By Christine Kreyling
The classic vision of Thanksgiving Day is Norman Rockwell’s studio-perfect painting —a picture of smiling faces gathered around a dinner table. Grandpa’s glasses are fogged with the steam that rises from the turkey he is carving. Grandma ladles out candied yams; Mom straps the baby into the high chair; Dad herds the boys in from the backyard. This is a vision from Bob Dole’s “tranquil times,” an idealized take on American life, but one that is still within reach for many in this nation.
The boomer-version of Thanksgiving is different: It’s Home for the Holidays with an edge. “Blended” families gather around a table that groans with vegetarian options as well as turkey. Maybe the unmarried son decides to come out, just as his mother is pulling the pies out of the oven. During the day a rueful acceptance of diversity may finally be achieved, but only after the second bottle of wine. Amidst all the angst, however, the gas logs still burn on the hearth, the refrigerator is still full, and the mortgage is still being paid—although the payments are higher than they ought to be.
For many Americans, however, neither of these pictures has much to do with reality. For them, Thanksgiving Day is not much different from any other Thursday. They may have to choose between having Thanksgiving dinner and having a place to sleep on Thanksgiving night. There are lots of months when they cannot pay their utility bills and make the rent. Their skin may be brown or yellow or white. They are often employed. For these Americans—and there are plenty of them here in Nashville—“affordable housing” is a contradiction in terms.
Not having the perfect everything
Robert and Madonna Cox and their three children will spend Thanksgiving at St. Patrick’s Ecumenical Shelter. They will share turkey and trimmings with four other families. The Coxes consider themselves lucky.
They’re right; at least they’re getting to spend Thanksgiving together. In all of Nashville, according to Sam Hollis, assistant director at St. Patrick’s, there is shelter for only eight homeless families—five at St. Patrick’s and three at the Nashville Family Shelter. Otherwise, Hollis says, homeless people are grouped together by sex and age when they seek shelter. Worse yet, there are times when they can’t find shelter at all.
Robert and Madonna Cox have been at St. Patrick’s since October. Both work full time: He is employed by a nursing service; she is a security officer. Robert has a B.S. from Tennessee State University; Madonna attended Western Kentucky University for two years, where she earned a certificate in early childhood development.
For the time being, however, they’re staying at St. Patrick’s while they try to save the $1,000 that they hope will be their ticket to freedom. That’s the minimum they think they will need to put down the utility deposits and the first and last months’ rent that will allow them to move into an apartment of their own.
The last place the Coxes lived before they came to St. Patrick’s was a house in North Nashville; they paid $500 a month, but they didn’t have a lease. They describe the house as “substandard.” There was no heat, and, when they flushed the toilet, raw sewage backed up into the bathtub. When the Coxes complained to their landlord, he promised to take care of the problems. They waited a month. Nothing was ever done.
The Coxes end up renting places without leases—and places that do not meet Metro codes—because they, like so many people with housing difficulties, have credit problems. Robert still owes money on a student loan. When the family tried to rent a town home at a local complex, they were turned down because Madonna’s credit history includes debts that she says were run up by her former husband.
In October the Coxes allege that they were illegally evicted from the North Nashville house. They claim that their landlord locked them out of their house and carted all their belongings—including their clothing, furniture, china, cooking and eating utensils, and even their children’s birth certificates—away to the city dump. They are currently engaged in a lawsuit against their former landlord and are receiving pro bono legal assistance.
“You have to have the perfect everything—especially income and credit rating—to find decent housing in a decent neighborhood in Nashville these days,” Madonna says. In the two years that they have been married, Madonna and Robert have lived in four different places, and that doesn’t count their time at St. Patrick’s.
The Coxes’ housing difficulties are not unique, or even very rare. In 1995 Nashville’s Crisis Intervention Center received 949 calls from people who were either out on the street or in imminent danger of being there. Another 250 calls were related to housing crises—utilities that had been shut off; plumbing that does not work; rent that cannot be paid; too many people living together, illegally, because they cannot afford to live any other way. All in all, the center receives three to four housing-crisis-related calls per day. And there are many who never call.
The experience of homelessness has left Robert Cox slightly stunned. “I always thought I’d be able to provide a home for my family,” he says. “The government says it doesn’t have the money to make homes affordable, but it always seems to have the money to build a stadium when it wants to.”
A tale of two cities
These days, the conventional wisdom is that Nashville is booming. A growing health care industry makes its home here. The arena is almost ready to open, and an NFL stadium is on the way. Music has returned to the Ryman, and tourists are crawling all over Second Avenue and Broadway. With unemployment at just over 3 percent, labor shortages are a way of life.
Less conventional thinkers, however, are increasingly uneasy about Nashville’s growing gap between the haves and the have-nots. “The need for affordable housing is enormous, and the lack of it is outrageous,” says Jane Davis, who chairs the board of the Metro Development and Housing Agency (MDHA). “With our low level of unemployment, we have an obvious need for more workers. But there is no way to get them here without housing that they can pay for. The whole boom could screech to a halt without more affordable living space.”
The U.S. census estimates that there are 207,497 households in Davidson County. Of those households, 68,474, or 33 percent, have “some type of a housing problem,” according to a 1995 report prepared by MDHA. That means that one-third of all the families in Nashville have trouble finding a place to live—at least they have trouble finding a place that meets Metro codes, a place where they can afford the rent and the utilities, a place where they are not overcrowded.
Nashville’s median annual income is approximately $43,000. MDHA’s report states that 13 percent of local families earn below 30 percent of that amount: 27,000 families make $12,900 a year or less. Approximately 13,500 of those households pay more than half of their income for housing, a punishing percentage that can make it almost impossible for a family to have food or heat or clothing. The number of families living in places that do not meet Metro codes is more than one in 10.
The federal government defines housing as “affordable” if rent and utilities consume no more than 30 percent of a family’s income—and if that family is making at least 65 percent of the median income of an area. In Nashville, an “affordable” housing expenditure comes down to an outlay of $698 per month for rent and utilities, provided the family makes $27,950 a year.
However, half of Nashville’s households make approximately $21,500 a year or less, and they are being faced with increasingly pricey options for shelter. MDHA executive director Gerald Nicely describes Nashville housing, along with that of Charlotte, N. C., as “the most expensive in the Southeast, higher than Atlanta.”
According to the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, the average rents for apartments in 1995 were $513 a month for existing units and $622 a month for new construction, an increase of approximately 7 percent over 1994. Home ownership costs went up at an even faster rate. The average cost of a single-family home in 1995 was $114,000, a 13.2 percent increase over the previous year. And utilities are an additional expense. Nashville’s per capita income rose only 5 percent in the same period. It doesn’t take a wizard to realize that more than half of Nashville’s families are caught between the rock of low income and the hard place of high-cost housing.
Paying the rent
Dorothy Blair doesn’t need to hear about the statistics. She has her own personal experience of the housing crisis. She is 60 years old and has legal custody of three grandchildren, ages 11, 9, and 5. Since 1992 she has lived in five different apartments. During the same period, each of her two grandsons has attended four different schools.
When Dorothy Blair moved from North Nashvile to South Nashville, hoping to escape a drug-infested neighborhood, her grandson Rodney was forced to change schools in the middle of the academic year. His class at Hermitage Elementary was just about to begin multiplication when he departed. When he arrived at Percy Priest, his class had already learned multiplication. “It was really traumatic for Rodney to be instantly behind,” recalls Terri Smith, a neighbor who helps the children with their homework. “We needed all summer to catch up.”
For now, however, things seem to have stabilized. Dorothy Blair currently occupies an apartment in a large turn-of-the-century residence near Sevier Park. Her granddaughter Teara greets visitors with a Disney alphabet book in hand, ready to explain to anyone who will listen that E is for elephant and M is for mouse. A large bookcase in the living room serves as a family shrine; it is covered with photographs of Blair’s children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
Blair has worked all her life, but she isn’t working now. Her most recent job was in the laundry of the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza, but she was forced to give up that job in 1992, when chronic arthritis required her to have knee-replacement surgery. She had more surgery last July and now walks with a cane. She says her niece, who lives next door, drives her to the grocery store “because I don’t have a car and wouldn’t be able to drive one if I had one.”
Dorothy receives a monthly check of almost $500 for her disability and Social Security. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) provides her with an additional $185 each month for the care of her three grandchildren. With a monthly income of $685, she qualifies for federal housing assistance. She is lucky that she gets it.
The basic qualification for public housing assistance is an income of less than 50 percent of the median—in Nashville that means an income of approximately $21,500 or less. Rental assistance in Nashville usually takes one of two major forms: Either it involves a move to public housing, built, owned, and maintained by the government, or it involves federally funded “Section 8” certificates that can be used for housing that is privately owned.
The stereotypical image of public housing is the “projects,” the complexes that have produced their own incestuous culture of poverty and despair. In actuality, only a minority of Nashvillians receiving public assistance live in the projects.
In 1995 MDHA reported that Nashville had 6,500 public housing units: That figure included 12 family developments—the stereotypical “projects”—seven high rises for the elderly and disabled, and 302 units in scattered neighborhood locations. According MDHA’s Gerald Nicely, there are now approximately 600 names on the waiting list for government-owned public housing.
Section 8 housing in Davidson County provides another 8,436 units. According to Pat Clark, who manages the Section 8 program for MDHA, this is how that system works: Persons accepted for the subsidy must find a unit that conforms to Metro Codes and to guidelines supplied by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. These guidelines include a rent that falls within HUD’s definition of “fair market value.” The Section 8 subsidy guarantees that tenants will pay no more than 30 percent of their income in rent.
“There are advantages for a landlord who accepts tenants with Section 8 certificates,” Clark explains. ‘The property owner has a guarantee that the subsidy will arrive on the first of the month and that, if tenants lose their jobs, the Section 8 program will pick up the slack.”
Not all landlords see it that way. Dorothy Blair recalls that, when she became eligible for Section 8 funding, she had to leave her apartment on East Nashville’s Russell Street. “It was a nice place,” she says, “but the man who owned it said no to Section 8. He would have had to fix it up to meet the guidelines—insulate it to cut down on the utility costs—and he didn’t want to go to the trouble or expense.”
The most obvious problem with the Section 8 program is that it does not have the funding to take care of everyone who qualifies for it. The Nashville program currently has a waiting list of 4,800, and MDHA stopped accepting applications more than a year ago. Clark estimates that there are at least three times that many more households out there that could qualify if the funding was available.
That funding is not likely to become available soon. Congress recently enacted legislation that cut to zero the number of new families that can expect to get government rent subsidies. Nevertheless, Jason DeParle recently observed in the New York Times Magazine that, “throughout the provinces of the new low-wage economy, people are making beds and guarding buildings, vacuuming offices and washing dishes, and they can’t afford the rent.”
The families on the waiting lists, and the many other low-income families who have not even applied for assistance, are simply the most desperate among the many seeking shelter. And a troubling question persists: If the stringent new welfare bill actually succeeds in pushing people into the job market, where are they going to live?
Even with her monthly checks and her Section 8 housing subsidy, Dorothy Blair has no margin for error. Her recent electric bill was higher than expected, so now she is looking for every opportunity to cut back. “Teara is just too young to understand that one light is all we can afford to have on in a room,” she laughs. “I’ve decided I’m just going to have to unscrew all but one of the bulbs.”
Building on success
Over the last decade or two, Nashville’s own MDHA has quietly built a reputation as one of the leading housing authorities in the nation. And a variety of local nonprofit groups, with government and foundation support, are producing success stories among, if not the most desperately poor, at least among those a step or two above.
MDHA came into existence during the late 1930s, when it was known as the Nashville Housing Authority. “It was during the Depression, when people were very poor and there was an acute housing shortage,” says Cecil Herrell, former director of development for MDHA. “These housing projects were intended to provide temporary shelter until the country got back on its feet. They were built as large complexes because that was the cheapest way to do it.” After World War II, returning GIs lived temporarily in housing projects, waiting for the postwar economy to gear up.
It was the Urban Renewal movement that brought about the shift from temporary housing to more permanent structures. “The people who were displaced by the slum clearance of Capitol Hill in 1949,” Herrell says, “were relocated to housing projects.” Many of them stayed there.
Herrell came to Nashville and to MDHA in 1981, at the beginning of the Reagan years. He recalls that MDHA at that time received allocations to build more public housing, but neighborhood protests blocked them. “There was a sense that large complexes created social problems, had a bad impact on neighborhoods, that it was better to spread new housing around in smaller increments,” he says. MDHA has not built a so-called “project” in 15 years.
During his time at MDHA, Herrell pioneered so-called “scattered site” rental housing. “Most other cities had given up on building public housing because it had created such problems,” Herrell says, “and so they didn’t apply for the funds. Because it was not large amounts of money for a large number of units, most cities thought it was too much trouble for too little reward.”
Meanwhile, throughout the ’80s, MDHA kept plugging away, applying for small grants that built stripped-down duplexes on vacant lots. The first scattered-site units were not exactly welcomed by their neighbors. “Because of the prejudice against public housing,” Herrell remembers, “we had to do a couple as pilot projects, to show that they actually increased property values.” Ironically, while the scattered-site units upgraded their neighborhoods, some of the new tenants became the targets for crime. “Because they were the newest looking houses, they invited break-ins,” Herrell says. “Burglars thought that, if they looked good on the outside, there must be something worth stealing on the inside.”
It was the 1990s before HUD began to encourage the construction of housing units with amenities, such as front porches, that would allow the new housing to blend in with the surrounding neighborhood.This year scattered-site housing designed by the local firm of Everton Oglesby Askew Architects and built by MDHA was a finalist in a design-award program sponsored by the Urban Land Institute.
Meanwhile, during the Reagan years, Section 8 housing was promoted in most other cities as a form of privatization. Its goals were admirable: It was intended to get people out of the projects and into neighborhoods. But the Section 8 program has had a down side. “Section 8 doesn’t increase the supply of affordable housing, it just allows more people to afford what already exists,” explains Herrell, “so it has had the effect of driving up the price of housing.”
It was also in the ’90s that HUD began to allow public housing to be built in some areas with historic zoning. In Tennessee MDHA led the way in the effort to build affordable housing in historic districts, Herrell says. While many neighborhood organizations were skeptical about the idea, Herrell gives credit to Metro Historical Commission executive director Ann Reynolds, who “encouraged the neighborhoods to try it and worked with [MDHA] to make sure that the buildings looked right.”
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, home ownership began to appear as an item on the HUD agenda. Again MDHA was a pioneer. Nashville was one of 19 cities nationwide that sold public-housing units, such as those in the Edgefield Annex and selected scattered sites, to qualified low-income buyers. (To qualify for a public-housing rental, a household may earn no more than 50 percent of the median income. But home-ownership programs allow earnings of up to 80 percent of median. The average is 60 percent.)
Home-ownership programs have also attracted the support of many of the Nashville nonprofits that seek to make a difference in the city’s affordable housing crunch. According to Kathryn Hearne, the chair of Nashville’s Low Income Housing Forum, local nonprofits have brought together $5 million a year, from a complex mixture of public and private sources, to create approximately 125 new housing units annually.
A home of one’s own
Era Hogan is the “poster child” of MDHA’s lease-purchase program. When she was 19, she moved into the projects. When the neighborhood’s drug dealers drove her from public housing, she went on Section 8. Just this month, on Nov. 15, she closed on a brand-new gray-and-white frame house in West Nashville. She lives there with her son, Joshua.
The three-bedroom, two-bath home was built through MDHA’s lease-purchase program, which allows buyers who make less than 80 percent of Nashville’s median income—less than $34,400 a year—to put lease payments into an escrow account until they have enough for their down payments and closing costs.
MDHA staffer Ellen White provides two years of counseling to buyers who qualify. She helps applicants manage credit problems and makes sure that the monthly payments will be no more than 41 percent of the household’s monthly income. Steve Neighbors supervises construction of the houses for MDHA—he has built about 40 since the program began in 1993.
The rest is up to folks like Era.
“When Steve called me up and asked me, ‘How’d you like to buy a home?’ I burst out laughing,” Era remembers. “I thought he was joking. I never dreamed I’d be able to buy a house.” Without the MDHA program, she probably couldn’t.
The average cost of a lease-purchase home is about $65,000, Neighbors says. And he estimates that that price is approximately $10,000 less than what a buyer would find on the open market, since MDHA sells at cost and does not make a profit. “MDHA does not subsidize the actual purchase,” Neighbors explains. “We just make the price more affordable.”
Becoming mortgageable
It is Tuesday evening at the Woodbine Community Center—time for a monthly meeting of the Homebuyers Club. Six women and one man gather at a table in the gym to discuss car payments and credit reports, spending plans, and the seasonal expenses of Christmas. Cathie Dodd, the director of the center, runs the meeting. Marc Ware, representing NationsBank, is on hand to provide information on the details of home ownership.
The Club members are cheerful. Pat Knight will close on her new home in December. She says her son Joshua has already packed his bedding and is all set to move in. Connie Kinnard announces that she has sold the car she couldn’t afford and has traded down for one that fits her budget.
The Club’s goal is to make its members “mortgage ready,” explains Dodd. “They’re all employed, full-time, but many have had credit problems and don’t currently qualify for a home loan,” she says. Dodd provides a place for them to get together, brings in a banker to serve as a “reality check,” and offers advice on basic financial planning. There is also a lot of encouragement. “We don’t give them any subsidies,” she says, “we just make them ready for the realities of the open market. We try to give them a green light to buy a house.”
A little help from our friends
Subsidy is the key element in all these affordable-housing success stories. The term “subsidized housing” conjures up visions of high-rise ghettos, blanketed with graffiti and packed with people strung out on crack. In fact, anyone who takes a federal income tax deduction for mortgage interest or property tax is living in housing subsidized by the federal government.
In Davidson County in 1995 approximately 47,000 households claimed tax deductions for property tax and/or mortgage interest. Those deductions amounted to a $396,954,941 federal housing subsidy, according to Dan Boone, public information officer with the local I.R.S. office. That figure is six times what the feds spent on affordable housing locally. The total federal outlay for affordable housing in Metro Nashville in 1995 was approximately $65 million, with private nonprofits contributing another $5 million.
This overall figure of $396 million includes deductions taken by low and moderate income families as well as by the affluent. Still, because higher-priced houses have heftier mortgages and property-tax tabs, middle and upper class households stand to benefit more at tax time. Two-thirds of the more than $3 billion that the feds forgive in mortgage interest and property tax deductions in Tennessee goes to households making more than $50,000 a year. The next time the words “subsidized housing” come to mind, think of Jackson Boulevard and Whitland Avenue as well as the projects.
Now more than ever
In spite of all the programs, both public and private, designed to ease the affordable housing crunch, more and more Nashvillians with low to moderate incomes are feeling the housing squeeze. And Kathryn Hearne predicts that the situation is going to get worse.
“There is just no way in the current market to make housing for low and moderate income families pay,” Hearne says. “The private nonprofits, with help from the private for-profit sector, can pick up the pace. But what it costs to build a house is what it costs to build a house.”
Hearne points out that, when nonprofits receive money for affordable-housing initiatives, wildly inflated expectations are often attached. “When the nonprofits don’t meet those expectations, they’re perceived as not being as efficient as for-profit companies, just because they are nonprofit. It’s a vicious circle,” Hearne says.
As social experiments, housing projects have obviously failed. These days, major cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia are actually tearing their housing projects down. “But if you move 25 people out of a project, and you build five units, what happens to the other 20?” Hearne asks. It is far more expensive to build scattered-site housing, she notes, than a large complex.
Stricter enforcement of codes and the gentrification of inner-city neighborhoods are progressive gestures that raise the quality of life for all neighborhood residents. They create a stable mix of neighbors where once there was a highly unstable ghetto culture. But this progress also comes with a literal price: It raises the cost of the housing.
MDHA Board chairman Jane Davis says she is optimistic about affordable housing in Nashville. But she admits that she is “by nature an optimist. I think you can be totally selfish and invest in affordable housing, because it doesn’t just stabilize families, it’s an investment in the business of Nashville. Good cities build buildings. Great cities have people living in them.”
Making the down payment
In November Mayor Phil Bredesen presented Wanda Alexander with a welcome mat for the front door of her modest house on Boscobel Street. Alexander, the first recipient of the down-payment assistance program funded by the newly created Nashville Housing Fund (NHF), was wiping tears from her eyes.
The NHF was chartered this year as a nonprofit affiliate of MDHA. Investors include the HCA Foundation, as well as 10 of the area’s largest banks. So many civic leaders gathered for the dedication in the front yard of Alexander’s house that one local wag called the spectacle “suits on the lawn.”
“Many renters discover that home mortgage payments are lower than monthly rent,” says Loretta Owens, director of NHF and a staffer at MDHA, “but they need help coming up with the essential down payment.” The NHF has joined other nonprofits in the task of easing the burden of start-up costs for renters with just enough income to make the monthly payments. “Five years ago, down-payment assistance wasn’t available,” Owens says, “and there’s still much more demand than supply.”
No survey data is available to indicate how many World War II generation parents have lent or given down payments to their boomer babies. It is no secret that, when housing prices escalated in the late ’70s and ’80s, many yuppies readily accepted a parental nudge into upward mobility. For would-be homebuyers without those parental resources, down-payment assistance provided by a variety of Nashville sources can give the same sort of push.
Robert and Sherry Hebert were paying $565 a month to rent an apartment in the massive River Retreat complex. Now they are making a monthly payment of $569 for a yellow frame cottage on a quiet street where the only noise is the rumble of an occasional train going by. They received an $800 grant from MDHA—the maximum grant is $3,500. Sherry says that without that assistance, “we’d never have been able to own.”
Three weeks ago the Heberts got the keys to their cottage. Two days later all 140 of Sherry’s refrigerator magnets were on display in the kitchen, and they knew they were home.
Three weeks ago the Heberts got the keys to their cottage. Two days later all 140 of Sherry’s refrigerator magnets were on display in the kitchen, and they knew they were home.
