The Squeeze

I've dived back into The Power Broker again, and I finally reached the section about the devastation wrought by Robert Moses' creation of the Cross Bronx Expressway in the 1950s.

Robert Caro describes one mile of a vibrant Jewish neighborhood just north of Crotona Park, where block after block of six-story apartment buildings housed tens of thousands of people, families who had earlier lived in tenements on the Lower East Side.

Their apartments in the East Tremont neighborhood had great transportation access to jobs and nearby shopping for everything they needed. The park was just a few blocks away, too. And the apartments themselves were spacious and airy, and most of all affordable.

The whole chapter is heart-breaking and enraging, of course, as the neighborhood women try to get the highway rerouted (which would have saved millions of dollars and been more direct too!), but the fact I never knew in all of it, the thing that stuck out to me the most, was the definition of housing affordability Caro presents:

Weekly take-home pay in the garment industry — the pay on which most of these people lived — averaged well under a hundred dollars. And while the generally accepted rule of thumb held that a family could afford to pay a monthly rent equal to about a week's income, this was not a rule accepted by the families of East Tremont, who had their own rule of thumb... (page 855).

So the families were used to paying less than a quarter of their income in rent because they were saving for their kids' college or medical expenses, Caro says.

But reread that quote: the rule of thumb for affordability was a quarter of income to housing.

These days, the rule of thumb is one-third of income is considered affordable housing.

When did that change? How did the government decide people's ability to afford housing magically become more robust at some point, or their need for things other than housing decrease? Housing got more expensive over time, yes, that was a reality — but did our need for other aspects of life become less?

Or was it just the squeeze of Reagan's America once again?

That seems the most likely answer.