Felicia Henderson sits counting out her finances at a table in the salmon-pink community room of The San Marco, a graceful Romanesque building whose chimneys and spired turret loom over tony East Walnut Hills.
Eleven years ago, Henderson says she underwent surgery to repair a condition that critically damaged blood vessels in her brain. Afterward, she had to relearn everything, she says, down to her ABCs.
Now, the only income the 51-year-old gets comes from a $750 a month federal disability payment.
It goes fast. The first big chunk comes out in rent: $251 a month for her one-bedroom apartment in the San Marco, owned, like 29 others in the building, by the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority. Then there is the $60 a month she must pay for her medications. And the $30 a month for her phone bill. Then money for doctor visits, the bus and other regular expenses. When the bills are paid, she’s left with just enough for food — if she’s lucky. Some months, she’s forced to go to local food pantries.
Henderson, in a gray sweatshirt with vibrant graphics, has her hair pulled back tight and neat. She’s quick to smile and joke, but an edge finds its way into her voice when she talks about her lack of resources — and a new proposal that could raise her rent.
“How can I have a decent life like that?” she says. “Do I seem angry? I’m angry because I’m hungry all the time.”
The proposal, which may or may not ever come into being, is a window into the long-term divestment in subsidized housing that has caused worries for those in Cincinnati and other major cities who rely on it. Those stresses are exacerbated by the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s moves to cut programs even as a national affordable housing crisis deepens.
There is a program on the table called Rental Assistance Demonstration that will pour private dollars into many public housing complexes over the next few years — but it comes with its own concerns.
In April, HUD Secretary Ben Carson floated a raft of potential changes that would raise the proportion of income inhabitants of federally-subsidized affordable housing must pay in rent, as well as impose new work requirements, triple the minimum rent required from the system’s poorest residents and set a minimum required rent for elderly and disabled residents, among other changes.
Carson later seemed to walk back on some of those increases, at least for now. But the future is murky.
If the changes were to be implemented, residents who rely on subsidized housing like Henderson — some 4 million of them across the country — would see their stretched budgets get even more fraught.
The rent increases, work requirements and other changes could cumulatively raise rents by an average of 23 percent for as many as 400,000 people throughout Ohio. That’s because the policy shifts would consider gross income, not net income, and would do away with a number of exemptions for things like medical bills.
In Greater Cincinnati, the rent increase could be as much as 26 percent, or $850 a year for the average resident, according to research by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. That would add more than $60 a month onto Henderson’s rent, for example.
The changes could impact as many as 38,000 residents in the Cincinnati metro area. Roughly 47 percent of those living in units affected by the increases would be children, according to HUD data.
The changes don’t sit well with many residents and their advocates.
“I think it’s going to be a hindrance for a lot of my residents, because they’re just barely making it on 30 percent,” said Delorise Calhoun, the president of the Jurisdiction-Wide Residents Advisory Board. J-RAB represents residents of public housing in Greater Cincinnati.
“To me, I’m looking at a lot more homeless residents,” she says. “They’re going to be out of their apartments.”
There are not many other options. There are lengthy waiting lists for Section 8 housing vouchers, and Cincinnati has a 30,000-unit gap when it comes to housing affordable to those at the lowest income levels, according to estimates from the Ohio Housing Finance Agency.
“Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority is paying close attention to any future action that may come out of Housing and Urban Development Director Ben Carson’s proposal that could impact the thousands of families CMHA serves as well as changes that would effect the way the agency operates,” CMHA spokesperson Lesley Wardlow says. “If the proposal becomes a new policy, CMHA would have to prepare our residents and staff for the implementation.”
Like Henderson, those at other buildings throughout Cincinnati are also worried.
Yvonne Howard is resident council president at Maple Tower, a nine-story, 120-unit CMHA property in Avondale that is home mostly to seniors. The grey and brown stone building houses assisted living programs and other services for older individuals who need help living independently.
Howard says the rent increases could have big implications for some of the residents there.
“The majority of the residents I work with are seniors on a fixed income,” she says. “They still have to pay for their medicine — Medicaid doesn’t cover everything. They’re worried. Their income is only $700 or $800 a month. And then they’re paying rent. Then they still have to pay for food. At most, they get $60 a month for food stamps. A lot of them are worried about where they’d go… because they won’t be able to afford rent and buy groceries.”
HUD Secretary Carson said the idea would incentivize more people who live in subsidized housing to work and eventually pay their own rents.
“The way we calculate the level of assistance to our families is convoluted and creates perverse consequences, such as discouraging these families from earning more income and becoming self-sufficient,” Carson said shortly after unveiling the plan.
The future of the rent changes is unclear. In remarks June 7 in Detroit, Carson suggested parts of the plan were off the table after Congress increased HUD’s budget. That increase came despite a request from the administration of President Donald Trump to slash funding for the agency — a request Carson supported.
But at a congressional oversight hearing on the proposal June 27, Carson indicated the administration was still pursuing the rent changes. Carson defended the proposals, saying “relatively few people” would be affected by a part of the rent increases that would boost minimum rents paid by subsidized housing residents from $50 to $150, for example. That increase alone would affect more than 400,000 people.
“We have to do what we need to do to make the budget fit,” Carson said, responding to questions from U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters about whether he continued to back the rent increases. “This proposal is a starting point in the conversation. Of course we continue to back our proposals.”
The potential rent increases have drawn intense criticism, especially after revelations of lavish spending within HUD — including the purchase of a $31,000 dining set for the secretary’s office. Carson says cuts at the agency are necessary, however, citing the $20 trillion federal deficit.
“Every year, it takes more money, millions of dollars more, to serve the same number of households,” he said during remarks introducing the ideas in April.
Trump’s budget proposal earlier this year cut more than 18 percent — almost $9 billion — from HUD’s budget, including a move zeroing out a fund for maintaining and improving public housing and halving another fund that pays for its operating costs. Congress, however, restored and even raised that funding in its final budget this year.
Should Carson’s proposed policy changes become real, advocates and residents say they will add to the already myriad challenges facing those who live in public housing and other subsidized options for low-income people.
In some ways, Carson’s proposals are a window into the creaking ship that is American public housing in 2018: HUD’s budget has been significantly reduced, and its once-robust attempts to provide for the most immediate needs of the nation’s poorest citizens has fallen behind the need for low-income housing.
HUD’s $42 billion budget authority is about half what the department got from Congress 40 years ago when adjusting for inflation. And in the past decade, cuts to public housing have been steep. Between 2010 and 2016, HUD was given $1.6 billion less for public housing — a 20 percent reduction, according to federal Office of Management and Budget data.
Robert Williams has lived in the San Marco for 18 years. He’s quick to speak his mind — even to defend President Trump sometimes — and has an independent streak. He doesn’t believe the situation is entirely Carson’s fault.
“Carson has to deal with it,” Williams says. “If he needs 10 dollars and Congress only gives him five, he’s gotta cut something. There is no getting around that.”
“The thing is, why do we keep sending the same congressmen back there five, six terms and they aren’t doing anything for us?” Williams asks, mentioning Ohio’s U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot, who has voted to decrease HUD funding in the past and even recommended eliminating the department in the 1990s.
The lack of resources is readily apparent at some local public housing complexes, where CMHA must struggle to keep aging buildings maintained on tighter and tighter budgets.
HUD has been moving away from owning public housing since the 1970s. In the place of housing agency-administered developments, the department has leaned on Section 8, which allows HUD to pay subsidized rents for tenants of private landlords, and tax credits that fund private development of affordable units.
Today, residents at CMHA housing complexes in neighborhoods like the West End, Avondale and other low-income pockets sometimes find themselves pushing the agency to address maintenance and safety concerns.
Howard, the council president at Maple Tower in Avondale, says residents have struggled with CMHA over conditions there — a fight documented in local media reports.
“We’re dealing with plumbing issues, flooding, ceilings collapsing on us,” she says. “Things not working. Infestations. Some places have rodents. Their feeling is, if we have to live through all this, you should be paying us to go through all that. We deal with a lot.”
It’s not the only CMHA property where residents say they have maintenance concerns.
At a recent residents council meeting in Winton Terrace, a sprawling, 600-unit CMHA complex of low-slung red brick townhouses in northern Cincinnati, the complaints were numerous.
CMHA built Winton Terrace in 1941, just a few years after the advent of modern American public housing and the creation of the local housing authority through the 1933 National Recovery Act.
At first, Winton Terrace was home to white residents almost exclusively. As public housing desegregated, however, whites began leaving the complex and Winton Hills, the surrounding neighborhood. The complex was predominantly black by 1970. Today, Winton Hills overall is roughly 90 percent black.
The complex is somewhat isolated — nestled next to factories and a landfill, miles away from the city center with spotty bus service.
One section of buildings at Winton Terrace had mice infestations, residents told a city inspector at the meeting. The mice had even taken to living in one resident’s stove, though the housing agency replaced the unit. Problems with plumbing and water mains were common and persistent. Ceilings leaked. An enveloping and mysterious swarm of insects had made a field between several of the buildings impassable. A herd of dozens of cats had overtaken another.
As residents listed off their concerns, Resident Council President Moneaca Collins tried to corral their energy as it rose in the brick community building at the heart of the complex.
Collins, a strong, scrappy 41-year-old mother of four, has been working to push CMHA — and residents — to take better care of the buildings. She knows Cincinnati’s public housing well, having grown up in nearby Findlater Gardens before moving to other cities in Ohio and Georgia.
Her life has been a whirlwind of triumphs — a college degree in education, home ownership — and challenges. After the housing crisis cost Collins her home, she turned to drugs to deal with the trauma, eventually becoming homeless. She moved back to Cincinnati in 2015 when her mother died of cancer. Since then, she’s been a steadily-building force to advocate for Winton Terrace.
It’s an insult to ask residents to pay more for housing that isn’t satisfactory, Collins says.
In response to questions about conditions at its properties, CMHA says it strives to do the best it can. It highlights numerous public engagement efforts and repairs it has made to complexes like Winton Terrace and other properties.
CMHA completed 49,610 work orders last year and another 57,891 in 2016, spokesperson Wardlow says. But it’s an uphill battle. CMHA buildings are an average of 74 years old and cumulatively, its 5,000 units housing about 10,000 people need $100 million in deferred maintenance. That’s not unusual for a HUD-funded housing authority — nationwide, agencies like CMHA have a $4 billion maintenance backlog.
It’s even harder to keep up when funding from HUD isn’t complete. In the last six years, CMHA’s funding has dipped as low as 86 percent of what HUD is supposed to provide it — and that’s after decades of cuts to HUD itself. In less than a decade, funding for public housing maintenance via HUD has dropped by half.
HUD and CMHA will try to fill some of those funding gaps with a somewhat controversial program called Rental Assistance Demonstration, which will eventually open public housing in Cincinnati and other cities up to private investors so CMHA can use those investments to make repairs and build new housing.
Some tenants complain about another layer of inspections — on top of those done on building conditions — from engineers assessing their buildings for RAD. And many are worried that RAD will mean demolition of their buildings and that their replacements won’t have enough units for everyone. Some affordable housing advocates decry RAD as a move to privatize public housing. And what federal oversight looks like for the private entities that will be running once-public housing complexes is still unclear.
But CMHA says the program will be positive — a way to finally fund capital needs.
On top of all the uncertainty, residents are now concerned their rents will increase.
“It’s going to hurt them bad,” Collins says. “They’re having a hard time paying the rent now. People are struggling in Winton Terrace already. If the rent increases happen, some people will have to leave.”
Sadie Crawford, 71, has lived in Winton Terrace for three years. She’s a tough customer — she’ll text her CMHA work orders to Collins, whom she calls Ms. Mo, whenever she files them.
“I demand to be treated well,” she says, laughing. “Mo is on it. I’m a Southern woman, from Selma, Alabama. Home of the civil rights movement. I demand it.”
She’s been in and out of Cincinnati multiple times in her life, once living in Millvale, another low-income, predominantly black neighborhood made up mostly of CMHA housing. She moved back to Cincinnati into Winton Terrace from Alabama when she retired.
“It’s not affordable, I just make it affordable,” she says of the current rent prices. “I let something else go to pay it. It’s $294 a month, with air conditioning. I’m going to have to buy less food — maybe I’ll have to eat two meals a day, say, if they raise the rents.”
Advocates say paying more than 30 percent of their income is too large a burden for low-income renters to bear.
“HUD decided almost 40 years ago that the right amount of rent, what people could afford, is 30 percent,” says Legal Aid of Southwest Ohio Director John Schrider. “And every administration, regardless of administration, has stuck with that.”
Residents at San Marco say their conditions are better than Winton Terrace and other public housing. The eclectic building, adorned with arched stonework and completed in 1894, was purchased and renovated by CMHA in the early 1980s after sitting vacant and derelict. It sits in a national historic district across from the soaring gothic spires of St. Francis DeSales Catholic church, built in 1879, and the two together give the quickly-redeveloping neighborhood the feeling of a European public square.
While it’s a grand structure, the building is more contained than the sprawling streets of Winton Terrace. The one-bedroom units aren’t bad on the inside, either, residents like Henderson, Williams and Lacky say. Recently, the building scored a 94 percent on a HUD inspection — easily passing.
But like Winton Terrace and other CMHA buildings, residents here are worried about the future.
San Marco resident Williams says many don’t see any easy ways out of the ever-tightening conditions around public housing. He says he’ll simply have to “roll with” any rent increases and find a way to pay them.
“Every day, you realize you’re at the bottom of the totem pole,” he says. “You feel like you don’t have a voice, basically. You have enough people in public housing to get together and call these congressmen and tell them what to do, but most people in public housing, they don’t vote, because they don’t see anything getting better for them.” ©
This article appears in Sep 19-26, 2018.