Houston

Causes

Homelessness in Houston has been the product of the same complex set of factors that accounts for rapid increases in homelessness elsewhere during the last two decades: rising rental costs (especially at the lowest rungs of the housing ladder), multiple pressures on the income-generating ability of those living in poverty, and new policies such as deinstitutionalization and the decriminalization of public drunkenness that swelled the pool of vulnerable individuals competing for scarce low-income housing. After analyzing data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census Annual Housing Survey for 1976 and 1983, Karin Ringheim suggested that Houston was perhaps a classic example of how structural factors (such as factors affecting the housing and job markets) produce a context in which pervasive homelessness is inevitable.

During that seven-year period, for instance, poor African-Americans in Houston experienced rent increases of 41 percent while experiencing a drop in median per capita income of 20 percent. Over time, the gap between the affordable housing that was available and what was needed widened considerably. By 1983, approximately 10,000 households in Houston needed units renting for less than $50 per month (using federal standards suggesting that no more than 30 percent of one's income should go to rent). No such units existed. A similar number of households needed units renting for between $50 and $99 per month. Only 1,000 such units existed, many of which were occupied by people with much higher incomes. As a result, the most vulnerable of the poor found themselves devoting unprecedented portions of their income to rent, creating the instability that contributes to high risk for homelessness.

Ways of mitigating the problems of unaffordable rents and inadequate income exist, of course. Government [Page 282]can decrease the cost of rental housing for poor people by providing housing subsidies or can increase the income of the poor through cash assistance and other kinds of transfers. Both were scarce in Houston, however, because of a prevailing ideology, apparent both locally and statewide, that placed high value on self-reliance and the free enterprise system. Rates of income assistance in Houston were among the lowest of all large metropolitan areas in the United States during that period. Moreover, those people who managed to get public assistance actually received little relative to people in other parts of the country. A 1989 McKinsey and Company report on homelessness in Houston, for instance, noted that Texas ranked forty-eighth out of the fifty states and the District of Columbia in the maximum amount of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefits a family could receive. Housing subsidies were equally rare. Although it was the nation's fourth-largest city, Houston at that time ranked fifteenth of sixteen large cities in its number of public housing units and thirteenth in Section 8 housing certificates—federal subsidies that Houston chose not to aggressively pursue. Similarly, only meager funding was available to support services for subpopulations at extremely high risk for homelessness, such as the seriously mentally ill. Texas ranked forty-eighth in per capita state funding for mental health care at this time and was one of only seven states that did not supplement federal income entitlements for the seriously mentally ill. The safety net, then, was a tattered one, creating a climate ripe for pervasive homelessness.

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