CRISIS MANAGEMENT
If you could levitate, dronelike, above the dilapidated, 1940s-era public-housing projects in California’s Sunnydale neighborhood, you would be able to make out San Francisco’s gleaming silver skyline, just seven miles away. Here, iron-barred windows are framed by exposed electrical wires and water-stained exteriors. There, the median price of a midtier home exceeds $1.5 million; a one-bedroom apartment rents for an average of $3,330 a month.
On a crisp October morning, U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Marcia Fudge, an austere figure dressed head to toe in black, stood in the gulf between these disparate realities and connected them. She was in Sunnydale to champion the city’s plan to erect 1,770 new mixed-income residential units to replace 775 old ones, but her message was about the larger challenge facing America. The housing problems that plague this low-income neighborhood, she said, are directly related to those facing San Francisco’s more debonair downtown.
“I need every single person in this nation to understand that homelessness is a crisis,” she told the small crowd, but “housing prices are a crisis,” too.
In the year since President Joe Biden appointed Fudge HUD Secretary, those twin crises have grown worse. The median price for a house in the U.S. has climbed nearly 20%, while the mean price of a rental unit has jumped roughly 14%, according to a Zillow index. Nearly half of American workers no longer earn enough to rent a one-bedroom apartment in the city where they live. Each of these spikes has cascaded downward, as those who can’t afford to buy drive up rental costs and those who can’t afford to rent are out of luck: more than half a million Americans, including more than 100,000 children, were homeless in 2020—the fourth consecutive year that number increased.
As the chief of U.S. housing policy, it is, at least in theory, Fudge’s job to fix
