – Pierce County

Associated Ministries

Bates Technical College

Catholic Community Services

Centro Latino

Foundation for Tacoma Students

Greater Tacoma Community Foundation

Korean Women’s Association (KWA)

League of Women Voters of Tacoma-Pierce County

Living Access Support Alliance (LASA)

Metropolitan Development Council (MDC)

NAACP- Tacoma Branch

Pierce College

Pierce County Housing Authority

Pierce County Human Services Coalition Executive Committee

Rainbow Center

SafeStreets

Shared Housing Services

Tacoma Community College

Tacoma Housing Authority

Tacoma Ministerial Alliance

Tacoma-Pierce County Affordable Housing Consortium

Tacoma-Pierce County Habitat for Humanity

Tacoma Urban League

United Way of Pierce County

University of Washington – Tacoma

YMCA of Pierce & Kitsap Counties

YWCA Pierce County

Read the original article online here.