POVERTY AWARENESS

Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Crown Publishers, 2016) ("The idea of a 'rent certificate program' was first proposed in the 1930s, not by some Washington bureaucrat or tenants' union representative but by the National Association of Real Estate Boards. That group would later change its name to the National Association of Realtors and become the largest trade association for real estate agents, with more than a million members. A rent certificate program would be superior to public housing they argued. Landlords and Realtors saw government-built and -managed buildings offered at cut-rate rents as a direct threat to their legitimacy and bottom line. At first, federal policymakers disagreed and at midcentury decided to fund the construction of massive public housing complexes. But the real estate interests kept lobbying for vouchers and were joined by numerous other groups of various political persuasions, including civil rights activists who thought vouchers would advance racial integration. Eventually, after America's public housing experiment was defunded and declared a failure (in that order), they would have their day. As housing projects were demolished, the voucher program grew into the nation's largest housing subsidy program for low-income families. In policy circles, vouchers were known as a 'public-private partnership.' In real estate circles, they were known as 'a win'." Id at 149. "Courts have shown little interest in addressing the fact that the majority of tenants facing eviction never show up. If anything, they have come to depend on this because each day brings a pile of eviction cases, and the goal of every person working in housing court, no matter where their sympathies lie, is just to get through the pile because the next day another pile will be there waiting. The principle of due process has been replaced by mere process: pushing cases through. Tenant lawyers would change that. This would cost money, not only in attorney salaries, but also in the hiring of more commissioners, judges, and clerks to handle the business of justice. Every housing court would need to be adequately funded so that it could function like a court, instead of an eviction assembly line: stamp. stamp, stamp." Id. at 304. This is just one of the sorts of things one should think about when people say they want "smaller government;" that is, who would smaller government serve?, and who would be served by the appropriate "large(s) government"?).