The Fond Du Lac Apartment Mystery

25:39Many of the Democratic candidates in 2020 proposed making the voucher program an entitlement and expanding it considerably. But that's something that just that hasn't happened politically. Congress doesn't appropriate enough money to serve every eligible household. And so what does that mean? It means that there are very lengthy wait lists around the country. Basically, demand exceeds the supply of voucher in almost every market. The length of time Corianne waited, a year and a half, multiple experts we spoke to said this is actually remarkably fast for this system. When systems function like this, one idea that describes what's going on here is something called administrative burden.

26:26The idea is basically, some systems will make it hard to get the carrot they're offering by hiding it behind a lot of red tape. We all encounter this some of the time. As far as I know, there is not really a level of privilege that insulates a human being in 2023 from eventually encountering some hell bureaucracy somewhere, some place that protects itself with a moat of endless telephone menus. We have all screamed agent with increasingly hoarse voices into the void. But remember, Corianne and everyone else trying to cross this particular moat, the thing they need is not a corrected flight or some other inconvenience.

27:02The thing they need is housing. These are people who are in a state of emergency who are being met with a waiting list. And while they wait, they're doing things like putting exorbitant amounts of their very limited income towards rent or couch surfing or living in homeless shelters or living on the street. To have a chance at getting a voucher, they have to remain not only eligible, but also findable by the bureaucracy that might say yes while surviving these conditions for months, sometimes for years. Well, and the way they contact you is via mail. Mail? Yeah. So if you're actually homeless, good luck with that.

27:45Hopefully your shelter has been taking your mail and hopefully you haven't switched shelters. I wasn't homeless at that point. So I was able to get the thing via mail when they were like, hey, are you still interested? A year and a half later. And I was like, yeah. Well, I feel like the other problem with the will reach you by mail and mail only policy is even for people who aren't homeless, I imagine, they might just not have the ability to guarantee that they will be at the address that they're at for an extent of your time. They just would have housing instability. I've moved three times in the past five months, different states.

28:21So, like, they had my phone number, but they never tried to call me via phone. Was there any communication from the housing authority while you were waiting? No.

28:34It's very easy to blame the bureaucrats here. And it's convenient. It lets us forget that they are following the priorities that most of us have voted for. Their job is to allocate resources to people from a system that's underfunded. Which means, in their defense, they are in a very tricky moral position. Here's Ingrid. What's tricky is I think, you know, a lot of these housing agencies are legitimately trying to get these scarce subsidies into the hands of the people who need them the most. But that's a very difficult thing to do. It's very difficult to determine. So a lot of housing authorities, I think they feel comfortable with this kind of the first come first serve approach.

29:10But, you know, the problem with that is that length on the waiting list isn't necessarily the best measure of need at that moment. Because another thing that happens is, you know, if it takes eight years for someone to get to the top of the waiting list, you can imagine housing agencies have a hard time finding those people who signed up for the waiting list eight years ago. And so they end up having to go through to search and go through a lot of names before they can actually find somebody who is still around and still eligible and interested. But even if the government does successfully find you after all this waiting and you're still eligible and interested, you are not at the end.

29:55If you get your voucher, congratulations, you have reached probably the toughest hoop of all. And this one has a time limit. Hoop three, finding an eligible apartment. Here's Ingrid. So you win the lottery, and this is where you kind of think it's the Hollywood ending, but it turns out that it's not easy to find a voucher-eligible unit. So what is a voucher-eligible unit? A voucher-eligible unit is one that rents below the voucher rent ceiling. You can't, you know, rent a home and, I don't know, the, you know, Trump Tower. There's going to be a cap on how large a subsidy the housing authority will pay.

30:35So you have to find a unit that rents below the voucher rent ceiling, an available unit. That unit has to pass required housing inspections. The local housing authority has to come out and inspect that unit to make sure that it is a decent quality unit. And it has to be owned by a landlord who is willing to rent to somebody who is using a housing voucher to pay for part of their rent. And why would a landlord not want to participate in that? So I think there's sort of, you know, there's qualitative research suggesting there are kind of three different. I mean, one is that they may have social biases about voucher recipients.

31:19Right. Number one. Number two is that they may feel like, you know, they can get a higher rent from somebody else, right? And they also, you know, unfortunately, a lot of landlords say that it's just very difficult to deal with local housing agencies. You know, the required inspections actually often force landlords to keep their units off the market for several months while waiting for the housing authority to come out, the inspectors to come out. and to give a green light to their unit. So according to Dr. Ingrid Ellen, the reason there aren't that many eligible apartments, some of it is landlord prejudice.

31:59Some of it is that regulations designed to protect tenants from bad housing can actually be a bit too onerous. Corianne says she was encountering exactly that problem. Okay, so 18 months after you applied, you were still findable, you're still eligible, you're still interested. So what happens next? Like, how do you go about trying to find an eligible apartment? That's a very good question. You have to hunt for your own apartment that fits into these qualifications, not even just the cost qualifications. They're like, do you take Section 8? Or if there was not a carbon monoxide protector in the building, they didn't even give them the chance to put it in.

32:42Like if they were new to working with Section 8, you would think they would be like, okay, here's some things that might help you get this tenant via Section 8. Can you fix these, these, these, these things? And they were simple things, but like they would just take it completely out of the running then. And what was the reception you were getting from landlords? I had surprisingly good reaction to the fact that I was in the program. I'm just like, they kind of sympathized with me because they're like, hey, we have a few people that are on Section 8 here. I just don't know if I'll be able to get you in at your budget.

33:17How long did they tell you that you had to find an eligible apartment? A month. Wait, one month? Yeah. Just to interrupt here, Corian's counting one month from when she attended an information session on how to use the voucher. The government would say she got two months because they start their timer for when they first issue the voucher. In either case, not a ton of time. Yeah, and then you could get an extension for another three months. And then that's it? Yeah. Oh, that's so... Were you stressed? Oh, yeah. And remember, this is the hoop that Corian would not be able to jump through. She looked for a$650 apartment.

33:56She never found one. She ended up having to move in with a friend in another state. We spoke to someone at Fond du Lac's housing authority who said that last year, occupancy rates in Fond du Lac were at 99%, not a lot of apartments to go around, period. Generally, there's not enough affordable housing in America, and the problem is especially bad in the small towns people flock to after COVID. So those were Corian's particular headwinds, but Dr. Ingrid Ellen said that Corian's experience is actually pretty normal. It turns out that only three in five of those lucky households who make it to the top of the wait list are actually able to use their voucher.

34:36Okay, so two in five of those households who have been, and this is, remember, after figuring out how to apply, waiting on the wait list for an average two and a half years, they're getting back up to the list, getting recertified, right, showing more documents. Two in five end up giving that voucher back to the housing agency. And I want to just sort of like pause on that. This is a voucher that's worth an average of about, you know,$10 ,000 a year in value. And these are households who have waited for, like I said, two and a half years. So these are households that clearly are in need, right?

35:14In America right now, just over a third of the people who receive housing vouchers are, like Corian, non-Hispanic white people. Dr. Ingrid Ellen says that while it's common for everybody to struggle to actually use these vouchers, that research shows that outcomes for Black and Hispanic voucher recipients are actually even worse. So as to the first half of Corian's question, What is the point in offering a service that has a very long wait list if it's not a usable option? The answer is complicated and messy, like most things in life. Some people are using the voucher, but many fewer people are getting help than we say we want to help.

35:53Which brings us to the second half of Corian's question. How could we change this? That's after the break.

36:43Thank you. They know talent. Visit roberthalf.com slash talent today.

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37:58Welcome back to the show. So Corianne, our listener, wanted to know not just why she'd face so many hoops, but whether this hoop-producing system could get any better. So I asked Dr. Ingrid Ellen. I was curious, if the voucher program had been a solution for dysfunctional public housing, what was the new solution for the dysfunctional voucher program? I'm not ready to give up on the voucher program. I'm also not ready to give up on public housing either, actually. I just think there are a lot of things that we can do to improve the voucher program. And let me say that there's lots of evidence that the voucher program does lots of good things for the people who are able to successfully use vouchers, right?

38:41It reduces the risk of homelessness. It reduces poverty. It reduces the share of income you have to spend on rent. It reduces crowding. And there's even evidence that vouchers have benefits beyond housing. We've done research at NYU showing that children whose families receive vouchers actually do better in school. There's evidence from the Moving to Opportunity study that over the long run, And children whose families get vouchers when they're young earn 15 % more on average as young adults. So there's lots of good things that vouchers do. But I think the voucher program, as currently structured, has some Achilles heels.

39:22But I think there's a lot that could be done. There's some low-hanging fruit. I think housing agencies could extend the search times. And states and localities, more of them could adopt source of income discrimination laws. and we could be more serious about enforcing those laws. And rather than setting the subsidy rents, the subsidy ceiling rents at the level of the metropolitan area, you could set them at the neighborhood level. That would open up more neighborhoods rather than having all the voucher affordable units being in just a few neighborhoods.

39:57The solution Ingrid is referencing here is a pretty clever fix. I can explain it better through the example of Corianne. So the way the system works right now, Corian was given a voucher for about$650. How did the government decide on$650? The system looked at Corian's application, saw that she had no income. Then the system looked at the average rents across her county and picked a number a little bit below the average, 40th percentile. The problem is that in Corian's case, there just weren't many of those cheap apartments on the market. The ones that did exist were all in the cheapest neighborhoods.

40:31Not all those landlords took vouchers. and she had to compete with anyone else who had just come off the waiting list. So she never found her theoretical$650 apartment. Dr. Ingrid Ellen is saying, you could just change how the voucher works. What if, in Fond du Lac's fanciest neighborhoods, Corian's voucher was worth$1 ,200 a month? In the cheaper neighborhoods, it could be worth less, maybe$450. That way, there's more chances for her to find a place. But also, poor people in Fond du Lac aren't all being squeezed into the same neighborhood, the problem the government keeps causing and then complaining about.

41:07This idea for a neighborhood-based subsidy, some metro areas have actually been trying this out, and early results suggest it works pretty well. So your prescription would be basically make this system work better. Don't invent, like, a third new system. I mean, that's my first take. You know, maybe we'll have a conversation in five years or 10 years when all these changes, reforms are adopted, and we'll see whether it's working better. But I think there's a lot of promise to the voucher program. And what's frustrating is that it's not living up to its full promise. And is there some, like, has, like, Sweden figured this out?

41:50Because there's some other country that is doing this in a more humane way. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I think that there are a lot of the Scandinavian countries, Northern European countries that have invested a lot more in social housing. And that's not just for the lowest income households, but it's a very large share of renters. And so that builds political support. Just to interrupt for a second, this idea that one way to fix the program is to expand it so that it includes more people. I just want to acknowledge that there are reasonable people who would be very resistant to the solution.

42:24Those people would think, the government has screwed this up for 100 years. Why give them more money to do possibly an even worse job? But the idea here is that if more people across society were using housing programs, there'd be more political pressure for these programs to, and this is not Ingrid's phrase, it's my own, not suck. When you have a program that reaches farther up on the income ladder, then you tend to have sort of more political support for that program. But the way that the public housing program and the way that our rental assistance programs have been structured, right, is that they have targeted the neediest households, which is understandable.

43:03But when you target the lowest income households, then you don't have the sort of same natural political constituency. I feel like the one way that we do subsidize housing for middle and upper… Is the mortgage interest deduction. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We do that. Yeah, we do that and we don't question that. Yeah. Does that frustrate you? Yeah, it's enormously frustrating, right? You know, I think that the voucher program now probably, it's probably$25 billion a year and the mortgage interest deduction is, you know, over$30 billion. And that's reaching the very highest income members of the community.

43:42So we spend more money subsidizing middle and wealthy people's homes than poor people and working class people's homes. Yeah, no, and that disproportionately goes to wealthy people, that mortgage interest deduction. You know, the more valuable the home and the higher your income, the more valuable the subsidy. When did that decision get made? That's another, I mean, it's... That's a whole other... But again, let me just say this, is that once you sort of have these subsidies in place, it can be difficult to take them away. Right, right. And so once you have homeowners that sort of expect this, then it can be very difficult to take that away.

44:19Yeah, it's just, I mean, I'm like cramming to become a housing policy dilettante. But like, who the government helps also organizes people into groups that are aligned with each other. And it's like people who get a mortgage interest deduction are a group. And they will vote to keep that, whether they realize they're in the same group or not. And it's just like if you imagine a different world where more people across a greater income strata were getting the same housing assistance, And you probably have less stigma from landlords and more useful programs. Things work when middle class people use them.

44:57That's right. And that's more of the European model, right? Right. But then you're talking about spending a lot more money because then you're talking about subsidizing not only – it wouldn't take that much more money to basically make the voucher program an entitlement for very low-income households. But it would take a lot more money to move to sort of more of a social housing system. And I think politically, I think there would be a lot of disagreement about that, about whether we want the government to have that large of a role. No, it would be really ugly. I can see the Fox News segment. And it's also hard because we have the country we have and you can't just become Sweden.

45:35We did things and now we are dealing with the things we did. That's right. So, like I said, at the very least, I think we've talked about what I think of as sort of low-hanging fruit of things we can do to just sort of improve the programs that we have to make them work better. And hopefully, you know, the more we get them to work better, the more money, actually, you'd be able to spread those resources potentially over more families.

46:05Dr. Ingrid Gould-Ellen. She teaches urban policy and planning at NYU. As for Corianne, when we first spoke, she was in Wisconsin. She was moving to Michigan with a friend. Things there didn't work out, so she's moved in with another friend in Illinois, and she says things are good there. She's considering applying for a housing voucher. She'll see how it goes. After a short break, the first automobile with an automatic transmission was the 1904 Sturavant, which meant the car could switch gears, but probably a bit awkwardly. And now, so will we. Coming up, a different segment with our friend Taylor Lorenz, who made me laugh harder than anyone else has in months.

46:44That's coming up.

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48:29So there's a new book that just came out this week. It's by friend of the show, Taylor Lorenz. Taylor's been covering the internet about as long as I have. She's just an incredible decoder of how social media works. She's a scoop machine. Her book is very appropriately called Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. I really enjoyed it. It has so many good stories. They're almost like fables about the invention of modern internet fame. One of my favorites is this story about how influencers started to pretend to have sponsored content. like they would post fake ads for real products because sponsored content at one point became a status symbol.

49:08To celebrate the release, we invited Taylor to Search Engine to hear what from the internet an extremely online person might recommend. That's how the conversation started out. We then fell into a rabbit hole that I am still thinking about several weeks later. Taylor Lorenz. Yes. You have a recommendation for something from the internet. Oh, wait, is it something I liked on the internet or was it something, wait, I'm so bad at this because I'm like, I just kind of consume information and I don't, anyway, I don't know. I don't know, PJ. It's just weird because you have like three Instagram accounts which post like great memes that I mostly have not seen and I still spend a lot of time.

49:49I don't know. It's like, I think because I consume so much content, it's, I have no ability to like, if it's a story, I can recognize it. But if it's just like something, I'm like, I don't know. I mean, I guess I like to TikTok, but does anyone care? My experience is that no one gives a shit about recommendations like that. Here's the recommendation that I wanted to give to people. It's internet related. I love going into defunct apps that I had years ago and just spending time there. And I don't know how to explain it, but it's like going to an internet ghost town and you kind of see who's still around and I've become addicted to it.

50:26And I'm trying to get back into like all my old accounts. I tried a couple of weeks ago for no particular reason to get into my high school AOL account. And apparently at some point the company entirely wiped their servers. So I logged in, but all my email was gone, which actually made me a little bit sad. It does. You know, the peak of Snapchat, like, I don't know, I had my snap streaks with like people that I don't talk to anymore. It's made me like reach back out to a lot of people. um i also just i've been feeling so overwhelmed by social media like our current social media i did a story recently where i paid someone to watch all my instagram stories for a week and aggregate them for me wait really yes i hired a gen z content consumer wait not a content creator a content consumer yes yes i hired a content consumer and i think this is like a new social media job for the future, honestly.

51:21And actually, Frank, the content consumer I hired, is taking on other clients. He's willing to take on other clients if anyone else needs it. But yes, there's too much content to consume. This is so funny. So wait, so Frank, how old is Frank? He's 23. Does he have one of those cool mullet haircuts that they all have? Not to generalize about young 20s. They all do have that haircut. Frank looks cool. Frank's a cool Gen Z assistant in New York, and he was looking to make some extra money. And, you know, he's very good at social media. He said, you know, he's primed to consume content. And his threshold for content, I think, is maybe higher than mine because he's grown up, like, plugged into YouTube.

51:57Okay, hold on. He watched thousands of stories from now.

52:03Does he, like, watch them on, like, a faster speed? Here's my recommendation. Everyone hire a content consumer. It is worth it. Frank, a 23-year-old Jen's here just watches your Instagram stories. It's so, no, PJ, it is like a weight being lifted. You have to consume. And if you don't consume the content, you miss things or you're a bad friend and there's too much and everyone's posting. So you need someone to like watch these thousands. I mean, he watched thousands of stories. He put a weekly report. He aggregated the most notable knowments. But how does he know? Here's what's funny. He actually didn't know who was important to me and who wasn't.

52:49That's what I would imagine. So he gave me recaps of people I have not talked to in years. And I was like, wait, that's interesting. Also, people started reaching out to me because I think people that I didn't normally watch their content. Oh, but now you're watching. I watched everything for a week. I was watching everything. So I started to get these DMs. And I actually, I'm meeting up with a friend in New York next week who was, I actually haven't told her, but she was like, oh my God, I haven't been chatting in a while. Well, the only way she would be upset is if she, if she doesn't get upset, it means she's not doing an assiduous enough job consuming your content because if she's not listening to you on search engine, then, you know, she needs to hire a Frank.

53:27Exactly. And I was talking to Frank about this because like, I think everyone needs this. Like, I actually want someone to log into all my accounts. Like, it's too much. There's too much. And I need to be able to check out. And I have to say, Frank only charged$200 for the week. I think it's a steal because literally the amount of hours and stress that it saved me. It's also the same price of a good therapy session. Yes, literally. This is therapy. This is therapy, PJ. This is like taking off like a huge mental burden. It's a mental burden. Not to suggest that there's anything strange about this Frank arrangement, but if this works and Frank consumes, you know, like every Instagram story that comes across your transom, doesn't that just increase the expectation among sort of more and more orbital friends of yours that you are going to be an active consumer of their content?

54:29Like part of the problem is that you're on like an anxious treadmill of attention that he's just making the number go up. Yeah. I mean, so that's actually something I started to worry because the week he just stopped last week. And now this week I've been like furiously tapping through because I do worry about the drop off. I don't want, because that's such a negative signal. And you all know when like you have that friend that like watches all your stories and then they stop watching, like you're like, why did they stop watching? you know? So yeah, hire a content consumer. They will save you so many hours of your life.

55:05You will be up to date with everyone. I had a book event shortly after this, and I was asking my friend Kira about her wedding and all this stuff. And it's like, I saw that in the recap. I saw that in the weekly recap. It's so funny. It's funny, you know, on Hard Fork, they were talking about how they had some colleague at the Times who, when he goes to a party, comes home and writes just like index cards about the salient facts of everyone he met so that then several years later, he'd be like, how is your son? I remember he had lead knee surgery in 2014 or whatever. And I listened and I was like, that's very smart.

55:37And I would never be organized enough to do that much work to try to perpetuate the illusion that I'm not self-centered. But if I had a Frank, I think I could get away with this. It's so funny, at some point, it's just gonna be a bunch of hired Franks watching each other's stories.

55:54I, yeah, I mean, I will say one thing. He abstained from close friends for privacy reasons. So don't worry if you've been sharing, you know, your nudes on close friends. Those are for my eyes only. I did not, you know. Are people sharing their nudes on close friends? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's just my friends. I have no idea. I don't, just to be clear. I don't trust the internet. Yeah, no. I don't trust my friends enough either. Taylor, this is a perfect and lunatic recommendation. I really, this is the best one that we've had by far. Thank you. So I'm excited to contribute to this growing industry.

56:26Taylor Lorenz. Her book is called Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. It is available now wherever books are sold, or lent if you find yourself at a library. And if you read our newsletter at pjvote.com, we will share contact info for Frank. He's taking on new customers.

56:48Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Truthy Pinnimanini, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Fact-checking by Sean Merchant. Special thanks this week to Ava Rosen. Her book, The Voucher Promise, is a great place for further reading on Section 8. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Pirello, John Schmidt, and Kevin Plunkett. and to the team at Odyssey. JD Crowley, Rob Mirandy, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Casey Clouser, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Courtney, and Hilary Schuff.

57:28Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Our social media is by the team at Public Opinion NYC. You can follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vote now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you for listening. We are off next week, but we will have a new story for you on October 20th. See you then. Thank you.