The constant liberalization and restriction of eligibility, and increase and decrease in personal scrutiny, under means- and need-restricted programs is the off-the-books, under-the-radar outcome of an ongoing struggle between “liberals,” who want many people eligible for expensive services (often because they earn a living providing those services) and “conservatives,” who do not require services and do want to pay taxes to help those who do require them. In economic expansions, when more services may be offered without a tax increase, advocates often demand, and receive, more extensive services for more people. In economic downturns, when falling tax revenues lead to budget crises, there is generally a sudden finding of “waste, fraud and abuse.” In all times, however, politicians often compromise by gross hypocrisy. While focused on the needs of particular group (supported by organized advocates), they prove their compassion by passing laws that, in theory, make many people eligible for extensive services and benefits. But during the budget process, when different needs and priorities are in competition, resources are scarce, and tradeoffs must be made, they save money by not providing enough to cover everyone theoretically eligible to get all the benefits they are theoretically entitled to. Having claimed credit for making a benefit available, both Republicans and Democrats “hope no one shows up” to claim it.
The most reasonable method of rationing under-funded benefits is a queue or waiting list, and this is the method generally used to ration housing assistance — public housing vacancies and “Section 8” housing vouchers. According the U.S. Census Bureau there were an estimated 33 million people living in poverty in 1999; in 1998 21 million people received food stamps but only 1.3 million people resided in public housing and only 3.0 million received other forms of housing assistance, such as Section 8. Yet both housing assistance and food stamps have similar eligibility criteria. In fact, since housing assistance has a “cost of living adjustment” that makes those with higher incomes eligible in metropolitan areas with higher average wages, more people are probably eligible for it, at least in theory, than are eligible for food stamps.
The queues for subsidized “affordable housing” are long. According to a 1998 report by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), “Waiting In Vain: An Update On America’s Housing Crisis”, in 1999 a family’s average time on a waiting list for the largest public housing authorities was 33 months. It was even longer in some large cities – eight years in New York City, six years in Oakland, and five years in Washington, and Cleveland. The average waiting period for a Section 8 rental assistance voucher was 28 months in 1998. The waiting period for the vouchers, which are used to help families in need rent privately-owned apartments, was ten years in Los Angeles and Newark, eight years in New York City, seven years in Houston, and five years in Memphis and Chicago. Almost one million families were on the waiting lists, nearly 25 percent of the 4.3 million households assisted by HUD. Yet it is unlikely that either funding will be expanded to provide for those on the waiting lists, or that eligibility will be restricted to the worst off to reduce them. In fact, federal housing spending is going down.
Perhaps more telling, in 1998 there were 8.5 million individuals and 7.2 million families who were living in poverty – a total of nearly 16 million poor households. While one million poor households were in the queue for housing assistance, therefore, at least 10.4 million poor households that might qualify for such assistance were not even in the queue. Both public housing and Section 8 vouchers limit what one must pay to 30 percent of one’s income, regardless of how low that income is. In 1999, according to Census Bureau data in the Statistical Abstract of the United States, there were 28.3 million households that paid more than 30 percent of their income for housing, nearly seven times the number of households aided by public housing authorities funded by HUD.
These facts illuminate a general point. For every beneficiary of less-than-universal public programs, there is an eligible person who wouldn’t think of going to the government for help. The more obscure to benefit, the fewer people know enough to apply. Just about everyone knows to send their children to public kindergarten, or to start collecting Social Security at age 65. Not many people know where to go to apply and get on a waiting list for housing assistance. Businesses seeking customers advertise. Government agencies seeking to avoid customers limit access to information. In many cases, the share of potentially eligible people who receive benefits could be substantially changed simply by informing the eligible through outreach, or by not doing so.
Certainly that has been the case in the City of New York. In the early days of the administration of former Mayor David Dinkins, the incoming social service administrators attempted to clear the city’s homeless population by offering them subsidized housing. As a result, however, the fact that (as a result of court decisions) anyone determined to be “homeless” can claim publicly-supported housing in New York became widely known. Thousands of people whose living arrangements were less than ideal, because of poor quality housing, living doubled up with friends and neighbors, or high rents, moved out and onto the street to claim the benefit. This forced the Dinkins Administration, which was facing a budget crisis, to take measures to sharply restrict eligibility.
In 2000 to 2003, outreach once again became an issue in New York. The “HealthStat” program, promoted by the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, sought to enroll all those eligible for Medicaid in the program, despite soaring costs. By February 2003, however, one of four New York City families was on Medicaid. With the City’s share of the Medicaid bill surpassing $4 billion, conservative commentators began objecting to “come and get it” Medicaid for the working poor, just as they had previously objected to “come and get it welfare.” Such objections go beyond the “anti-welfare crusade” objections to people receiving benefits they were not entitled to. These are objections to people receiving benefits they are, in fact, entitled to, but that no one expected them to actually receive.
The opposite of outreach is disinformation and stonewalling – lost paperwork, applications at inaccessible locations open during limited hours, long lines, extensive delays. Throughout the nation, advocates for the poor and disabled routinely file, and win, lawsuits for wrongful denial of assistance. For the most part, these lawsuits merely attempt to obtain for an individual, or group of individuals, benefits that are, in fact, promised under law but are not sufficiently covered by budgeted public funds.
Access to information may be uniformly made available through outreach, or uniformly limited through stonewalling. What is worse, however, is the tendency for information, and thus benefits, to be limited to certain well connected groups.
Like employment opportunities, the availability of public benefits, especially less-than-universal public benefits, often becomes known through informal, person-to-person networks. Sometimes this is an accident of social policy. According to the 1999 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey, 50 percent of those living in New York’s public housing units were on public assistance. Many people in housing projects can explain welfare, SSI, housing assistance vouchers and Medicaid to their neighbors; few can provide a tip as to where to go and how to get a job. Access to New York City’s public housing itself has become rationed based on networks, with many future beneficiaries the children of past beneficiaries. Immigrants from other countries account for nearly 40 percent of the city’s renters, but only 20 percent of its public housing occupants. In fact, those receiving cash public assistance are generally eligible for a host of public benefits from food stamps to Medicaid to housing assistance, and are automatically enrolled in those benefits when they apply for welfare. The working poor, who never meet a caseworker, often do not receive benefits they are entitled to.
Sometimes differential access to information is intentional. In addition to federal housing programs, New York City and State have their own state and local housing programs. In one of them, the “Mitchell-Lama” program, new apartment buildings received both a 30-year exemption from property taxes and an interest rate subsidy, and their middle-income occupants received below market rents. Obviously, this is an extremely valuable benefit in a high housing cost city, and one that was made available to those who are not poor. These units were distributed based on waiting lists, established on a first come, first serve basis. It is generally believed, however, that members of certain unions, political clubs and associations knew specifically when and where to go to get on the list the day it opened; these subsidized housing units ended up being occupied primarily by the well connected. In fact, a recent article noted that the judge who oversees New York City’s aid for the homeless resides in such a unit. She and many other judges, she noted, moved in when they were younger and had qualifying “middle” incomes.
Wherever there is a queue for something valuable, there are going to be queue jumpers, and subsidized housing is no exception. There has been a 20-year political battle over who should get higher priority in allocating the nation’s public housing. At the start of the public housing era in the 1940s and 1950s, new, modern public housing units, with up to date bathrooms and kitchens, were a step up from the dilapidated, obsolete housing where many poor people lived. As such, their residents were required to meet certain standards, including employment rather than dependence of public assistance. In the early 1980s, the federal government began to see public housing – concentrated in older sections of older cities – as a convenient place to put the nation’s most trouble residents – addicts, paroled criminals, the mentally ill, the socially unemployable – and mandated that such people given priority in public housing. After a while, few working people were left in the nation’s housing projects, some of which were abandoned and torn down, but in New York City, where public housing remains better than many of the alternatives, the battle over who gets the units continues. An early 1990s decision to give working poor people priority in the allocation of at least some of the city’s units was overturned by a lawsuit, or so I read.
The under the table battle over the official federal definition of a “metropolitan area” is primarily a battle of the allocation of housing assistance and similar funding. According to federal rules, recipients of Section 8 housing vouchers may use them anywhere within a “metropolitan area,” and therefore may use them to move from older cities to newer, growing suburbs. In addition, to be eligible for the vouchers one must be below the metropolitan area’s median income. Each decade, in association with decennial census, the federal government reviews the official criteria for determining metropolitan boundaries, and each decade it proposes criteria that would designate metropolitan boundaries that correspond to what most people think they are. The result is a wave of protest by suburban counties and the Congressmen that represent them, and the alteration of the criteria make these counties part of “metropolitan areas” that are separate from older central cities.
This has two effects. First, central city residents are no longer able to use housing vouchers to move from the city to the suburbs. And second, middle-income people in affluent suburban counties suddenly become eligible for subsidized housing, because the median income in the “metropolitan areas” that includes those counties is high, while working-class people in poorer urban counties become ineligible, because the “metropolitan areas” that includes those counties is low. Obviously, most middle income suburban families do not know that they are eligible for housing subsidies, but politically connected suburban families do. But in the end, these machinations are not even needed. By act of Congress, for purposes of eligibility for housing benefits the “New York Metropolitan Area” is limited to New York City and Putnam County, New York, a semi-rural county with virtually no rental units located 40 miles from the city’s border.
Housing assistance is an example of a public benefit that very few people expect from the government. Public education, on the other hand, is a benefit that most people expect the government to provide their children. Here in New York City, however, that expectation has not been met. In a city that regularly produces winners of the Westinghouse and Intel science prizes, a substantial share of the children attend schools designated by the State of New York to be failing, and a majority attend schools recently identified by the Mayor of New York as sub-standard. In reality, here in New York child-care for the school-aged is a universal benefit, but education is not.
Like housing assistance, education in New York City has been rationed based on queue, with applications, waiting lists, and frantic parents trying to get their children into the limited number of elementary, middle or high school similar in quality to most schools elsewhere in the United States. And as for housing assistance, there is official and unofficial queue jumping, with ideological battles over quotas and diversity versus how well four year olds test as criteria for admission. There is also individual maneuvering via phony addresses, political connections, and other ruses. One cannot blame educated, motivated parents for doing all they can to assure an education for their children. One can be embarrassed by a system that for 30 years bought off such parents with a series of deals while not providing for the majority, until enrollment rose, budgets were cut and even the aggressive minority was unable to secure a decent education for its children, and had reason to demand change.
Given the wide use of the “hope no one shows up strategy,” one sees why expanding publicly-funded health care through more and more separate programs, each with its own applications procedures and requirements, is cheaper than having one simple program that applies to everyone. It is because less savvy people will be left out. That’s what those advocating this approach are counting on. Any government program that is not funded at a level sufficient for every potential eligible person to actually benefit is, in that sense, an intentionally inequitable fraud.