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Tackling Urban Homelessness the Green Way

The US housing affordability crisis is driving more and more of the working poor to live out of cars and squatter homes- the solution seems to be creating more affordable homes in both urban and suburban areas where there is a high level of homelessness amongst the working poor but this means more carbon emissions and pollution in urban areas the long run. A green alternative needs to be found if both homelessness and pollution are to be solved simultaneously.

By Athullya Gopi | The US housing affordability crisis is driving more and more of the working poor to live out of cars and squatter homes- the solution seems to be creating more affordable homes in both urban and suburban areas where there is a high level of homelessness amongst the working poor but this means more carbon emissions and pollution in urban areas the long run. A green alternative needs to be found if both homelessness and pollution are to be solved simultaneously.

Homelessness is a growing global phenomenon. In the United States (US), its rampant increase is most evident in urbanized areas along the East and West coasts. Homelessness in the US does not only occur as a result of an individual’s perceived social and economic problems such as mental health and substance abuse issues or the stagnation of incomes, it is also the result of long-standing imperfections in the private US housing market that prevent everyone in the economy who demands housing as a dependable and primary source of shelter from accessing it. Such market imperfections limit the number of affordable housing units supplied by the private sector to urban low or very low income households – often making such individuals or households highly susceptible to homelessness as both incomes stagnate and rents or home values spike. An ideal long-run solution to reducing this type of homelessness is to employ federally mandated policies designed to increase the supply of available affordable housing units to those needing dependable shelter. The idea of increasing the number of physical dwelling spaces in already congested and polluted urban areas, however, implies an added burden to carbon emissions and energy utilization in cities at a time when careful consideration needs to be given to the latter. Is there a green solution to solving homelessness caused by the housing affordability crisis in the US?

The rapid growth of urbanization is most evident in the rising number of people living in cities – by 2030 it is estimated that at least 27% of the world population will be concentrated in cities with a population of more than 1,000,000. It is also clear that the rapid growth of urbanization is increasingly becoming a contributor to global climate change – although cities only account for less than 2% of the earth’s surface 71 to 76% of the world’s carbon emissions originate from urban areas. The impact of climate change is being increasingly felt in urban areas including its homeless. Since 2016 the number of homeless individuals in urban areas perishing from being unsheltered in extreme climate conditions has been increasing.

However, it is not just in urban areas that homelessness is growing. Poverty and homelessness have been increasing in suburban areas in the US over the last 15 years. With homelessness on the increase as a social ill not necessarily constrained by population density or geography more and more households/individuals who find themselves chronically unsheltered as a result will also be directly exposed to the increasingly devastating effects of climate change. A sustainable and joint solution needs to be found to address both problems, one that envisions more eco-friendly homes for those who need them as a source of shelter when they have no recourse to one.

To start formulating such a joint solution we must begin with understanding the source of growth in homelessness over the last few decades. While foreclosures in the post-recession era have largely been responsible for people losing their owner-occupied homes, the source of homelessness relating to economic conditions extends beyond mere market forces that are freely operating. In the United States, the private housing market is an imperfect one, meaning that there are constraints imposed upon it that prevent demand and supply of housing from fully clearing. The imperfect housing market leads to renters being priced out of housing that is affordable when they are faced with either income shocks (like being made redundant when the economy goes down) or rental price shocks (when an upturn in the economy leads to a surge in property prices and therefore rents). This leads to a growing number of individuals/households that are at risk of becoming temporarily homeless. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) refers to such individuals as “transients”. Modern-day representations of homelessness are no longer restricted to the visibly homeless woman forced to live in her car while working as an adjunct professor and the army veteran who can only afford housing through a gofundme crowdfunding campaign. The housing crisis is one that is increasingly an affordability crisis.

The imperfect market leads to demand for housing persistently remaining relatively higher than the supply of available housing at any point in time. Often this mismatch between housing demand and supply is the result of the relative inelasticity (low sensitivity to price changes) of housing supply. Generally speaking when the price of a good or service increases, the supply of housing should respond over time by increasing too and vice versa. Housing supply, however, is relatively quite slow to respond to price signals due to a number of factors that do not directly impact the housing market. For example state regulations regarding land use vary across the United States and often favor the use of land in urban areas for commercial purposes rather than for housing, making it difficult to quickly increase housing supply in such areas in response to a sudden surge in housing real estate prices.

Additionally, the increasing use of housing real-estate as sources of investment leaves more and more units either vacant or used in a way that allows investors to gain higher than market returns – such as converting them to “AirBnB” units. This indicates that the market is biased towards those in the economy who demand housing real-estate as an investment good rather than as a basic form of shelter. This bias towards housing investors is clearly seen in urban areas by the rising levels of gentrification in cities – a way of making housing investments more attractive and therefore valuable to investors. Ultimately the existence of this bias means that richer entities/households that can afford to purchase or rent more than the one unit of housing they need for shelter gain access to the additional units they demand more readily than the relatively poorer households that need at least one unit for basic shelter. With a ‘sticky’ housing supply and a bias in how demand for housing is met, poorer households are ever more at risk of transient homelessness and not receiving at least the single unit of housing they require to meet their need for basic shelter.

Furthermore federal government safety nets for low income and very-low income households have been declining over the years instead of increasing: there have been no significant increases in federal housing voucher funding to make housing more affordable and more public housing units have been retired or demolished than built between 2000 and 2016 leading to an overall drop of around 200,000 units during this time. All of this implies a greater need for more physical housing units to be supplied outside of the imperfect private sector – to be made available ideally through federal government-led policy intervention that creates housing for the growing population of working poor that are most likely to be made transiently and then chronically homeless.

Increasing the supply of affordable housing to meet the real demand for housing as a source of shelter is only one half of a joint solution – the second half must resolve how to achieve this in a sustainable manner without adding to pollution levels. In this regard, special emphasis needs to be made on urban as opposed to rural areas mainly because the former are focal points of energy and durable goods consumption, both of which contribute significantly to the overall carbon footprint. For example, concentrated energy consumption in urban areas tends to create enough heat to change their surrounding microclimates, even causing them to differ in temperature on average by more than 1 degree Celsius than neighboring rural areas. Urban areas also generate undesirable runoff patterns in water – the way urban landscapes are constructed means that less water gets filtered back to replenish the local water table. At the same time urban areas, because of their warmer microclimates, generate more rainfall, meaning that run-off containing pollutants from industrial sites occurs more quickly and intensely than rural industrialized areas and significantly reducing water quality.

Innovative sustainable construction methods are becoming more popular. One example of a green construction standard is the Living Building Challenge, a green building certification program that outlines how sustainable built-up structures that are net water and energy positive (i.e. water is re-treated onsite and that more energy is generated onsite than consumed). This building standard was successfully used in a sustainable affordable housing project is present in Minneapolis. In 2015 two local nonprofit organizations, Aeon and Hope Community launched “the Rose”, a 90 unit mixed-income apartment complex with half the units assigned as affordable housing at a monthly rent of around $636 for a single bedroom apartment. What is remarkable is that the per square foot cost of constructing the Rose was less than a half that of a similar conventional high-end sustainable building. While it was 20% more expensive and more complicated to build than a comparable code-compliant building the Rose was intended to offer long-term cost-effectiveness by being up to 75% more energy efficient.

Affordable housing is largely not a favorable investment option for real-estate developers and so its sustainable development must be incentivized through policy change – one option would be through tax credits. However future policymakers must remain cautious about private investors using green building techniques in the name of climate change to deliberately ramp up property values.

Such an example appears in a case study of a multifamily residential property development supported by the City of Portland Oregon Department of Environmental Services. The latter is responsible for managing the city of Portland’s wastewater and stormwater infrastructure. In the Barrington Square Apartments project, the property owner retrofitted stormwater controls with greener technology that enabled the removal of more than 350,000 gallons of runoff with pollutants. While at first glance it appears that the Environmental Services Department that supported the project successfully promoted the implementation of green technology in the private sector to clean up of the environment, the project report indicates that the property owner was motivated to make these changes to increase the value of the property itself – an idea that is counter-intuitive to the expansion of sustainable affordable housing.

About the Author
Athullya is originally Indian, born and brought up in the United Arab Emirates. She joined the Levy Masters Program in 2016 after leading a successful career in credit insurance. The choice to swap her role as the head of commercial underwriting with that of a full-time student came after being inspired to see how Economics works in the real world. She now works at the Institute for New Economic Thinking in New York.

Ecological Theory for a Green New Deal

When then Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) joined the Sunrise Movement’s protest in the office of incoming speaker Nancy Pelosi, she catapulted a radical climate policy into public consciousness. Known as the Green New Deal, the policy would enable a just transition away from the high-carbon production that exacerbates climate change. Given this renewed interest in the potential of transformational federal spending, including on programs like the federal job guarantee, which many have argued will be one of the central components of a Green New Deal, it is necessary to reexamine the state of ecological theory in order to provide a philosophical foundation for our era’s new, centralized approach to ecology.

By Maxximilian Seijo

Since the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, ecological theory has favored a theoretical approach which is skeptical of centralized authorities. Most evident in the path-breaking work of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss, his “deep ecology” movement, among other things, prioritized “local autonomy and decentralization” over any centralized mediation of ecological relations. This perspective is based on a philosophical approach that reduces abstract relations with legal and political authorities unto immediate material connections. Such a reduction creates a limited ecological theory, which in Næss’ own words asserts that “the vulnerability of a form of life is roughly proportional to the weight of influences from afar.” Næss’ view that distanced relations introduce a metaphorical weight upon ecologies is anathema to a Green New Deal, which aims to utilize centralized and abstract monetary issuances or legal decrees to create more just, egalitarian relations between humans and the environment. In this essay, I offer an alternative to Næss’ deep ecology which accords to the centralization and collectivity needed to achieve such transformative socialist goals.

Næss’ philosophy can be traced to the works of Spinoza, Whitehead, and Heidegger. Where Spinoza and Whitehead seem to reinforce, in varying degrees, Næss’ decentralized ontological materiality, Heidegger offers a more capacious ecology which, while still problematic in some ways, I argue must nevertheless be the foundation for an alternative ecology of just centralization.

In his 1946 essay, “What Are Poets For?” Heidegger offers one particularly prescient formulation of his approach to ecology. “Plant, animal, and man—insofar as they are beings…are ventured,” Heidegger writes. (100) Ventured, for Heidegger, is the state of being thrown into a shared and egalitarian ecology, what he simply dubs “being.” In addition to establishing equality for ecological beings, Heidegger also articulates some form of innate ecological centralization. “Being, which holds all beings in the balance, thus always, draws particular beings toward itself—toward itself as a center,” he argues. (101) After formulating ecological equality and some form of centralization, Heidegger laments that the presence of this center has not been recognized. He calls this all-mediating center, “an-unheard of center,” and with it, further obscures the legal relationship between governance and ecological relations which persists even when it is not avowed.

At this point, the reader might be thinking, “what does this have to do with a Green New Deal?” To explain why these arcane philosophical conceptions of centralization are relevant, we must go to the word ecology itself. Ecology, from the Greek oikos, means “dwelling.” (145-147) One of the central tasks of human production is to establish such a “dwelling” of our own, from the planetary to the household scale. We produce to afford such dwellings. This production, as the constitutional and neochartalist theories of money and law have demonstrated, is always undergirded by centralized legal authorities, whether through legal currency issuance, property rights, or taxes and fines. This means that our ecologies, whether human-to-human, human-to-environment, or environment-to-environment, are mediated by governance. Despite what Næss would suggest, I argue that this is a good thing, as it means that we can collectively reorganize ecological relations through centralized legal authorities, through democracy.

From this standpoint, I will approach a later Heidegger essay, entitled, “The Question Concerning Technology,” which points to a similar conclusion. In the essay, Heidegger attempts to establish the causal mechanisms of production. He writes, “wherever ends are pursued and means are employed, wherever instrumentality reigns, there reigns causality.” (5) He breaks this productive causality into four categories: the material, the form or category, the end goal, and the means of bringing the production into being. Further, Heidegger suggests that these four causal mechanisms of production depend on each other, and that “in this connection, [they] bring about means to obtain results, effects.” (3) What Heidegger has done in this essay is establish that production itself is dependent upon a lubricating abstract “connection.” I claim that this abstract ecological relationality is law. It is the centralized legal medium of money that enables all exchange.

Approaching the question of ecological theory on these legal terms leads to the question of Bitcoin. Bitcoin represents the fantasy of ecological decentralization on money’s terms. Dangerously reminiscent of Næss’ philosophical commitment to the weight of abstract influence, Bitcoin is a commodified abstraction that must be mined, as it was designed as materially finite. As a result of both its decentralized network design and this artificial finitude, Bitcoin is contributing to immense environmental damage across the world. In other words, offering the inherent centrality of ecological relations in the legal mediation of production is not merely an arbitrary theoretical path forward, but a specific affront to the theoretical frameworks that are accelerating our abandonment of ecological justice.

Grounding ecology in the legal mediation of money is not what contemporary ecological theorists do. For example, in his recent book, noted ecological theorist Sean Cubitt writes that “ecological crisis, it is argued here, is not the fault of individuals but of the communicative systems, most of all the tyranny of the economy, of money as the dominant medium of twenty-first century intercourse between humans and our world.” (7) I understand why Cubitt takes this position. The issuance of money has incentivized extractive economic production for generations, but allowing that trend to solidify into a determined truth is not how we fix our ecological quandaries. Rather than fetishize money’s historical limitations, we need to embrace its democratic potential, we need to use its full legal power in the name of a Green New Deal, for all our sakes.

About the Author:
Maxximilian Seijo is a graduate student at the University of South Florida. He is the co-host of @moneyontheleft (a podcast that mobilizes Modern Monetary Theory to reclaim money’s collective possibilities for leftist politics and culture) and Digital Media Fellow at the Modern Money Network.

A Green Job Program Will Help Workers, the Economy, and the Planet

There’s been much talk about Trump’s plan for jobs and infrastructure that entails over one trillion dollars in new spending (without tax increases) and promises to employ thousands of American workers. Because it looks like this would require significant deficit spending, it has drawn stiff criticism: even Trump’s the own conservative supporters have expressed concern.

Among advocates of Keynesian spending and Modern Money Theory (MMT), however, some precautionary excitement can be observed. Their perspective is different because they are unafraid of a government deficit, and in favor of direct job creation. They understand that deficit-spending is not inherently bad, and that the US government will never have to default on its debt. When the economy is not at full employment, increasing the deficit would actually be helpful, not harmful.

A fiscal stimulus aimed at reducing unemployment is timely and necessary. Despite the confidence expressed by the Fed about the latest employment numbers, the situation for those who are jobless is not looking good. One of the reasons for the latest rate hike by the Fed was their positive outlook on unemployment numbers. Chairman Yellen has gone as far as saying that (at 4.6% unemployment rate) we are close to full employment and fiscal stimulus is not necessary to reach that goal.

However, the low official joblessness rate hides the fact that an increasing number of Americans have left the labor force altogether; for example there are currently over 5 million Americans who are not in the labor force but have reported that they want a job. This is where a Job Guarantee program could come in handy. In short, the government would act as an Employer of Last Resort, effectively guaranteeing a job to all of those willing and able to work.

And if Trump uses the deficit-spending towards jobs in infrastructure, it might result in something that resembles the job guarantee policy that America needs**. I argue, however, that the financial feasibility should not be the only criterium for a successful implementation of the job-guarantee. It also has to be sustainable. If we’re going to be at full employment, we have to do it in a way the planet can handle.

The current structure of the economy relies too heavily on fossil fuels, wasteful production methods and non-renewable resources. Unless we change this, sustaining full-employment would result in increasing production, consumption, and waste. My favorite Keynes’ quote is that “In the long run we are all dead.” If we’re talking about a long run of increasing pollution, he will surely be right. As we know, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. This applies to jobs too. Unless they are green jobs, too many jobs will be bring us environmental destruction.

The issue of the environmental sustainability of a Job Guarantee program has been on my mind since I first heard of the proposal. Mathew Forstater’s Green Jobs proposal was inspirational to my work. In my Master’s thesis, I tweak its existing framework to target environmentally sustainable outcomes. I find that we can transform the Job Guarantee program to ensure its sustainability without increasing its cost. Here’s how:

I set up the program in a way that promotes social enterprise and community development, following the work of Pavlina Tcherneva et al. With the help of social entrepreneurs, NGOs, and Nonprofit Organizations, local communities should decide what projects will be undertaken. For example, communities along the Hudson river could support a program where workers dealt with invasive species such as the zebra mussel and water chestnut. Other localities could handle neighborhood farming, recycling centers, flood containment structures, bike paths, etc.. It’s been found that if the community is involved in determining what projects are taken on, participation levels are higher.

A more detailed account of my proposal and calculations is available upon request, but this is the gist of it: I used an Input-Output model to establish what would be the cost of employing the official U-3 unemployed population into “green” Job Guarantee jobs. That framework accounts for indirect job creation related to the proposal, but not induced employment. What I find is that the US government can, under conservative assumptions, employ all of those who are officially unemployed for around 1.1% of GDP while paying them a $15hr wage. That is about 17% of the annual military budget. The Green Job Guarantee program is projected to cost just under 200 Billion dollars per year in order to ensure employment for 7.8 million people.

As the world economy quickly transitions into a more sustainable state, a shift in the productive structure will occur, rendering some current occupations useless. Workers who are employed in areas like fossil fuel energy generation (the fabled coal workers of the American Midwest for example) will be left without a job and unlikely to find a new one right away. There is no way to predict how quickly this transition will occur: it could be a gradual–albeit fast–process if led by government initiative, a slower and insufficient movement if guided by profit motives, or even a sudden transition caused by widespread popular response to natural disasters.

Given current trends it is safe to assume that the transition to a renewable energy generation and a sustainable economy will occur before the fossil reserves are depleted. Just as the stone age ended before we ran out of stone, the “oil-age” will end before we run out of oil. As such, fossil fuel workers (and those who depend on their consumption) are at risk of losing their jobs in the near future. A Job Guarantee program would allow those workers to not only find employment readily, but also to acquire the on-the-job skills that will allow them an easier transition into the Green economy.

So as we continue to criticize and investigate the means of job-creation proposed by the President-Elect, let’s look beyond the government deficit, and consider the planet, too. Whether you’re afraid of government debt or not, you should be concerned with the destruction of the earth. If we are going to have a public program that aims a generating new jobs and bringing people back into the workforce, then that program should be a Job Guarantee. But, if we’re going to guarantee jobs, the will have to be green. And we have all the tools we need to make that happen.
*Interested in some good work on how to build a sustainable economy? Check out the publications from PERI and the Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. Interested in a non-profit that is already doing some great things in that area? Visit GreenWave‘s website and get involved!

** I must make clear that, although Trump’s infrastructure plan might very loosely look like a Job Guarantee program because of its intent, it differs significantly from it because of how it will will be implemented. The president elect’s plan is based on private spending and making concessions to big corporations; it is basically a big giveaway to developers and not a program to ensure full-employment and financial stability.