By: Amy Peltier, Coalition and Advocacy Director
“Our housing determines where our kids go to school. The types of institutions we can access, and the people we interact with on a daily basis… The type of structure we live in and its location shapes social relationships and pattern inequality throughout our lives.” This narrative is part of the introduction in, The Sociology of Housing, edited by Brian J. McCabe and Eva Rosen. It was also the underlying theme of their comments as Keynote speakers at the Partnership’s Connecticut Affordable Housing Conference last month. Traditionally, economists understand housing as a commodity and financial transaction, political scientists view housing as shaping political and policy preferences and policymakers and government institutions often discuss housing in terms of physical structures and shelter. However, as Rosen and McCabe explain, sociologists see the housing system as shaping everyday lives and structures of our social world and relationships, including our personal and family lives and the power dynamics within the communities where we operate. The Keynote as well as their 2023 release The Sociology of Housing, focus the lens on our housing challenges as a two-part crisis. First, it’s an income problem where wages are not rising with the costs of housing and, second a supply problem with a lack of units being built since the early 2000’s due to a variety of national issues like the high cost of construction and labor and local restrictions that regulate land use.
Rosen and McCabe’s comments directly address the unique impact of housing instability in CT and establishes a national baseline for understanding affordability; no household should be housing cost-burdened and unable to afford basic necessities because they are spending more than 30% of their income on housing. Altogether, their work finds that housing continues to be one of the main drivers of inequality. Brian McCabe spoke of how instability and inequality are shaped by the context of the neighborhood in which you live and that race shapes the experience of where you ended up in the housing market to begin with. And, while homeownership continues to exacerbate the racial wealth gap, the number of cost burdened families continues to grow across income groups. As an area of study, sociology analyzes how cost burdens affect all social groups. This can make determining what to prioritize tricky, but also makes it easy to identify that because of one’s housing status, there are key social outcomes most often seen detrimentally impacting the lowest income earners and people of color. In fact, their research found that more than 50%of both Blacks and Latinos across the United States, are cost burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on rent.
The presentation highlighted some new forms of housing inequality and instability that have arisen from our current housing crisis. Sociological research employs in-person and electronic audits to analyze housing networks and possible discrimination. The audits have often shown that ethnic discrimination and steering have increased over time. However, while this evidence has shown sociology’s important contribution to the study of housing discrimination, new forms of technology are finding that audits alone, without additional data, may make the model less effective and reliable. For example, sociological audits have shown that the growth of short-term rentals, like AirBnB, over time often have a negative impact on local housing markets. These rentals can contribute to community disruption and reveal discrimination against those with disabilities.but More data is needed to show how they increase both property and rental values and whether applying certain regulations could improve equitable outcomes in these transactions. An additional space where housing inequality is trending is in manufactured and mobile homes. These units can make affordable and stable housing an option for some, but involves troubling power dynamics, as these residents are limited to ownership of the homes but not the land underneath it. This creates real conflict when it comes to stability and personal choice, if the land or park are sold or the land use changes. Likewise, ownership of structure but not of land, has been a longstanding issue affecting stability for indigenous people living on tribal lands as well (also covered in The Sociology of Housing, Chapter 5). Also discussed, in the context of new trends, was what sociologists are seeing in evictions. In CT, Brian McCabe found that there were 55 eviction filings every day. When one-third of evictions happen in a county that has a larger Black population earning less hourly wages compared to state averages, it’s hard not to see that as a racial justice issue.aw McCabe further noted that whether an eviction is simply filed or is successful in removing tenants, the act in and of itself seriously impacts the overall well-being of those facing it. The editors also pointed out that evictions are shaped by regulations within local geographies, often made by community volunteers without the expertise and knowledge necessary to understand the housing crisis or rules governing land use. Local laws and institutions, as well as municipal court filings and costs significantly impact character, community, building and use of land and determine whether the cost burdened are manifested into homelessness.
Rosen and McCabe’s address was particularly poignant to the Partnership and our network in housing advocacy, as we prepare for the upcoming legislative session which kicks off in January 2025. A major takeaway from the Keynote and a priority of the Partnership’s legislative agenda is that improving our current system of rental assistance is one of the most important things we can do to address the housing crisis.
Connecticut is one of the few states with a state funded voucher program, the Rental Assistance Program (RAP). About 50,000 households in Connecticut receive rental assistance either through the state’s Rental Assistance Program (RAP) or federal HCV popularly called “Section 8.” Waitlists in CT for the RAP have been closed since 2014. When it last opened in August of that year, it was open for only two weeks and received over 86,000 applications. Through the lottery process, approximately 5,000 were placed on the federal HCV/Section 8 program, and 3,000 were placed on RAP. Households had about a 1 in 10 chance of being connected to a voucher. As of January 2024, there were between 1,400 – 1,600 households on the state’s waitlist for rental assistance. These numbers show that most of the people that need rental assistance cannot access it. Eva Rosen explained that the typical participant in CT waits over 2 years for a housing voucher and pays approximately $522 per month with their voucher. While CT can be a leader in bridging the gap of vouchers from the HCV program with our RAP, there are simply just not enough vouchers. Both the state and federal voucher programs are grossly underfunded. Unless we expand investment both nationally and here in CT, our voucher system will never offer enough support to those who need it. Additionally, as Rosen explained and we see here in CT, vouchers can be difficult to use. 40% of families who are lucky enough to receive a voucher end up unable to find a home where they can use it and the vouchers go unused. Often, the reason vouchers go unused is the challenge in finding a landlord willing to participate in the program. Both Rosen and McCabe recommend a better system of incentivizing landlords as one of the innovations we need to improve the housing voucher process and get people equitably housed.
In addition to incentivizing landlords, Rosen and McCabe offered several sociologically based, innovative recommendations to improve housing systems and their profound influence on social relationships, economic opportunities, and community well-being. Social networks and the access to the resources within them (or not), contribute to broader social inequities and economic opportunity. Ensuring more intermediaries in the housing system that support individuals seeking housing options through things like tenant support counseling or centralized and easy-to-use navigation tools, could bring efficiency in connecting individuals with the currently available resources so that fewer go unused. The editors also recommend state-based innovations that would not need to adapt to federal rules and regulations and instead utilize public bond funding. For example, experimenting with social housing models, a mixed income housing model that aims to integrate social housing units (for low and moderate incomes) with market-rate housing to avoid concentrations of poverty and promote social inclusion. Finally, McCabe and Rosen emphasized the growing impact that local organizing and tenant unions are having in housing stability and avoiding the larger, more competitive housing market. Grassroots efforts of local residents and stakeholders generating collective power have been effective in establishing options like community land trusts that determine permanent local control and affordability and create tenant organizing structures that effectively advocate for housing quality and building purchases.
Ultimately, solving the housing crisis demands more than economic fixes, it requires a shift toward equitable, inclusive, and community-driven solutions. McCabe and Rosen’s work effectively explains that by centering human needs, promoting social justice, and prioritizing long-term affordability, sociological methods can help transform housing from a source of inequality into a foundation for stability and opportunity. We must aim for a comprehensive understanding that improved housing scenarios for all benefits communities broadly and is linked to other social goods and outcomes that we all care about. Moving forward, the lessons in sociology from this Keynote and The Sociology of Housing can help us assist marginalized communities, challenge inequitable systems, foster sustainable solutions to housing access and eventually ensure that everyone in CT has a safe, stable home that is affordable to them in an equitable community of their choice.