Comment on Chester Hartman and David Robinson's “Evictions: The hidden housing problem”

Abstract

People have often flourished by wandering, so displacement and mobility are not inherently bad. The “hidden” problem is not evictions, but how homelessness has been caused by protections enacted in the name of helping the poor. The effect of eviction protections is to prolong the eviction process, causing income loss and expenses that small property owners, who own much private rental housing used by the poor, cannot absorb. Over the past few decades, a large segment of low‐cost private rental housing has been abandoned, and rooming houses have almost entirely disappeared—all coinciding with the enactment of eviction protections and the rise of homelessness. If rooming houses were made viable once more, as much as 80 percent of the homeless could be housed in private rental housing, allowing public resources to be redirected to the hard‐core homeless. Private rooming houses are especially critical for our growing elder population.