New York Times innumeracy and investigative incuriosity still going strong

From I Live in My Car by Rukmini Callimachi.  The subheading is Dozens of parking lots have opened across the country for working people who can afford a car but not rent.

I had thought to skip this but it keeps nagging at me.  Then I see this.

I'm in a ULI webinar on how we turnaround downtown San Francisco and I'm kind of in shock that people really think things like spending a fortune on streetscape projects are somehow going to turn around the city's fortunes when there are 30 mil SF of vacant office space

— Mark Hogan (@markasaurus) October 18, 2023

My suspicion is that there likely is a lot on which Mr. Hogan and I might disagree, but he is absolutely correct here.  These sorts of affairs tend to be pretending to solve some complex issue but in reality are mere opportunities to push a preferred agenda of policies with little prospect for problem alleviation.  Or, as Hogan says:

I hate to be negative about people working on complicated urban problems but we should all be saying "what is the fastest way we can results for the least amount of money" and then scaling up to more expensive and complicated improvements from there, not the reverse

Which was exactly my feeling when I read Callimachi's article.  It is of a type usually pushed in the Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR and PBS.  They pick some nominal victim, almost always a woman, spend a lot of emotive writing on the tragedy of their circumstances and conditions, omit much that is necessary to understand the context, end up accidentally revealing information which obviates the original reason for writing the article, and then resort to writing an advocacy piece on some social policy which appeals to the naiveté of the reporter.

In this instance, a woman is living with her daughter and dog out of her car but is able to do so in the parking lot of a Methodist church.

Chrystal Audet tried to get comfortable in what she called her “bedroom” — the back seat of her eight-year-old Ford Fusion. To stretch her legs, she had to leave a passenger door ajar, but September nights are raw in the Pacific Northwest, with sheets of rain that cut to the bone.

From her own “bedroom” in the front seat, her 26-year-old daughter Cierra Audet asked her to close it.

“We have to get out of this,” Ms. Audet said to herself as she pulled a comforter against the cold and struggled to fall asleep in a parking lot in Kirkland, Wash.

The idea is that churches and the like can make available spaces for those living in cars to be safer and have better access to amenities while they are homeless in cars.  

Well . . . perhaps, but that sure feels like a bandaid.  We don't want to make it easier to be in distress.  We want to solve the problems which cause someone to be in distress, homeless and living out of their car.

And sure enough, it is more complicated than the reporter wants to let on.

Ms. Audet, 49, earns over $72,000 a year as a social worker for the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services. But a combination of bad luck, bad debt and a bad credit score priced her out of her apartment in Bellevue, another suburb of Seattle, one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. With an eviction looming, she put her furniture in storage this spring and began parking the sedan in a U-shaped parking lot outside a church in Kirkland.

Just a hair below the median household income nationwide.  Callimachi has no light to shed on the 26-year old daughter whom one would have anticipated working, thereby rising the household income distinctly above the national median.  

Something is going on in this story.  A full-time employee of the state earning a good income, in a state with many support programs.  As a full-time state employee, she presumably has very good health insurance coverage.  

There doesn't seem to be an income problem here.  Must be on the expenditure side of the ledger.  What are the problems here?

Around the country, real estate is being set aside for people like Ms. Audet in the form of parking lots. Dozens of such lots have opened in the last five years, with new ones being announced every few months, including as far east as Pennsylvania and North Carolina. They are sprinkled across the Midwest in Green Bay, Wis., and Duluth, Minn. And they dot the spine of the Pacific Northwest, providing a safe harbor for a growing cohort of working Americans who are wedged in the unforgiving middle. They earn too little to afford rent but too much to receive government assistance and have turned their cars into a form of affordable housing.

That's the story Callimachi wants to tell.  Real estate is being set aside for people living out of their cars, usually in the form of parking lots.  How much this is an actual trend is unclear.  "Dozens" in five years scarcely counts as a rigorous quantification.  

But there is a different story at the very end of that paragraph.

They earn too little to afford rent but too much to receive government assistance and have turned their cars into a form of affordable housing.

That is indeed a richly researched tax, income, and economic issue.  But none of those decades of research or elucidation of the various tactical and strategic trade-offs are raised in the article.  To say nothing of moral hazard as a policy risk.

Callimachi indicates that Audet has had bad credit history since 2001.

Her free fall into unsustainable debt began last December when her car made a horrible, sputtering sound, and died. With poor credit, the only loan she could find came at a punishing cost: For the 2015 Ford Fusion with over 100,000 miles, she is being charged interest of 27.99 percent, equaling a payment of $398 per month, one-tenth of her take-home pay.

We can all sympathize with car troubles and how wretchedly expensive they can be.  Audet is spending 10% of income on her car loan.  How does that compare to the national average?  That is 10-15%.  So car payments aren't the issue it seems.

Things then get more unclear.

Medical bills in the thousands arrived for her Crohn’s disease. She missed two rent payments. And then the landlord raised her rent $248 a month.

“It was a case of one bill too many,” Ms. Audet said.

Down the spiral that led her to homelessness were a series of forks — choices between bad and very bad that she made, many in moments of desperation. She spent a week at a hotel. Expedia offered to break up her payments, which she is now paying off at the rate of $138 a month. To avoid her unpaid rent going to collections, she signed an installment plan, agreeing to pay $495 per month.

Again, full time government employee!  Health insurance would likely be covering much of her chronic illness.  But maybe there is something else going on that's just not shared.  

Then a series of bad financial decisions.  Again - pity for Ms. Audet, but . . . 

The point is not to blame Audet for her circumstances.  It is clear that she is at least in part responsible, as are we all for our various misadventures.

The issue is not particularly about how she might have averted this calamity.  If we knew more of the details there might in fact be some useful program to help people better manage their finances.

But looking at the map of Kirkland, that has to be one massively expensive real estate - surrounded by Seattle, Bellevue, and Redmond.

From a public policy perspective, there seem only two primary strategies worth pursuing.  Warehousing people in church parking lots in their cars is not the answer.  Higher personal productivity (and therefore income) is one part of the equation and lower cost of living is the other (food, energy, housing, education, etc.)  

I can't imagine that there are any significant public policy opportunities which would be acceptable to anyone to subsidize a middle income person to live in a high cost neighborhood.  Possibly these tony neighborhoods are open to a massive increase in multi-unit housing, but I doubt it and why should they sacrifice land values without compensation?

It seems like the only viable policy is finding a way for Audet to live in an affordable neighborhood and commute to her work in Kirkland (or wherever she actually works).  

But Callimachi wants to write about the urban fad of parking lots for car dwellers.  Not a large problem and hardly even clear that it is a real problem much less a real, replicable and value-adding solution.  

In fact, virtually everything in Kirkland is more expensive.  From Payscale.

Kirkland's housing expenses are 121% higher than the national average and the utility prices are 6% higher than the national average. Transportation expenses like bus fares and gas prices are 23% higher than the national average. Kirkland has grocery prices that are 25% higher than the national average.

Clearly her revenue side of the equation seems fine and the problem is the cost side of things.  And why is Audet in Kirkland?  The Washington State Department of Social and Health Services website does not show any of their offices in that area at all.  

So once again, I am left feeling like the New York Times is trying to make something out of nothing, leaving too much left unstated, indulging in urban planning fads, and never daring or being willing to tackle the real problems.  How do you enable someone to be more productive, how do you help them to be more effective decision makers, how do you reduce the cost of living.  

Yes, real estate in Kirkland seems especially egregious but everything is expensive there.  The normal market response is to leave expensive areas and move to cheaper places to live.  Why is that not an option here?  We don't know and given the economic innumeracy of New York Times reporters we are unlikely to know.  It is far cheaper to write emotion laden sob stories than to do the investigative journalism that might provide some answers and pointers.