Newsletter

Weekly Roundup 9/2: PBS News Hour Feature!

Technically a roundup for last week's news: I break down PBS's feature on disability and the housing shortage, the NYT fails at covering housing policy, and lots of links!

Alex Ghenis

02 Sep 2024 — 10 min read

Hello kind readers! I meant to get this off a couple days ago but life had other plans that got in the way.

But that delay officially makes this the Labor Day newsletter! That sure deserves some recognition, right? For those curious about the connection between disability and labor advocacy in the US, here's a solid rundown on the AFSCME Local 328 blog.

DisabilitYIMBY is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Now to the disability and YIMBY stuff…

PBS News Hour Covers Disability & the Housing Shortage

This past Tuesday, PBS News Hour aired a piece titled “People with disabilities face extra hurdles amid national housing shortage.” It gave a good overview of disproportionate harm faced by people with disabilities (PWDs), with an acute focus on low-income community members including folks on Supplemental Security Income (SSI). It interviewed renters with disabilities and representatives of two disability organizations: the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), a legal and advocacy firm, and The Kelsey, a Bay Area nonprofit housing developer that builds inclusive apartment complexes and advocates for more accessible housing in general. The News Hour website features video, audio, and a transcript: I recommend the video for those who can watch it, as it has good visuals about accessibility and lack thereof.

The focus on low income and homeless PWDs is incredibly important – though certainly doesn’t cover everyone facing housing struggles and headaches. Why is this group so important? Well, the disability community is disproportionately low income, and the lowest-income among us are often kept in poverty through systemic inaccessibility, discrimination, unconscionably inadequate social services, and unconscionable asset limits. For example, the maximum monthly SSI benefit in 2024 is a paltry $943 for an individual or $1415 for a couple; SSI also has asset limits of $2000 for individuals and $3000 for couples, which haven’t changed to account for inflation since the early 1980s. It’s difficult to find and secure housing as a poor person on benefits, even without accessible housing needs. People with accessibility needs, though, face a further shortage of options and higher costs. As a result, you get anecdotes and figures like those shown on PBS:

Across the country, PWDs are living in inadequately accessible homes, often above their budget, because appropriate housing isn’t available. Right off the bat, New York resident Jensen Caraballo (a 34-year-old with spinal muscular atrophy who receives SSI) explains his story moving from a nursing home to an apartment like this: “I will be honest. I settled for less. I needed a two-bedroom apartment that was affordable and accessible, and this place was neither. But it was the only way that I could live independently. So, I settled for less.” Caraballo explains that some months, some bills don’t get paid, his bank account can run negative, and he reluctantly asks friends and family for help.
Caraballo’s experience in the nursing home was filled with neglect and assorted traumas. He says he felt “stripped of [his] autonomy” as a teenager and young adult in the nursing home. Even the most amazing institution limits autonomy – and given the troubling state of America’s nursing homes, it makes sense that PWDs like Caraballo will accept inaccessible apartments and financial struggles to gain more independence. Of course, one’s independence is improved further through accessible housing, but people will take what they can get over the nursing home status quo…
On the numbers front, more than 4 million PWDs receive SSI, but that monthly payment is inadequate to survive on anywhere in the United States. Reporter Judy Woodruff notes that “even in America’s cheapest rental market, Dallas County, Missouri, rent for a one-bedroom would require 64% of a monthly SSI payment.”
Erin Nguyen Neff, a staff attorney at DREDF, notes that PWDs often encounter legal hurdles or resistance to requests for accommodations, even in situations ostensibly covered by federal law. For example, Nguyen Neff says that having a live-in aid could technically be a violation of a lease and cause conflict with a landlord.
Although the PBS piece doesn’t cover rules around housing accessibility in-depth, PWDs tend to encounter the following barriers:
- Older homes built before the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 had either minimal or zero accessibility requirements, though some are at least partly accessible or could be modified for more accessibility.
- Post-ADA, the US still has incomplete accessibility requirements for apartments (e.g., new apartments need wide enough doors and hallways for wheelchair accessibility, but there are no requirements for things like roll-in showers or automatic door openers). This means newer apartments tend to be more accessible than older ones, but still often require expensive modifications to truly meet a resident’s needs.
  - Newer, more accessible apartments also tend to be more expensive and out of reach for low income PWDs. The exception is subsidized below market rate (BMR) units, which is one reason why the disability advocacy community pushes so hard for new BMR housing.
- However, the ADA does not apply to single-family homes. So, when it comes to new construction, the widespread use of single-family sprawl over apartments and density means too many homes are fundamentally inaccessible or would require expensive modifications like stair lifts.
- Renters with disabilities may request a reasonable accommodation to their home – but while a landlord can’t deny it, the landlord can a) make the tenant pay for the modification and b) force the tenant to revert the unit to its original condition before moving out. Tenants can even be forced to pay for reasonable accommodations to common areas in an apartment building, such as an automatic door opener to a building’s entrance. Given the cost of these accommodations and PWDs’ economic disadvantages, many are unable to pay for accommodations in their rentals.
- PWDs who own their homes must also pay for modifications out of pocket, though some cities and nonprofits provide funding for home accessibility retrofits. Still, those funds are limited and often have income requirements.
[Back to PBS points now] Despite disability being covered by the Fair Housing Act since 1988, many accommodations are illegally rejected. In 2023, 53.26% of fair housing complaints were disability-related.
Nguyen Neff from DREDF also notes that many PWDs are driven to living in nursing homes because of the combination of inadequate housing and inadequate social services like personal attendant care. Attendant care and other independent living systems are necessary for people to live successfully in the community.
PBS highlights one of my favorite newer nonprofits, The Kelsey, which operates disability-inclusive apartment complexes and pursues housing advocacy in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Kelsey also partners with other apartment complexes (including mixed-income developments with BMR set-asides) to advise on disability accommodations in their BMR units.
News Hour visits The Kelsey Ayer Station, a mixed-ability, mixed-income apartment complex located right by a light rail transit line in San Jose, CA. 25% of its units are designated for PWDs and The Kelsey Ayer Station has staff that provide independent living another advice to tenants. There’s also a distinct effort to build community.
- The building has innovative and flexible accessibility features, such as removable cabinets and adjustable lighting, to accommodate a variety of disabilities.
- The Kelsey worked with the community to design the building, which PBS highlights by interviewing Isaac Haney-Owens, a man with autism who shows off Ayer Station's sensory garden.
- However, Micaela Connery, the cofounder and CEO of The Kelsey, notes that funding will always be an issue when trying to provide new, accessible and inclusive housing to people with lower incomes. While I personally believe there’s a group of renters that could support market-rate accessible housing, we’ll always have a need for nonprofits like The Kelsey so long as PWDs experience such widespread poverty – and those nonprofits will require grants and subsidies. (Alternatively, government could radically step up to start providing accessible housing itself, but that's another discussion).
When asked for policy solutions, Nguyen Neff suggests “Having adequate rent regulation or rent control to help keep rents regulated and low for people with disabilities and for low-income people; increasing funding so that people with disabilities have greater access to housing; but also changing the way we look at housing to remove the profit motive and center the people living there.”

Alex's note on policies:

So, one likely trend in this newsletter will be me agreeing in part and disagreeing in part with fellow disability advocates on housing policy – about, among other things, how much to embrace market framing (both analysis & solutions) versus anti-capitalist framing, and also how to balance pragmatism with idealism. I'm personally a mixed-market YIMBY and many disability advocates lean farther left than I do, with a good chunk of left-NIMBYs in the community (good rundown on left-NIMBYism from Noah Smith). So, I'm going to do that partial-agreement on Nguyen Neff's recommendations & give my policy thoughts…

First off, the single biggest thing we can do to tame housing costs is to radically expand supply of housing, especially in the places people want to live (like in Berkeley, where DREDF is located, and in San Jose, where The Kelsey Ayer Station resides). Decades of insufficient housing construction in those cities are ultimately what's allowed landlords to raise rents has much as they have, and put so many houses & condos out of reach of PWDs who might otherwise be able to buy them.
Any rent control/regulation has to be done carefully lest it distort the housing market in harmful ways, and has to be done hand-in-hand with new supply otherwise it will only benefit the people lucky enough to land rent-controlled apartments (plenty of people will inevitably be left out, whether that’s people who end up with high rents because of policy loopholes or people who end up on the street because there aren’t enough homes). So, tread lightly here…
I wholeheartedly agree with the recommendation to increase funding so PWDs have better access to housing. Some of the ways to do this are by increasing grants & tax credits for new accessible homes, including BMR apartments, and by increasing monthly housing subsidies and disability benefits so recipients can afford higher-quality homes in general.
Finally, we can have a well-designed housing market that mixes for-profit development with with the right regulations (including around zoning and accessibility), taxes, targeted subsidies, and so on: basically, a healthy mixed-market system. Regarding profits on housing construction: if you want unsubsidized development at all anywhere, there has to be some opportunity for profit otherwise nothing will get built. Ultimately, advocating for removing the profit motive is righteous but isn't an implementable policy solution; would (if implementable) harm housing construction; and IMO is an unachievable wish in America absent a revolution. So, that's my biggest point of disagreement.
- We also need to recognize that plenty of NIMBY advocacy is the result of a profit motive: incumbent homeowners restrict housing supply to boost their own property values, and incumbent landlords block competition to boost their own rental income. On that note, the best way to eat into housing profiteers' profits while benefiting PWDs is to radically increase the supply of housing, and thus competition among property owners (landlords included). I’ll flesh those housing market & policy bits out more in the future.

Kudos to PBS for covering this important topic!

On housing policy and elections, the NYT is not okay

Though it's not disability-specific, I must join the online chorus of criticism against the New York Times for its patently absurd framing of the impact of the US Presidential candidates’ policies on the housing market. This past Friday, August 30, the Times published an article titled “Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have plans to solve the housing affordability crisis. Economists have doubts.” What are the differences and doubts, you might ask? Let’s take a look:

“Ms. Harris is promising a cocktail of tax cuts meant to spur home construction – which several economists said could help create supply. But she is also floating a $25,000 benefit to help first-time buyers break into the market, which many economists worry could boost demand too much, pushing home prices even higher. And both sets of policies would need to pass in Congress, which would influence their design and feasibility.

Mr. Trump’s plan is garnering even more doubt. He pledges to deport undocumented immigrants, which could cut back temporarily on housing demand but would also most likely cut into the construction work force and eventually limit new housing supply. His other ideas include lowering interest rates, something that he has no direct control over and that is poised to happen anyway.”

Yes, that’s right – NYT rightly highlights Harris’ very-much-housing-specific policies of a) tax cuts to spur home construction, which should lower prices by the laws of supply and demand, and b) a proposed $25,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit that would, on the flipside, boost demand and thus prices while helping some people start their home-equity journey. The whole thing would need to be well-designed and, yes, get through Congress as the interviewed economists contend. I think it’s fair for some economists to have doubts, but overall it seems like a well-balanced package of proposals (I’m a tentative “no” on the first-time homebuyer credit since homeownership is already plenty subsidized over renting, but it’s better than a wide net that also includes subsidies for second homes or upsizing).

And what about Trump’s “housing policy?” Well, that would be mass deportations and camps in ways that would remove some demand (through, you know, gross violations of human rights) but also remove many/most of the people actually building our homes, depending on how many legal residents get scooped up in widespread raids of brown people. Sounds bad! Oh, and it would involve either bullying or illegally influencing the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, or using dictatorial powers to remove the lines between the Fed and Presidency (a move that would wreck the economy sooner or later). Also, over the line just a bit!

But of course, the Times treats those Trump policies with the same bland tone as Harris' tax credits while ignoring the human rights implications of Trump’s mass deportations. And while economists doubted whether Harris could get her policies through Congress, the interviewed economists wondered whether Trump could get his past courts and judges (since they would almost certainly be illegal in some way or another).

So, to be clear, these two candidates’ “strategies” are nothing alike and present radically different versions of America. Yet in the headline and in much of the body text, the Times presents them as just a couple proposals that economists have “doubts” about. We cannot normalize fascism like that, and we must never treat gross human rights violations as valid housing policies.

So, I wholeheartedly join on the Internet pile-on against the NYT’s ridiculous housing article.