This weekend I saw the important documentary, “The IF Project” about an effort at both preventing young people from ending up in jail by having prisoners share their stories. The IF Project asks the basic question, “If there was something someone could have said or done that would have changed the path that led you here, what would it have been?” The answers are a trove of self discovery and lessons for young people who might be making big decisions that could lead toward the criminal system or a brighter or at least better future. The IF Project also works with women coming out of the prison system; one of their biggest challenges in trying to get their lives back on track is lack of housing. Why is it that we spend our time talking about wonky statistics and arguing over well established economic facts like supply and demand rather than addressing the real issues faced by people facing steep challenges created by poverty and lack of resources in our community, like people coming out of prison? A professor at Seattle University, Sara Rankin, has a theory. From the Seattle Times:

There seems to be an urgency about addressing homelessness, but urgency hasn’t always led to lasting solutions. That may be less about resources than how people feel about poverty in general.

Sara Rankin, a Seattle University law professor who has studied the problem for years, says we’re fighting against instincts that make us want to turn away from homeless people.

Rankin said there is a wealth of studies that show that “when we’re exposed to visible evidence of poverty we react to that with higher rates of disgust, anger and annoyance than exposure to any other marginalized trait.”

Rankin in the featured video makes a great point: as a general rule people don’t want to see poverty in public, they see it as a private problem. Anyone who has been poor can attest to the bad feeling associated with using food stamps (there is now a debit card, but we had food stamps when I was a kid) for example. I remember when my mom would pay with them I would walk away from the cash register. What if someone from school saw that we were “on food stamps!”

That shame felt by poor people and created by our aversion to poverty affects our discourse about housing. We don’t want to talk about the fact that it isn’t a housing crisis at all; it’s a poverty crisis. And that poverty crisis isn’t about not being able to find an apartment with stacking washer and drier, that takes pets, and is next to light rail for $1000 a month. That’s a problem experienced by affluent people, not a policy crisis. Poor people face the reality of deciding whether to pay rent or their medical bills next month or what they will be feeding their children for dinner.

I am frankly worn out by the distraction of Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ) which is being pushed while we are, as Rankin points out, making poverty not only shameful but illegal (Rankin has studied the impact of laws making living in cars illegal, something I’ve written about here), pushing it out of the public eye and discourse in order to talk about creating 150 units of rent restricted housing for people earning $40,000 annually while increasing the rents in all the other units.

Here’s what I wrote on Facebook over the weekend:

I get exhausted sometimes arguing about AMI levels and zoning and the Grand Bargain and dealing with egos and the petty passive aggressive disputes that break out on the internets. I share this with you all because we are wasting so much human potential while we argue about the rent of a unit or price of a house. We’ve lost the story here. It’s about people.

I do what I do because bad policy promulgated I the name of the poor is hurting the poor. As we promote policy that strangles housing and seeks to punish the “haves” and create villains we’re losing people.