On a special episode of The Excerpt podcast: More than half a million people are homeless today. As winter approaches, shelters in New York City and Los Angeles are now past capacity. In New York, people in those shelters are starting to be evicted. And as rents across the country continue to soar, the number of people living without adequate shelter will continue to grow. What can we do to solve our housing crisis? Mary Cunningham, the Vice President of Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy at the Urban Institute, joins us to share the best strategies to get more people into homes.

Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here

Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Dana Taylor:

Hello, and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, December 14th 2023, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.

Every year, more and more people are ending up on the streets. Right now, as winter approaches, shelters in New York City and Los Angeles are past capacity, and in New York, people in those shelters are starting to be evicted. More than 580,000 are homeless today, and as rents across the country continue to soar, the number of people living without adequate shelter will continue to grow. What can we do to solve our housing crisis? Our guest today has some ideas. Mary Cunningham is the vice president of Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy at the Urban Institute. Mary, thanks for being on The Excerpt.

Mary Cunningham:

Thanks for having me.

Dana Taylor:

People listening to this might think that the homeless crisis and housing crisis are two distinct issues. Are they? And if not, why?

Mary Cunningham:

They are not two distinct issues. Homelessness is a housing problem. The rise in homelessness has been driven largely by the rise in our affordable housing crisis. People have trouble paying rent, they face eviction, and then they end up homeless. And usually, people think about homelessness as a substance use challenge or mental health crisis, and indeed, some people who experience homelessness do have those challenges, but for the most part, if we had enough affordable housing, we wouldn't have a homeless problem as big as we do in the United States.

Dana Taylor:

So what's led to the housing crisis that we're in now? And what are some of the gaps that have really grown bigger, causing more people to be pushed onto the streets?

Mary Cunningham:

So we've had an affordable housing crisis for a pretty long time, particularly for low and moderate income people. It's always been challenging to pay the rent, and renters have fared the worst, particularly after the pandemic when we saw huge run-up in rents, and that is largely because we have a supply problem. We don't have enough affordable housing, we're not creating enough affordable housing to meet that demand. And when there's a lot of people fighting for a limited, scarce supply, you have a run-up in rents, and you also have a large chunk of people who either can't afford to live in the housing that they're in, or they are facing homelessness. And so, it really is a supply issue, and the supply issue is driven by a few things, and one of them is that we have land use and zoning laws locally that constrain our supply. So in the United States, about 75% of communities, it's illegal to actually build apartments, and that's what we need the most.

Dana Taylor:

Okay. So Mary, how are city officials responding to the homelessness crisis that's happening in New York City and in LA?

Mary Cunningham:

They're trying to think about how to increase the levels of affordable housing, but that takes time. You can also provide rental assistance to people who are already in housing so that they don't become homeless. But the challenge is that we just don't have enough resources. The federal government hasn't made enough investments in the affordable housing infrastructure in our country to provide enough housing for people, and so states and localities are struggling to make up the difference, but that is a challenge for localities and local policymakers.

Dana Taylor:

I just read an article about several buildings in New York's downtown being converted from office space to housing, it's in the financial district. Is that an idea that many people have been talking about since the pandemic? It seems like it is. And is that a solution that could help alleviate the shortage of affordable housing?

Mary Cunningham:

Yeah, it is something that came up during the pandemic. As offices have emptied out, there have been empty buildings sitting, and people have been thinking about local planners, local housing officials have been thinking about how do we convert these empty buildings to affordable housing. That can be challenging. You have a building that's set up for largely office space, and turning those into apartments can be really difficult, but there is a movement across the country to think about this and try to be innovative and figure out how to make those conversions. I think it's one option, it's one solution, but I also think communities need to think about other options, like increasing density in cities and suburbs, so making it legal for apartment buildings to actually be built and constructed, and also making investments in stimulating some of that production so that it's available to the lowest and moderate income people.

Dana Taylor:

Well, you mentioned the word innovative. Are there other solutions that have struck you and your team as being particularly innovative here?

Mary Cunningham:

Yeah, when we think about homelessness, there are great evidence-based solutions to solving the homelessness problem in the country, and I would just make sure that your listeners understand that homelessness is a solvable problem. It often seems like it's not a solvable problem, it seems like it's intractable. People see homelessness rising in their communities, and they don't know what to do with it or about it, and we have solutions.

So one of the solutions is called Housing First and supportive housing, and that is a really innovative approach to homelessness, which says, for people who have been living on the streets for long periods, they've been chronically homeless, they may have severe mental illness or substance use issues, that we'll give them housing first, get them into an apartment, help them stabilize, and then get them services that they need to work on some of those other issues. And what we see is that people who have been living on the streets for very long periods, one year later, after they get Housing First and supportive housing, the housing retention rates are hovering around 85%. This is a hugely successful public policy intervention, and I would love to see this get scaled across the country so we can address homelessness on a wider scale.

Dana Taylor:

What do you think are the biggest hurdles that you see for people who are unhoused today versus 10, 20 years ago?

Mary Cunningham:

I think it just goes back to the housing issue, which is that housing has gotten increasingly more scarce, and we leave it up to the private market to provide housing. There has been a lack of public investment in housing, so government has decreased housing assistance over time, and at the same time, a lot of our affordable housing stock has aged and gone offline.

Dana Taylor:

Well, other than Housing First, what are some success stories that you've followed nationally for getting people off the streets into long-term housing?

Mary Cunningham:

So one of the things that we want to make sure that we're doing is that most people are housed in our country ,and we want to make sure that they stay housed. We also saw a huge success during the pandemic, which is that we didn't have a huge run-up in homelessness, we saw eviction rates actually come down, and that was because the government made a huge public investment in emergency rental assistance during the pandemic. So I think we can really learn from that, in a time of crisis, the nation came together and said, if we don't do something, we're going to have millions and millions more people on the street. And so, Congress allocated $48 billion to emergency rental assistance, and communities distributed that assistance across the country and kept people in their houses.

Dana Taylor:

Mary, you've said that the housing crisis can be turned around. What do you see as the most important thing that local officials should focus on to lower rates of homelessness?

Mary Cunningham:

Thinking long-term, local officials really do need to think about land use and zoning reform, so making sure that it's possible to build apartments and units for low and moderate income people. I think housing trust funds, setting up local tax levies to contribute to and grow those local housing trust funds so that state and local governments can fund some of that affordable housing, because once you pass land use and zoning reform, it's really important not only to pass that reform, because that's basically the first step, but then after, to do planning around what do you want this community to look like, what's the best way to set up housing close to transportation, close to employment centers, and then to use government assistance and investment to really stimulate affordable housing in those areas. So I think that's one of the big ways that, over the long-term, that local policymakers can really make a dent in homelessness.

I think in the short-term, of course, there are people living on the street right now, and so helping them rapidly re-house folks by giving them some rental assistance to get into an apartment, to get off the street, is an important component. And then, like I said before, keeping people in housing is also really essential, so making sure people who need help paying their rent get that subsidy, and also tenant protections can go a long way in helping people stay in their homes, and making sure that the scales are not just tilted to the landlord, but also are protecting the tenant.

Dana Taylor:

I know that you are not discouraged. What gives you the most hope when it comes to the fight to end homelessness?

Mary Cunningham:

I think the thing that gives me the most hope is that we have mountains of evidence for what works. We know that homelessness is a housing problem, we know how to build more affordable housing, we know how to invest in more affordable housing. Another example is the Housing Choice [inaudible 00:10:19] program, which helps people who can't afford to pay their rent, provides them a subsidy, they can then take their subsidy and rent an apartment somewhere in the private market. We know that that program works really well. We have the solutions, what we need is the will and investment to really scale those solutions.

Dana Taylor:

What do you want people listening to take away from this interview?

Mary Cunningham:

I think the most important thing is for people to think about how they can welcome affordable housing in their communities. It will take all of us saying yes to affordable housing. So if you live in a neighborhood, and there is potentially affordable housing being constructed, support that affordable housing, that's how we're going to see decreases in homelessness, that's how we're going to see an end to housing precariousness among particularly low and moderate income people. But also, I think the housing crisis is affecting more and more people up the income ladder, and we need that housing built for everyone.

Dana Taylor:

Mary, thanks so much for being on the show.

Mary Cunningham:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our senior producer, Shannon Rae Green, for production assistance, our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening, I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.