The Times editorial about its five-part series on Dasani, a poor child who lived for three years with her two parents and seven siblings in one room of a fetid Brooklyn homeless shelter, offers a narrow view of possible solutions: "rental subsidies." The editorial concludes, "That's a good start, but more is needed, including from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who can aid that effort by ponying up money for the subsidy program as well as for services that save poor people from eviction."
The editorial makes it sound as though Mr. Cuomo will be "ponying up money" out of his own pocket, rather than by taxing New Yorkers who already live in one of the highest-tax states in the nation (first or third, depending on how you count). Some of those New Yorkers have made different choices than Dasani's parents. They may have chosen to have fewer children than eight, or to avoid using illegal drugs, or to move out of New York City to areas where housing costs are lower, such as upstate. The editorial doesn't make the case for the justice of taxing a hardworking, law-abiding New York family of four who moves out of the city to afford an unsubsidized rent so that Dasani's non-working, drug-addicted parents can remain in New York City in an apartment that can accommodate their family of eight.
What's more, the editorial is missing a sense of the economy of the New York housing market. Wouldn't more, and more generous rental subsidies just lead landlords to raise rents by the amount of the subsidy, the way colleges do with Pell Grants? Or wouldn't the introduction of additional rental subsidies deny apartments to the New Yorkers who otherwise would have rented the apartments on a market basis but will now be displaced or outbid by the subsidy recipients? It's not, after all, as if there are tens of thousands of rental apartments sitting vacant in New York just waiting for a family to come along who can afford the rent. Family-sized apartments in New York are a relatively scarce commodity.
Absent from the Times editorial is any sort of supply-side sense that an improvement in the situation requires more apartments, not just more rent money, some of it in the form of subsidies supplied by taxpayers, chasing the existing pool of apartments. Asking "how do you get more apartments" would involve looking at things like zoning regulations that render areas of New York City far less dense than they could be or reserve them for industry rather than housing, landmarked historic districts that block new construction, environmental regulations, politicized land-use approval processes, the role of unions in driving up construction costs, a city building department with regulations so Byzantine that you basically have to hire an "expediter" to deal with it, and so forth.
Finally, interpreting the whole situation as one about housing or homelessness, one that can be solved with a rent subsidy or services that prevent eviction, also seems to avoid the much more complex issues that made Dasani's story so heart-wrenching and compelling. How do you break cycles of drug addiction and violence and crime and poverty that run through multiple generations of a family? One child that Dasani is seen fighting with in the series apparently lives in a housing project. She's not homeless like Dasani, but she doesn't seem headed for much more happiness in life, which seems to undercut the Times' assumption that the problems described in the series are susceptible to being solved solely by an increase in rent subsidies.