Mayor Wheeler announced a much-anticipated proposal to ban homeless camping in Portland at a Friday press conference. This idea, which has been hinted at in various forms for more than a year, follows a growing drumbeat of vitriol from upset Portland property owners, businesses, and other members of the public about the impact that visible homeless camping has on the community—and its reputation. “Simply put, we can no longer tolerate the intolerable,” said City Commissioner Dan Ryan, who co-sponsored the proposal outlined by Wheeler on Friday. “It's time to take some risks to get our city out of this ditch.” Yet, without the needed boost of significant funding, clear support from other government agencies, and interested contractors, the proposal appears little more than a plan to create an eventual plan.

The Times spoke with four landlords and four tenants across Los Angeles County to understand how they’re coping with the fallout from the coronavirus.

The landlord-renter relationship is inherently unjust and part of our completely broken housing situation, but—judgments aside—this is what they’re dealing with. Property owners juggle a widespread struggle to pay rent with their own mortgage responsibilities.

Deciding whether to rent or buy is a big decision that requires serious “Where am I now?” and “Where am I going?” sorts of questions. It might be best to keep renting if you want to maintain maximum flexibility for personal or professional reasons, or if jumping into more debt right now takes you out of your comfort zone. Maybe you’re just not ready to face the responsibilities of homeownership: repairs, upgrades, maintenance, yard work and all the rest. Even thinking about the difference between cleaning an 800-square-foot apartment and a 2,400-square-foot house can make you want to take a seat and a deep breath. Your local housing market could be working against you, as well. If you live in a hot market with eager house hunters chasing too few properties, it might be best to bide your time until a better buying opportunity presents itself.

Should you rent or buy a home? Use our simple rent vs buy calculator to find out which option is best for you.

Legalizing apartments is not a panacea. But it is a precursor to other solutions. If there are no apartments, there are no homeless shelters, no student housing, no senior housing, and no Section 8. That’s why California’s zoning override bill, the More HOMES Act, was endorsed by Habitat for Humanity and the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, a coalition of 750 affordable-housing groups. More apartments would allow people to live closer to jobs, schools, and amenities, making transit more viable and reducing commute distances, which is good for the environment. Shorter, more-reliable commutes are also associated with greater economic mobility. Most importantly, by upzoning entire cities and states at a time, these efforts could help make sure that it isn’t only low-income neighborhoods of color—the places vulnerable to gentrification and displacement—that become hot spots for development in cities that need more housing. Whiter, richer neighborhoods that have aggressively opposed any attempts to build more housing will finally have to bear their share of the supply. […] In other words, that the burden of development is often borne by centrally located, formerly redlined communities of color is a product of the current system, in which social capital and political connections determine who gets to keep their neighborhood the same. Black, brown, and poor neighborhoods have emerged as the weakest links against enormous pent-up demand for housing, and planners (“a caretaker profession—reactive rather than proactive,” as the planner Thomas Campanella caustically put it) go with the flow. “It’s almost certainly true that more development happens in lower-income or minority communities because you can’t build any new housing—and certainly not apartments—in wealthy, white communities,” says Jenny Schuetz, a housing expert at the Brookings Institute. “Whether the rezoning changes that depends on how much opposition is straightforward zoning, and how much is the process of development.” In other words, city- and statewide rezoning might reverse the status quo, if governments succeed in stripping wealthy white neighborhoods of their powerful place in the local control system. But governments need to make sure the new rules don’t replicate the power imbalance that permeates development permitting now.

The trailer has always held a special place in the American imagination. Once a symbol of freedom and mobility, it became — through waves of economic hardship and discrimination over the course of the 20th century — a testament to the limitations of the so-called land of opportunity. Stated another way, trailers became the province of the have-nots, and along the way, the pernicious myth of “trailer park trash” became core to a set of stereotypes about lower-class white people. [...] With almost no cultural images of dignified life on the inside of a trailer, or in the often close-knit neighborhoods that trailer parks become, Americans cling instead to the simple, outmoded ideas about trailers and their inhabitants that they’ve held for nearly a century.

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