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Posted on Aug 21, 2024

Original image by Garik Barseghyan from Pixabay. Digitally altered by Lucy Kang.

We need affordable housing now! On today’s episode, we look more closely at two stories that underscore the importance of affordable housing.

First, we’ll examine what the recent Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson means for unhoused people who are living on the streets and how historical disinvestment in affordable and public housing has created our current homelessness wave.

Then, we’ll hear about the fight to legalize and preserve one important type of affordable housing units in New York City – basement apartments – and how the escalating impacts of climate change are making that campaign more urgent than ever. 

TRANSCRIPT

Lucy Kang: You’re listening to Making Contact. I’m Lucy Kang.

Two hundred and forty thousand people in this country are experiencing unsheltered homelessness. That means they’re sleeping in places not meant for human habitation, like outside or in vehicles.

Many of them end up on the streets in cities. And there, they face harassment and sweeps. That’s when encampments are broken up, and people forced to leave.

I used to report on encampment sweeps when I worked at a local radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area. And they were horrible. Every single time.

I’ve spoken to dozens of people over the years. People who told me they sometimes had basically no warning that they had to leave…

Casey: They came and woke me up and said, I had like 10 minutes, 15 minutes to basically grab what little I had, you know, whatever I could, in time before they came.

Lucy Kang: I’ve heard stories about people getting their things taken or destroyed.

Needa Bee: People were getting hysterical. They were actually watching their stuff getting crushed. Like there was a lady there who is a is a musician. They crushed her violin. They crushed her drum set. … People lost bikes. One lady lost all her uniforms for work. And then lost her job.

Lucy Kang: Sweeps like this are cruel. And they can be really traumatizing. Imagine getting woken up and told you have to leave, but not having anywhere to go. And then imagine that happens to you over and over again. That is the reality for some people. And they’re not just losing belongings and important documents. Often they’re also losing community. Folks in many encampments look out for each other. Losing those relationships means starting from scratch: only this time, they’re often alone.

We’re looking at this issue today because the Supreme Court recently made a decision in a case called Grants Pass v. Johnson that’s going to have a major, major impact on how local governments deal with homelessness. The question was whether the anti-camping ordinances of the city of Grants Pass violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Here is lawyer for respondents Kelsi Brown Corkran speaking during oral arguments.

Kelsi Brown Corkran: The City interprets and applies the ordinances to permit non-homeless people to rest on blankets in public parks while a homeless person who does the same thing breaks the law. The ordinances by design make it physically impossible for homeless people to live in Grants Pass without facing endless fines and jail time.

Lucy Kang: Ultimately, the court ruled that cities can fine and jail unhoused people for sleeping in public – even if they don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s a huge blow to the rights of people experiencing homelessness and it opens the door for increased sweeps.

Paul Boden: The Supreme Court said, you know, the protections under the Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment don’t apply to unhoused people, don’t apply in these circumstances. And so they let the dogs out.

Lucy Kang: That’s Paul Boden, the executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, or WRAP, which is based in San Francisco and which submitted an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case. Paul is formerly unhoused and has spent decades fighting for the rights of unhoused people and trying to stop sweeps.

Lucy Kang: So how is this Supreme Court decision likely going to impact folks, who are living on the streets?

Paul Boden: Oh, it already has. I mean, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, issued an executive order.

Lucy Kang: The executive order directs state agencies to clear encampments on state land and urges cities to do the same. Governor Newsom also threatened to pull state funding from cities and counties for not doing so. In early August, he went to an encampment in Los Angeles to personally participate in a sweep.

Gavin Newsom: We’re done with excuses. And the last big excuse was “well, the courts are saying we can’t do anything.” Well, that’s no longer the case. So we had a simple executive order. Do your job. There’s no more excuses.

Paul Boden: It’s already already turned the volume up in the campaigns of local and state governments to aggressively address the issue of homelessness based on a concept that says, if we see it, we have a homeless problem. If we don’t see it, we don’t have a homeless problem.

Lucy Kang: In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed launched “very aggressive” sweeps following the Supreme Court decision. And other cities are following suit. This is going to further criminalize homelessness and poverty.

Paul Boden: People end up being incarcerated or cited with tickets that then become bench warrants because clearly they can’t afford to pay the tickets or they don’t show up in court. But people have ended up in this based on this really carceral approach to addressing the issue of homelessness.

Lucy Kang: The United States has a long history of trying to keep people deemed “undesirable” out of public spaces.

Paul Boden: Like, that’s the thing about looking at this stuff in isolation. Like, Japanese American Exclusion Act, the Sundown Towns. And then you look at the Jim Crow laws and other laws, the Native American wiping out of whole communities. Like you use that time, place, and manner restrictions that local governments hold so dear where they control the environment in their community as relates to the time, place, and manner that people are out in public spaces. And they’ve used it in a discriminatory fashion for as long as we’ve been colonizing this space that we’re in.

Lucy Kang: And laws that prohibit sleeping, standing, or lying in public are just a newer iteration of this long history. It’s no accident that unhoused folks are disproportionately people of color, disabled people and queer and trans people – the same communities who have been historically targeted.

Paul Boden: I mean, it’s displacement. It’s relocation. It’s removal. It’s a very forceful militaristic removal of the presence of people that are living in public spaces cause they don’t have a roof over their head.

Lucy Kang: I think it’s important to remember that the wave of homelessness that we’re seeing today didn’t just show up from nowhere. It has its roots in the 1980s, especially in actions taken by the Reagan administration.

Paul Boden: There were massive affordable housing cuts at the beginning of the Reagan revolution between 1980 and 1983. Around 54 billion a year nationally that was being cut just in the public housing programs, as well as the rural programs in the Section 8 programs. It was this massive disinvestment in providing subsidies and maintenance operational fees for the development of public housing for poor people.

Lucy Kang: And that disinvestment continued. According to Paul, there are over 400,000 fewer units of public housing available today than in 1994. Instead of investing in public housing, the Reagan administration directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, to create emergency shelters instead, which are only meant for temporary stays.

Paul Boden: So we didn’t replenish the housing. But we did heavily increase the policing and the carceral approach to addressing the issue of homelessness once we had opened the emergency shelters.

You don’t address the cause of why the problem that you’re trying to address actually exists. Like you’re not really addressing housing. You’re not really developing housing and subsidizing housing that meets the need. So you go for the cosmetic approach.

Lucy Kang: Homelessness is due to policies that we could change but don’t. Like the massive disinvestment in public and affordable housing Paul talked about. And other things like stagnant wages, cuts to social welfare, barriers to healthcare and education, and mass incarceration – these all contribute to homelessness. And then when you put all that into the container of historical racism and exclusion of this country, you get what we see today. It’s not just one city in Oregon. It’s not even just in this country. Prioritizing the carceral and military systems shapes how America approaches the world.

Paul Boden: The systems that created the kind of LGBT attacks that we’re seeing, the attacks on reproductive rights, the attacks unhouse community members, the incarceration rates, you look at who’s in our streets, who’s in our jails, who’s in our prisons – it’s very consistent of who is the majority of those people.

And that we understand that the organizing to address this stuff, the prioritizing of the Pentagon over the Department of Health and Human Services or the Housing and Urban Development programs, like this is all connected. And our fighting for the humanity of the people in Gaza and the people that are living in the streets is the same fight. And we just need to get better and better and better at connecting those issues and bringing it under the rubric of we’re fighting for human rights for all people.

Lucy Kang: That was the voice of Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project.

I’m jumping in to remind you that you are listening to Making Contact. If you like today’s show and you want more information, or if you’d like to leave us a comment, visit us at our new website, FOCMedia.org. There you can access today’s show and all of our prior episodes. Okay, now back to the show.

Welcome back to Making Contact. In the first half of today’s show we learned about the history and factors that have led to the homelessness crisis. And I hope you’ve managed to take away just how important affordable housing is to preventing and solving it.

Now we’ll turn to New York City, to zoom in on the fight to legalize and protect one really important type of affordable housing: apartments in basements and cellars, many of which are unauthorized and unregulated. Up to hundreds of thousands of people live in these units, even though tenants are at risk of evictions that could lead to homelessness and the units can lack safety protections.

Up next, we have a story from a partner podcast about what happened when that turned deadly for one immigrant family – and why this issue is so urgent in the face of escalating climate change. Here is producer Stella Gu with a story brought to us by the Queens Memory Podcast.

[Montage: news clips]

Stella Gu: September 1st, 2021, on what many thought would be a normal pandemic, the remnants of Hurricane Ida swept through New York City.

[News clip]

Although the storm originally made landfall in New Orleans days before as a Category 4 hurricane, its strength in New York City was not well forecasted, leaving residents and officials under-prepared for the destruction it would cause.

[News clip]

No other borough would pay a bigger price than Queens.

Out of the 13 who lost their lives in New York City, 11 lived in Queens, and 10 occupied the same type of illegal apartment.

[News clip]

Three were a family living on Peck Avenue – a father, a mother, and a daughter.

[News clip]

In early news reports, the Chinese family had no name and was a mere statistic. No one knew who they were, even within Chinese community. It would not be easy to identify them.

Zhang Dechao: [V/O on top of Mandarin] She told me the male victim was from Hubei, same province I was from, asked if I knew him since I am the president of Hubei Association, but I had no idea who that was.

Stella Gu: Zhang Dechao, a Chinese medicine practitioner and president of the Hubei Province Association, took it upon himself to find out.

Zhang Dechao: [V/O on top of Mandarin] This accident happened on September 1st, 2021. It was a 500-year storm. I wasn’t aware of this until the journalist from the World Journal called me. We started to ask around from the senior center and nursing home, to see if anyone knew someone his age and from Hubei. Eventually we got to know his last name and then found out his full name, Leng Hong Sheng.

But we couldn’t get in touch with their families. Later through someone from Hubei, we got the number of the brother-in-law of Mr. Leng in China. At that time my son was in China, so I asked him to make the phone call as soon as possible. We called many times, but no one picked up because he thought it was a scam. Eventually we contacted the neighborhood committee and local police, finally got in touch with them.

Stella Gu: It’s hard to imagine today how chaotic it must have been that night, when I stand in front of the once flooded house on Peck Avenue. This small neighborhood is strangely situated in Kissena Park. 100 years ago no one lived here. There was a creek called Kissena creek which later was buried. In Chippewa, Kissena means cool water.

Zhang Dechao: [V/O on top of Mandarin] That place is the lowest area in Flushing, it was originally a swamp then dried out, there was even a bridge, and later somehow houses got built here. Every year it would be flooded whenever it rains. Later on, a park was built here, one meadowland and one wetland, it’s not suitable for people to live here. But I don’t know why the housing situation didn’t get attention from the government. So many underserved groups live here, the drainage system should have been improved. It is questionable whether the situation there is completely following the safety code, that’s why you see so many residents here are low-income Chinese immigrants.

Normally a basement has a window above ground. But Mr Leng’s window was 2 – 3 feet below the ground level. You walk down a 12-step stairway to his door. That area is already the lowest in Flushing, that basement was truly the lowest of the lowest. That’s why all the water went to his basement that night within a couple minutes. Tons of water rushed to their door, they didn’t stand a chance.

The Leng family went to bed early, the storm happened late at night, they must have thought it was safe to stay at home. But that place flooded every year. The problem never got resolved. The reason they stuck to living there is that they had applied for affordable housing, and were hopeful that they would be able to move out very soon. They waited and waited, their turn never came.

Stella Gu: Different types of affordable housing programs exist for low income groups. The most common two are public buildings – which have a long waiting list – and affordable housing lotteries. Public buildings owned by the government are very limited in number. Once your application is approved, your waiting time could be ten years or more.

While the affordable housing lottery is a cooperation between the government and commercial real estate developers. Eligible applicants secure apartments based entirely on luck. Both routes to affordable housing are complicated, though once you’re in, you’re in for life. But for people who wait in line for years, the lottery can feel cruel, and in Mr. Leng’s case – fatal.

Just like so many other immigrants who traveled thousands of miles to relocate to the U.S, Mr. Leng started his journey with hope. But he ended up without even a safe home. The ashes of Leng’s family were eventually shipped to China in a volunteer cargo truck.

When a tragedy like this occurs, we always wonder what we could have done to prevent it from happening. The house the Leng family lived in had 9 complaints filed against it from 2000-2007. Eight of them were either about the illegal conversion of basements or about the space being overcrowded with too many occupants.

And the problem is twofold – in both supply and demand. Even as affordable housing units remain in short supply, people like Mr. Leng would keep applying, hoping against all hope that one day they would win the lottery. The best things in life are worth waiting for. Housing is one of those things for Chinese families. There’s a saying in Chinese – 安身立命. The home is where the soul comes to rest, on the grounds of which new life can take hold. The so-called “housing security” in Chinese culture is more than just an economic ideal, it’s a spiritual one tied to one’s sense of belonging in this world.

And yet due to the affordable housing crunch in Queens, families are forced to wait – often with no end in sight.

Lucy Kang: That was Stella Gu, a producer with the Queens Memory Podcast. You just heard an excerpt from the Season 3 story “Invisible Homeless.” The story is also available in Mandarin. Go to queensmemory.org for more information.

To learn more about basement apartments, I spoke with Annetta Seecharran. She’s the executive director of Chhaya Community Development Corporation, a housing and economic justice organization dedicated to serving low income South Asians and Indo-Caribbeans in New York City. Chhaya, along with other organizations, is part of the Basement Apartments Safe for Everyone, or BASE, campaign that supports a pathway to legalize and regulate these units.

Lucy Kang: We just heard the story of this immigrant family who very sadly perished in their basement apartment during Hurricane Ida. Could their deaths have been prevented?

Annetta Seecharran: 100%. And this is why we, you know, we are putting so much effort into this and pushing so hard. This is a leading campaign for my organization and for many others within the housing movement here in New York City because it’s a huge risk. And these deaths shouldn’t have happened and they absolutely could have been prevented had New York City and New York State address the issue of basement apartments and basement safety.

Lucy Kang: Could you talk about the BASE campaign? What is it advocating for?

Annetta Seecharran: Basement apartments in New York City are a critical part of the New York City affordable housing stock. We’ve estimated that there’s probably more than 400,000 basement units spread out across the city.

So the reason why the BASE campaign exists is because basement apartments, the vast majority of them are considered unauthorized units or quote, unquote “illegal.”  Yet, everybody knows that they exist. And people live in them.

The concern is that for a very long time now, because these units are unauthorized, homeowners would randomly get a fine or an eviction order because somebody complained that they are subletting their basement apartments. And we saw like, you know, trends of the city cracking down in certain neighborhoods, often as a result of some sort of xenophobia, right, when there was an increase of certain immigrant populations in the neighborhood, etc. But there was for sure an unevenness in the crackdown on basement apartments.

Lucy Kang: What happens when authorities get notified of unauthorized basement apartments?

Annetta Seecharran: Because this has been such an issue that happens,  you know, in the shadows, there isn’t official data about how this contributes to homelessness, for example, when there’s a crackdown. I do believe that these crackdowns in certain communities definitely contribute to homelessness, for sure.

What we do know is that certainly in, you know, in some communities like the South Asian community when there’s a crackdown what typically happens is that the tenant then finds another place to live with an extended family member, for example.

But that’s not a forever solution. In no time those tenants are back in the basement that they vacated or another basement. And so we haven’t solved the problem here, right? By cracking down you’re only losing a unit, and you’re causing homeowners to suffer and potentially put them at risk for defaulting on their mortgage or just you know losing critical income that they rely on.

Lucy Kang: Can you talk a little bit about how basement apartments allow tenants to stay in their communities, or to also be around their family members?

Annetta Seecharran: They are so critical. You know, my family, for example, when we first arrived in this country, when I was 13 years old, we stayed in a basement apartment with my aunt. And it is often the only accessible housing for low income folks, for new arrivals, sometimes young people, sometimes older, older adults, to stay within a community where they feel comfortable, where they can buy foods that’s familiar, where they can find jobs that are easily accessible to them. They keep communities together, they are important, and they allow people to stay together, really, right, and prevent displacement.

Lucy Kang: And at the same time, because some of these basement apartments are, as you say, unauthorized, can you describe how that makes their tenants more vulnerable?

Annetta Seecharran: It creates a multiplicity of problems for tenants, right? Because they are often done, you know, in the shadows, right? Like, in the, not in a legal market.

It puts tenants in a vulnerable position because they often don’t have a lease. Those tenants who don’t have a lease don’t really have a legal backing  to support getting the help that they need as tenants.

It also puts homeowners in a vulnerable position. Leases are important. It’s a legal contract between the landlord and the tenant and so often because they are unauthorized, these units are rented out without a lease.

The other issue is that basic safety concerns are not addressed. Homeowners are not able to update their apartments if they want to because there isn’t a structure, there isn’t an infrastructure, a legal infrastructure that allows them, that provides the support that they may need to make those apartments safe.

And so what we, what the campaign is proposing is that there is a city wide program that supports homeowners in bringing those apartments up to code that regulates them like you would regulate any other housing, rental housing unit.  And it protects both the homeowner and the tenants.

And now, what we’ve seen in Ida, right, with climate change, there is an urgency around this matter. We don’t know when the next storm is going to hit and what neighborhood is going to hit. We feel that there is an urgency here, not just to really bring a level of dignity to basement dwellers, also give homeowners a reliable source of income that they feel good about.

Until we deal with the affordable housing crisis, people will continue to live in basement apartments. We’re never going to stop this issue. And so we might as well lean into it, make them safer, you know, bring them on, you know, online as  part of the, a formal part of the affordable housing stock. And not an underground – pun intended here, right? – part of the housing stock.

And so right now there is a policy proposal in New York City known as the City of Yes. And what this does is that it’s a fairly significant proposal that allows for an increase in density and bringing more units online. But what we’re excited about is that this would allow for those code changes that are required for basement units to come forward to become legalized and authorized.

Lucy Kang: Well, Annetta, thank you so much for taking the time to join me on Making Contact today.

Annetta Seecharran: Thank you very much.

Lucy Kang: That’s Annetta Seecharran, the executive director of Chhaya Community Development Corporation.

And that does it for today’s show. To learn more, head over to our new website, focmedia.org, where you’ll find more details about this episode and our archive.

I’m Lucy Kang. Thanks for listening to Making Contact.

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