The Fond Du Lac Apartment Mystery
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Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. Before we start this week, a little news. Next Friday, October 13th, at 12 p.m. Eastern Time, is the year's first Search Engine board meeting. What this means is, if you're a paid subscriber to the podcast, you'll get an email that morning with a Zoom link. We, meaning me and all of you guys, will do a Zoom meeting for an hour. I'll take moderated questions and provide unmoderated answers.

We did this once before back in the Crypto Island days. It was very fun, somewhat chaotic. If you're not yet a member and want to sign up, pjvote.com. Next Friday, October 13th, noon, Eastern Time, the first Surgeon and Board meeting. Don't miss it. Okay, the show. So each week we try to answer a question about the world. No question too big, no question too small.

This week, our question is a confusing mystery about the price of an apartment in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. And this week, we have a bonus, a story about a person on the internet with a very, very unusual job. All that after these ads. Search Engine is brought to you by Ford. As a Ford owner, there are lots of choices of where to get your vehicle serviced. You can choose to go to their place, the local dealership.

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Contact your participating dealer or visit FordService.com for important details and limitations. Okay, so first of all, how do you want me to refer to you? What form of your name is the right form of your name? Corey, Corianne, or Cora. Any of them are fine. Corey, Corianne, or Cora. Well, what do you prefer? Corianne would be good.

Okay, great. Hi. Hi. So you sent a question which I was like, this is a really specific question. And I liked the specificity of your question. Do you mind just reading it? I have the email. Yeah, let me pull it up. Okay, so my question says, I am an adult disabled person with no income, currently battling with social security disability income to get benefits.

I was recently awarded a Section 8 grant to help me pay for my rent, but the problem is I can't use it. In case you're not familiar with Section 8, it's a federal program where the government provides vouchers to low-income households. It helps people with low incomes or no incomes pay for their housing. Much of the government and many academics have stopped calling this program Section 8, in part because there's stigma attached to that phrase. Instead, they'll say the Housing Choice Voucher Program,

Corianne calls it Section 8. I'm not going to tell her not to because that would be the behavior of a completely insane person. Also, I get why she calls it Section 8. It's shorter. Anyway, Corianne applied for a housing voucher, and a year and a half later, she was approved. And that's when she got her allotment, the amount of money she qualified for. The allotment in my county in Wisconsin for one adult with no income is $650. That must include all utilities and any special accommodations.

There are no apartments within those barriers in my town, or for that matter, anywhere in the state. There is some sort of waiting list, but almost all the places are full. What Corianne is saying is that she's been approved for a housing voucher, but the amount of money they've given her is less than the cheapest available apartment she can find.

This Catch-22 is a state of affairs which leaves Corianne with some questions. What is the point in offering a service that has a very long wait list if it's not a usable option? And what can be done to change this? So those are my questions. Those are good questions. They're great questions, I thought. Can I ask you just about like,

The circumstances of your life in which you are asking these questions, like what is going on? Absolutely. I'm pretty open book with everything. So you don't get to be a queer, bald individual without answering a lot of questions. So, okay. So what, I guess I want to ask about your employment and about your disability. Like what, what happened where you're in the position that you're in? So I'm originally from central Illinois. I moved to Wisconsin in,

About two and a half years ago, I moved with my now ex-wife and she was the main provider for the house. And I was able to work from home a little bit, but with my disability, I was not doing the greatest job of working or showing up to work. I have epilepsy, meaning I have seizures.

So any sort of stress on my body or even sitting a large amount of time in front of the computer can definitely cause some issues for epilepsy and trigger seizures. Corianne says she was having two to three seizures a day just sitting at her desk.

So she stopped working. She says she applied for disability but was rejected. And so now, to get by, she's had to become an expert in navigating federal and state bureaucracy to figure out how to live without a real income. There's a very big homeless population in my town, so it's easy to find a lot of resources. It's just not always easy to...

use or access the resources. Who's your sort of guide through the red tape of it all? Like, how do you figure out what you're eligible for, what you're not, what the rules are? Like, is it a person? Is it like an online resource? Like, what do you do? It's me. It's you? It's me and Google. We're good friends. Yeah. I work for a group called Hope on the Block, who is specifically for actually homeless people that are on the streets.

And I actually help them with, they have a small pantry in front of the library that provides things like food, but also they actually provide me a lot of resources of, here's something that you might be able to access since you're not on the street. I'm lucky. I have a place to go, but a lot of people don't. And I know people that are in a worse situation than me. And that's part of why I work with Hope on the Block here, because I want to help people who are

When we spoke a few months ago, Corianne was living in a building that used to be a schoolhouse. As she said in her email, the rent was too expensive for her to keep paying without any assistance. And she couldn't use her voucher for $650. So she was in a situation where she could lose her home. Lucky for her, an old friend offered her a place to stay in his home in Michigan.

The day we were talking was the day before the move. And she was pretty excited about the move, which means the question she's asking, it's not like a rhetorical question meant to highlight the unfairness of her predicament. It's an actual real question. What is the point in offering a service that has a very long wait list if it's not a usable option? And what can be done to change this? So we had our little mystery about a useless coupon for an apartment in Wisconsin that

And I also just want to know, how common were stories like this? Was Corian's experience a glitch in the matrix? According to polls, about 70% of this country believes the government should help people who can't afford housing. And about 30% of the country doesn't. But no one in this country, I don't think, believes that we should tell people we're going to help them and then give them a voucher they can't use for an apartment they'll never find. So how did it end up this way? We found someone to pose these questions to. Someone who would actually be able to answer them.

So to start off, can you just sort of introduce yourself, like say who you are and what you do? Yeah. So my name is Ingrid Gould-Ellen, and I'm on the faculty at the Wagner School at NYU, which is our graduate school of public service. Dr. Ingrid Ellen teaches urban policy and planning at NYU, where she also directs the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. She spent a lot of her professional life researching housing programs in general and Section 8, or the Housing Choice Voucher Program in particular. That's why I wanted to talk to her.

Can you just tell me about housing vouchers? I literally don't know the story of housing vouchers. Yeah, it's kind of an interesting story. I mean, basically, Congress created the first version of the Housing Choice Voucher Program, the Section 8 Voucher Program, in 1974.

And at that point, the federal government had only subsidized place-based subsidized housing, mostly in the form of public housing, right? These are, the federal government would pay for the construction of developments that would house, you know, 100% lower income renters and charge affordable rents. And sort of the subsidy was tied to a particular building. Got it. So it was like the first theory of how to make housing affordable is we will just build housing.

what now people call projects, but like, we'll build housing specifically for people that can't afford housing. That's right. And we will put them there. Exactly. In the story of public housing in America, Section 8, or the Housing Choice Voucher Program, it shows up relatively late in the tale. We're going to start earlier than that because the program and the mistakes it would make are rooted in earlier problems it was trying to address.

So, in the early 1900s, the federal government started to worry about this new phenomenon happening in American cities. Ghettos, for the first time in America, had begun to form. That word has become kind of loaded. I feel a little uncomfortable saying it, but that's what they were called. And here's what people meant when they said it then. In cities like New York and Chicago, poor people, immigrants mostly, were packed together in substandard housing in small pockets in the cities.

In the ghettos, the places where people lived didn't look like the homes elsewhere in America. Families lived in buildings without electricity or running water. Some were in tenements where large families packed into tiny rooms and diseases like tuberculosis ran rampant. Crime rates were high. So in 1937, the government decides to get into the housing game. Franklin D. Roosevelt passes his New Deal, a series of progressive reforms. And as part of that, he establishes the U.S. Housing Authority.

The bold new idea was that the federal government would step in and build better, safer housing for people. These were supposed to be temporary homes for people who had slipped into poverty, just a place to stay while you got back on your feet. That's the idea, and so the experiment begins. All over the country, the government starts actively demolishing the housing it calls slums, sometimes dynamiting the homes that poor Americans were living in.

In the place of these buildings, the government erects its own public housing, often in the form of giant towering high-rise buildings. In the 1950s, two of the most famous of these towers go up, a pair of buildings in St. Louis called Pruitt-Igoe. These developments are run by the St. Louis Housing Authority. This is a far cry from the crowded collapsing tenements that many of these people have known. The video shows these people, well-dressed black and white families walking around brand new buildings.

At the outset, one building was for black families, another for white families, which the narrator doesn't mention. At the time, this would not have been that remarkable. Here in bright new buildings with spacious grounds, they can live. Live with indoor plumbing, electric lights, fresh plastered walls, and the rest of the... For a moment, it was a beautiful dream. Working people of different races, living with some security and dignity. It wouldn't work out. Here's Ingrid.

For a number of reasons, sort of criticisms of public housing and place-based subsidized housing more generally started to mount. And there were some progressives that charged that these developments, which often stood out as architecturally distinct, they were even often cut off from the regular street grid and built on super blocks, that they isolated the low-income renters and they stigmatized them. Yeah.

And there was also a concern that public housing also perpetuated both economic and racial segregation. In 1954, right as the Pruitt-Igoe Towers were going up, the Supreme Court banned segregation. Over the next decade, the white residents would abandon the towers. So part of the Pruitt-Igoe plan, that the towers would house black and white families, didn't survive.

A compounding problem was that the white people who were leaving, in fact, the people choosing to leave in general, tended to be the middle class residents, which was very bad for the people who remained there. Because while the government had agreed to pay to build the towers, it was not willing to pay a dollar to subsidize their upkeep. The plan had been that the tower's maintenance would depend entirely on money from people who lived there.

The elevators, when they worked, were only designed to stop on certain floors. The lights were constantly being broken. People found themselves navigating dark stairwells, which made them ideal targets for the muggers who would hang out there. A study found that muggers often came from outside the housing project. One winter, temperatures in Pruitt-Igoe dropped below freezing. The water lines broke. Raw sewage flowed into open hallways. How many families are without heat at this point?

A community leader standing outside in the snow tells the reporter how hard it's been to get any help. So far, the city has just sent three space heaters. Places like Pruitt-Igoe may have been built with good intentions to help people, but

But now they were warehouses where poor people, often poor Black people, lived in a state of unsafe squalor brought to them by their federal government. And it wasn't just in St. Louis. So Chicago was kind of the most notorious. So I think of the 33 public housing developments that were built in Chicago in the 1950s and early 1960s, 32 of them were in neighborhoods that were over 85% Black.

Oh, wow. And over time, then those public housing developments became virtually, you know, 100% occupied by Black residents. And so these developments perpetuated both racial and economic segregation. That was kind of concerned from the left. At the same time, from the right, I mean, conservatives never liked the public housing program. They felt this was kind of socialism. They were suspicious of government's ability to effectively own and manage housing.

About 20 years after Pruitt-Igoe was built in St. Louis, with all of its promise and fanfare, conditions in the towers had gotten so bad that the government decided to demolish it. Today is demolition day at Pruitt-Igoe. Here in the late afternoon, with weather moving in from the west and helicopters hovering above, door-wrecking company will explode the supporting columns from an 11-story vacant high-rise. Local news channels at the time broadcast the demolition live.

Footage showed these huge buildings collapsing in on themselves like sandcastles. Dust clouds pluming out in all directions. The notorious Fruitaigo project is now one-third down. The rest of it should be leveled by the end of this year. So, public housing did not seem to be working the way it was intended. While it was good for the dynamite industry, the problems it was actually designed to address still remained. All over the country, there were plenty of people who just could not afford housing.

So two years after Pruitt-Igoe is demolished, a new solution is introduced. Section 8. That's after the break. Search Engine is brought to you by Greenlight. A new school year is starting soon. My partner has two young kids, both of whom use Greenlight. And honestly, it's been kind of great. Greenlight is a debit card and money app for families where kids learn how to save, invest, and spend wisely. And parents can keep an eye on kids' new money habits.

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Welcome back to the show. It's the 1970s, and President Richard Nixon has noticed that public housing in America is not working out very well.

He tells Congress, quote, "Because so many poor people are so heavily concentrated in these projects, they often feel cut off from the mainstream of American life." A particularly dramatic example of the failure of federal housing projects is the Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis. He talks about the decision to demolish the towers and then says, quote, "Pruitt-Igoe is only one example of an all too common problem. All across America, the federal government has become the biggest slumlord in history."

This view, that buildings like Pruitt-Igoe really had come to resemble the substandard tenement buildings they were meant to replace, this was not just something Republicans thought. Americans across the political spectrum agreed. And so this new law gets passed with bipartisan support that contains the seed of a new idea for how to put more Americans in quality homes. Section 8. Section 8 represented America looking at our housing problem and just shaking the etch-a-sketch, deciding to try something really new.

Section 8 is passed as part of a law in 1974. It'll evolve over the next few decades. But the basic gist goes like this. What if we just helped families afford private apartments instead of trying to house them ourselves? Here again is Dr. Ingrid Allen.

So there was kind of some sort of bipartisan consensus to try a tenant-based subsidy rather than saying you have to live in this particular location. We're going to give you a voucher and now this subsidy sort of goes with you and you can choose to rent, you know, any home or a whole, well, not quite any home you want, which we'll talk about in a second, but you can rent homes on the private market.

Republicans liked the plan because it meant the government would build and manage less housing. Democrats liked it because they hoped that if people who needed housing were free to live in more places, they might have better lives. Maybe their kids would get access to a school district where the tax base included more wealthy people. Maybe they could just live by their extended middle-class family. Since then, the voucher program has been a small but steadily growing idea.

Under Bill Clinton, a lot of remaining Pruitt-Igoe-style towers were demolished. Some of those residents were vouchered out. Essentially, the government told them, we're sorry we failed you. Take this voucher and try to find something good on the private market. Today, vouchers are the most popular form of federal housing assistance. Over 2 million households use them.

Which sounds like a lot, but many of the people who do try to use the program encounter a series of gnarly hoops they have to jump through in order to get their voucher. We are going to look at those hoops through the eyes of Corianne, our listener. Corianne, who 50 years after Pruitt-Ico was cheerfully dynamited on live TV, finds herself in a different Midwestern state, Wisconsin. Corianne needs a home. She believes that she meets the requirements for these vouchers, which means that she begins with hoop number one,

The application. And what is like the I just I want to see like what is the website like what's the application portal? The website's changed a little bit, but I think I can throw it in. Is there a chat?

There we go. Fond du Lac housing authority. That's where I was living when you talked to me last. Is Fond du Lac, am I supposed to throw some more French on that or is that right? Fond du Lac. I'm not French nor Wisconsinite, so Fond du Lac. What do they say in Wisconsin? Fond du Lac. Okay, it sounded like Fond du Lac. I mean, in Fond du Lac, they call it Fondle Sack. They're very nice to their town.

Okay, but I'm just looking at the website. It doesn't look terribly official. It also, it's weird. They kind of make it seem simpler than it is. Oh, they absolutely make it seem simpler than it is. On the website, there's a graphic of a big finger pointing at the words apply now. I clicked the finger. It didn't work. I clicked apply now. It also didn't work. Then I realized, oh, that's just a clip art graphic, not a button. It's a bit confusing.

There was no one to help with the application because like you could call the offices and they'd be like, apply online. And if you had like any questions about it, there was nobody to reach. So I filled out all the information and then I just waited for a year and a half.

The tricky part of this for Corianne is that she's filling out complicated paperwork without help. If she gets something wrong, she could get disqualified, or worse, she could accidentally commit fraud, or be a victim of fraud. Fake Section 8 advice websites run by scammers are a real issue. So Hoop 1 is just filling out complicated paperwork alone. It's stressful. But Corianne passes it, which gets her to Hoop 2, The Wait. Again, here's Dr. Ingrid Allen.

The average waiting time around the country is the latest estimate suggests it's about two and a half years to get a housing voucher. In some markets like San Diego and Miami, it's like eight years. A lot of housing agencies only open their wait lists for people

certain weeks every couple years. And so you have to figure out exactly when it is that you can apply for a housing voucher. And then you have to wait. And you have to wait, and you have to wait, and you have to wait some more. So only one in four income-eligible households in the U.S. receive federal rental assistance. And so...

Why? Well, I mean, I'd say the answer is political. Many of the Democratic candidates in 2020 proposed making the voucher program an entitlement and expanding it considerably. But that's something that just that hasn't happened politically. Congress doesn't appropriate enough money to serve every eligible household. And so what does that mean? It means that they're very lengthy wait lists for

around the country. Basically, demand exceeds the supply of voucher in almost every market. The length of time Corian waited, a year and a half, multiple experts we spoke to said this is actually remarkably fast for this system. When systems function like this, one idea that describes what's going on here is something called administrative burden. The idea is basically some systems will make it hard to get the care that they're offering by hiding it behind a lot of red tape.

We all encounter this some of the time. As far as I know, there's not really a level of privilege that insulates a human being in 2023 from eventually encountering some hell bureaucracy somewhere, some place that protects itself with a moat of endless telephone menus. We have all screamed agent with increasingly hoarse voices into the void.

But remember, Corian and everyone else trying to cross this particular moat, the thing they need is not a corrected flight or some other inconvenience. The thing they need is housing. These are people who are in a state of emergency who are being met with a waiting list. And while they wait, they're doing things like putting exorbitant amounts of their very limited income towards rent or couch surfing or living in homeless shelters or living on the street.

To have a chance at getting a voucher, they have to remain not only eligible, but also findable by the bureaucracy that might say yes, while surviving these conditions for months, sometimes for years. Well, and the way they contact you is via mail. Mail? Yeah. So if you're actually homeless, good luck with that. Hopefully your shelter has been taking your mail, and hopefully you haven't switched shelters.

I wasn't homeless at that point. So I was able to get the thing via mail when they were like, hey, are you still interested? A year and a half later. And I was like, yeah. Well, I feel like the other problem with the will reach you by mail and mail only policy is even for people who aren't homeless, I imagine they might just not have access

The ability to guarantee that they will be at the address that they're at for the extent of your time. They just would have housing instability. I've moved three times in the past five months, different states. So like they had my phone number, but they never tried to call me via phone. Was there any communication from the housing authority while you were waiting? No. It's very easy to blame the bureaucrats here. And it's convenient. It lets us forget that they are following the priorities that most of us have voted for.

Their job is to allocate resources to people from a system that's underfunded, which means, in their defense, they're in a very tricky moral position. Here's Ingrid. What's tricky is, I think, you know, a lot of these housing agencies are legitimately trying to get these scarce subsidies into the hands of the people who need them the most. But that's a very difficult thing to do. It's very difficult to determine. So a lot of housing authorities, I think they feel comfortable with this kind of the first-come, first-served approach, but...

The problem with that is that length on the waiting list isn't necessarily the best measure of need at that moment. Because another thing that happens is if it takes eight years for someone to get to the top of the waiting list, you can imagine housing agencies have a hard time finding those people.

who signed up for the waiting list eight years ago. And so they end up having to go through to search and going through a lot of names before they can actually find somebody who is still around and still eligible and interested. But even if the government does successfully find you after all this waiting and you're still eligible and interested, you are not at the end. If you get your voucher, congratulations, you have reached probably the toughest hoop of all. And this one has a time limit.

Hoop 3, finding an eligible apartment. Here's Ingrid. So you win the lottery, and this is where you kind of think it's the Hollywood ending, but it turns out that it's not easy to find a voucher-eligible unit. So what is a voucher-eligible unit? A voucher-eligible unit is one that rents below the voucher rent ceiling. You can't, you know...

rent a home and I don't know, the Trump Tower. There's going to be a cap on how large a subsidy the housing authority will pay. So you have to find a unit that rents below the voucher rent ceiling, an available unit. That unit has to pass required housing inspections. The local housing authority has to come out and inspect that unit to make sure that it is a decent quality unit. And

It has to be owned by a landlord who is willing to rent to somebody who is using a housing voucher to pay for part of their rent. And why would a landlord not want to participate in that? So I think there's sort of, you know, there's qualitative research suggesting there are kind of three different ways

I mean, one is that they may have social biases about voucher recipients, right? Number one. Number two is that they may feel like, you know, they can get a higher rent from somebody else, right? And they also, you know, unfortunately, a lot of landlords say that it's just very difficult to deal with local housing agencies. You know, the required inspections actually often force landlords to keep their units off the market, right?

for several months while waiting for the housing authority to come out, the inspectors to come out, and to give a green light to their unit. So according to Dr. Ingrid Allen, the reason there aren't that many eligible apartments, some of it is landlord prejudice. Some of it is that regulations designed to protect tenants from bad housing can actually be a bit too onerous. Corian says she was encountering exactly that problem.

Okay, so 18 months after you applied, you were still findable. You're still eligible. You're still interested. So what happens next? Like, how do you go about trying to find an eligible apartment? That's a very good question. You have to hunt for your own apartment that fits into these qualifications, not even just the cost qualifications, the like, do you take Section 8?

Or if there was not a carbon monoxide protector in the building, they didn't even give them the chance to put it in. Like if they were new to working with Section 8, you would think they would be like, okay, here's some things that might help you get this tenant via Section 8. Can you fix these, these, these, these things? And they were simple things.

But like they would just take it completely out of the running then. And what was the reception you were getting from landlords? I had surprisingly good reaction to the fact that I was in the program. Just like they kind of sympathized with me because they're like, hey, we have a few people that are on Section 8 here. I just don't know if I'll be able to get you in at your budget. How long did they tell you that you had to find an eligible apartment? A month. Wait, one month? Yeah.

Just to interrupt here, Corrine's counting one month from when she attended an information session on how to use the voucher. The government would say she got two months because they start their timer for when they first issue the voucher. In either case, not a ton of time. Yeah, and then you could get an extension for another three months. And then that's it? Yeah. So were you stressed? Oh, yeah.

And remember, this is the hoop that Corian would not be able to jump through. She looked for a $650 apartment. She never found one. She ended up having to move in with a friend in another state. We spoke to someone at Fond du Lac's housing authority who said that last year, occupancy rates in Fond du Lac were at 99%, not a lot of apartments to go around, period. Generally, there's not enough affordable housing in America. And the problem is especially bad in the small towns people flock to after COVID.

So those were Corian's particular headwinds, but Dr. Ingrid Allen said that Corian's experience is actually pretty normal.

It turns out that only three in five of those lucky households who make it to the top of the wait list are actually able to use their voucher. Okay, so two in five of those households who have been, and this is, remember, after figuring out how to apply, waiting on the wait list for an average two and a half years, then getting back up to the list, getting recertified, right, showing more documents, two in five end up giving that voucher back to

to the housing agency. And I want to just sort of like pause on that. This is a voucher that's worth an average of about, you know, $10,000 a year in value. And these are households who have waited for, like I said, two and a half years. So these are households that clearly are in need, right? In America right now, just over a third of the people who receive housing vouchers are, like Corianne, non-Hispanic white people.

Dr. Ingrid Allen says that while it's common for everybody to struggle to actually use these vouchers, that research shows that outcomes for Black and Hispanic voucher recipients are actually even worse. So as to the first half of Corian's question... What is the point in offering a service that has a very long wait list if it's not a usable option?

The answer is complicated and messy, like most things in life. Some people are using the voucher, but many fewer people are getting help than we say we want to help. Which brings us to the second half of Corian's question. How could we change this? That's after the break.

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That's 25% off your first month of Seed's DS01 Daily Symbiotic at seed.com slash search. Code 25 search. Search Engine is brought to you by Discover DoubleNomics. We discuss all things finance and economics here, but have you heard about DoubleNomics? It's okay if you haven't, because we like to keep you in the know, and it's extremely niche.

Here's an example of doublenomics. Discover automatically doubles the cashback earned on your credit card at the end of your first year with cashback match. That means with Discover, you could turn $150 cashback to $300. It pays to Discover. See terms at discover.com slash credit card. Welcome back to the show. So Corianne, our listener, wanted to know not just why she'd faced so many hoops, but whether this hoop-producing system could get any better. So I asked Dr. Ingrid Ellen...

I was curious, if the voucher program had been a solution for dysfunctional public housing, what was the new solution for the dysfunctional voucher program? I'm not ready to give up on the voucher program. I'm also not ready to give up on public housing either, actually. I just think there are a lot of things that we can do to improve the voucher program. And let me say that there's lots of evidence that the voucher program...

It does lots of good things for the people who are able to successfully use vouchers, right? It reduces the risk of homelessness. It reduces poverty. It reduces, you know, the share of income you have to spend on rent. It reduces crowding. And there's even evidence that vouchers have benefits beyond housing. We've done research at NYU showing that children whose families receive vouchers actually do better in school.

There's evidence from the Moving to Opportunity study that over the long run, children whose families get vouchers when they're young earn 15% more

on average as young adults. So there's lots of good things that vouchers do, but I think the voucher program as currently structured has some Achilles heels. But I think there's a lot that could be done. There's some low-hanging fruit. I think housing agencies could extend the search times and, you know, states and localities, more of them could adopt source of income discrimination laws and we could be more serious about enforcing those laws.

And rather than setting the subsidy rents, the subsidy ceiling rents at the level of the metropolitan area, you could set them at the neighborhood level. That would open up more neighborhoods rather than having all the voucher affordable units being in just a few neighborhoods. The solution Ingrid is referencing here is a pretty clever fix. I can explain it better through the example of Corian. So the way the system works right now, Corian was given a voucher for about $650.

How did the government decide on 650? The system looked at Corian's application, saw that she had no income. Then the system looked at the average rents across her county and picked a number a little bit below the average, 40th percentile. The problem is that in Corian's case, there just weren't many of those cheap apartments on the market.

The ones that did exist were all in the cheapest neighborhoods. Not all those landlords took vouchers. And she had to compete with anyone else who had just come off the waiting list. So she never found her theoretical $650 apartment. Dr. Ingrid Ellen is saying, you could just change how the voucher works. What if, in Fond du Lac's fanciest neighborhoods, Corian's voucher was worth $1,200 a month? In the cheaper neighborhoods, it could be worth less, maybe $450.

That way, there's more chances for her to find a place, but also poor people in Fond du Lac aren't all being squeezed into the same neighborhood, the problem the government keeps causing and then complaining about. This idea for a neighborhood-based subsidy, some metro areas have actually been trying this out, and early results suggest it works pretty well. So your prescription would be

Basically, make this system work better. Don't invent a third new system. I mean, that's my first take. Maybe we'll have a conversation in five years or 10 years when all these changes, reforms are adopted, and we'll see whether it's working better. But I think there's a lot of promise to the voucher program. And what's frustrating is that it's not living up to its full promise. Yeah.

And is there some, like, has, like, Sweden figured this out? Because there's some other country that is doing this in a more humane way. Yeah. I mean, you know, I think that there are a lot of the Scandinavian countries, Northern European countries that have invested a lot more in social housing. And that's not just...

for the lowest income households, but it's a very large share of renters. And so that builds political support. Just to interrupt for a second, this idea that one way to fix the program is to expand it so that it includes more people. I just want to acknowledge that there are reasonable people who would be very resistant to the solution. Those people would think the government has screwed this up for a hundred years. Why give them more money to do possibly an even worse job?

But the idea here is that if more people across society were using housing programs, there'd be more political pressure for these programs to, and this is not Ingrid's phrase, it's my own, not suck.

When you have a program that reaches farther up in the income ladder, then you tend to have sort of more political support for that program. But the way that the public housing program and the way that our rental assistance programs have been structured, right, is that they have targeted the neediest households, which is understandable. But when you target the lowest income households, then you don't have the sort of same natural political constituency. Right.

I feel like the one way that we do subsidize housing for middle and upper... The mortgage interest deduction. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We do that and it's like a really... Yeah, we do that and we don't question that. Yeah. Does that frustrate you? Yeah, it's enormously frustrating, right? You know, I think that the voucher program now probably, it's probably $25 billion a year and the mortgage interest deduction is, you know, over $30 billion and that's reaching the very highest...

income members of the community. So we spend more money subsidizing middle and wealthy people's homes than poor people and working class people's homes. Yeah, no, and that disproportionately goes to wealthy people, that mortgage interest deduction. You know, the more valuable the home and the higher your income, the more valuable the subsidy. So... When did that decision get made? That's another... I mean, it's... That's a whole other... But again, let me just say this, is that once you sort of have these subsidies in place, um...

it can be difficult to take them away. Right, right. And so once you have homeowners that sort of expect this, then it can be very difficult to take that away. Yeah, it's just, I mean, I'm like cramming to become a housing policy dilettante, but like, who the government helps also organizes people into groups that are aligned with each other. And it's like people who get a mortgage interest deduction are a group and they will vote to keep that whether they realize they're in the same group or not. And

It's just like if you imagine a different world where more people across a greater income strata were getting the same housing assistance, you probably have like...

Less stigma from landlords and more useful programs. Things work when middle class people use them. That's right. And that's more of the European model, right? Right. But then you're talking about spending a lot more money because then you're talking about subsidizing not only. It wouldn't take that much more money just to basically make the voucher program an entitlement for very low-income households.

But it would take a lot more money to move to sort of more of a social housing system. And I think politically, I think there would be a lot of disagreement about that, about whether we want the government to have that large of a role. No, it would be really ugly. I can see the Fox News segment. And it's also hard because we have the country we have and you can't just become Sweden. We did things and now we are dealing with the things we did.

That's right. So, like I said, at the very least, I think we've talked about what I think of as sort of low-hanging fruit of things we can do to just sort of improve the programs that we have to make them work better. And hopefully, you know, the more we get them to work better, the more money, actually, you'd be able to spread those resources potentially over more families. Dr. Ingrid Gould-Ellen. She teaches urban policy and planning at NYU.

As for Corianne, when we first spoke, she was in Wisconsin. She was moving to Michigan with a friend. Things there didn't work out, so she's moved in with another friend in Illinois, and she says things are good there. She's considering applying for a housing voucher. She'll see how it goes. After a short break, the first automobile with an automatic transmission was the 1904 Sturivant, which meant the car could switch gears, but probably a bit awkwardly. And now, so will we.

Coming up, a different segment with our friend Taylor Lorenz, who made me laugh harder than anyone else has in months. That's coming up. So there's a new book that just came out this week. It's by friend of the show, Taylor Lorenz. Taylor's been covering the internet about as long as I have. She's just an incredible decoder of how social media works. She's a scoop machine.

Her book is very appropriately called Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. I really enjoyed it. It has so many good stories. They're almost like fables about the invention of modern internet fame. Like one of my favorites is this story about how influencers started to pretend to have sponsored content. Like they would post fake ads for real products because sponsored content at one point became a status symbol.

To celebrate the release, we invited Taylor to Search Engine to hear what, from the internet, an extremely online person might recommend. That's how the conversation started out. We then fell into a rabbit hole that I am still thinking about several weeks later. Taylor Lorenz. Yes. You have a recommendation for something from the internet. Oh, wait. Is it something I liked on the internet, or was it something...

Wait, I'm so bad at this because I'm like, I just kind of consume information and I don't... Anyway, I don't know. I don't know, PJ. It's just weird because you have like three Instagram accounts which post like great memes that I mostly have not seen and I still spend a lot of time... I don't know. It's like, I think because I consume so much content, I have no ability to like...

If it's a story, I can recognize it. But if it's just like something I'm like, I don't know. I mean, I guess I like to tick tock, but does, does anyone care? My experience is that no one gives a shit about recommendations like that. Here's the recommendation that I wanted to give to people. Can I, can I, it's, it's internet related. Yeah. I love going into defunct apps that I had like,

years ago and just spending time there. And I don't know how to explain it, but it's like going to an internet ghost town and you kind of see who's still around and I've become addicted to it. And I'm trying to like get back into like all my old accounts. I tried a couple of weeks ago for no particular reason to get into my high school AOL account.

And apparently at some point the company entirely wiped their servers. Yeah. So I logged in, but all my email was gone, which actually made me a little bit sad. It does. You know, the peak of Snapchat, like, I don't know, I had my Snap streaks with like people that I don't talk to anymore. It's made me like reach back out to a lot of people. Yeah.

I also just, I've been feeling so overwhelmed by social media, like our current social media. I did a story recently where I paid someone to watch all my Instagram stories for a week and aggregate them for me. Wait, really? Yes.

I hired a Gen Z content consumer. Wait, not a content creator, a content consumer? Yes, yes. I hired a content consumer. And I think this is like a new social media job for the future, honestly. And actually, Frank, the content consumer I hired, is taking on other clients. He's willing to take on other clients if anyone else needs it. But yes, there's too much content to consume. This is so funny. So wait, so Frank, how old is Frank?

He's 23. Does he have one of those cool mullet haircuts that they all have? Not to generalize about young 20-somethings. They all do have that haircut. Frank looks cool. Frank's a cool Gen Z assistant in New York, and he was looking to make some extra money. And, you know, he's very good at social media. He said, you know, he's primed to consume content, and his threshold for content, I think, is maybe higher than mine because he's grown up, like, plugged into YouTube. Okay, hold on. He watched thousands of stories from there. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Does he like watch them on like a faster speed? Here's my recommendation. Everyone hire a content consumer. It is worth it. 23-year-old Jen Seher just watches your Instagram stories. No, PJ, it is like a weight being lifted. You have to consume. And if you don't consume the content...

You miss things or you're a bad friend and there's too much and everyone's posting. So you need someone to like watch these thousands. I mean, he watched thousands of stories. He put a weekly report. He aggregated the most notable knowings.

But how does he know? Here's what's funny. He actually didn't know who was important to me and who wasn't. That's what I would imagine. So he gave me recaps of people I have not talked to in years. And I was like, wait, that's interesting. Also, people started reaching out to me because I think people that I didn't normally watch their content. Oh, but now you're watching. All of a sudden, I watch everything for a week. I was watching everything. So I started to get these DMs. And I actually, I'm meeting up with a friend in New York next week.

who was... I actually haven't told her, but she was like, oh my God, we haven't been chatting in a while. Well, the only way she would be upset is if she...

If she doesn't get upset, it means she's not doing an assiduous enough job consuming your content because if she's not listening to you on search engine, then, you know, she needs to hire a Frank. Exactly. And I was talking to Frank about this because, like, I think everyone needs this. Like, I actually want someone to log into all my accounts. Like, it's too much. There's too much. And I need to be able to check out. And I have to say...

Frank only charged $200 for the week. I think it's a steal because literally the amount of hours and stress...

That it saved me. It's also the same price of a good therapy session. Yes. Literally. This is therapy. This is therapy, PJ. This has taken off a huge mental burden. Huge mental burden. Not to suggest that there's anything strange about this Frank arrangement, but if this works and Frank consumes every Instagram story that comes across your transom...

doesn't that just increase the expectation among sort of more and more orbital friends of yours that you are going to be an active consumer of their content? Like part of the problem is that you're on like an anxious treadmill of attention that he's just making the number go up.

Yeah. I mean, so that's actually something I started to worry because the week he just stopped last week. And now this week I've been like furiously tapping through because I do, I do worry about the drop off. I don't want, because I, because that's such a negative signal. And you all know when like you have that friend that like watches all your stories and then they stop watching, like you're like, why did they stop watching? You know? Yeah.

Yeah, hire a content consumer. They will save you so many hours of your life. You will be up to date with everyone. I had a book event shortly after this, and I was asking my friend Kira about her wedding and all this stuff. And it's like, I saw that in the recap. I saw that in the weekly recap. So funny. It's funny, you know, on Hard Fork, they were talking about how they had some colleague at the Times...

who, when he goes to a party, comes home and writes just, like, index cards about the salient facts of everyone he met so that then several years later he can be like, how is your son? I remember he had lead knee surgery in 2014 or whatever. And I listened and I was like, that's very smart and I would never be organized enough to do that much work to try to perpetuate the illusion that I'm not self-centered. But

If I had a Frank, I think I could get away with this. It's so funny. At some point, it's just going to be a bunch of hired Franks watching each other's stories.

Yeah. I mean, I will say one thing. He abstained from close friends for privacy reasons. So don't worry if you've been sharing, you know, your nudes on close friends. Those are for my eyes only. I did not. Are people sharing their nudes on close friends? Yeah. I don't know. Maybe it's just my friends. I have no idea. Just to be clear, I don't trust the internet. Yeah. I don't trust my friends enough either. Tell me.

Taylor, this is a perfect and lunatic recommendation. I really, this is the best one that we've had by far. Thank you. I'm excited to contribute to this growing industry. Taylor Lorenz. Her book is called Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. It is available now wherever books are sold or lent if you find yourself at a library. And if you read our newsletter at pjvote.com, we will share contact info for Frank. He's taking on new customers.

Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruthi Pinamaneni, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Fact-checking by Sean Merchant. Special thanks this week to Ava Rosen. Her book, The Voucher Promise, is a great place for further reading on Section 8. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Pirello, John Schmidt, and Kevin Plunkett.

And to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Casey Clouser, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Court Courtney, and Hilary Schuff. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Our social media is by the team at Public Opinion NYC. You can follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vote now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you for listening. We are off next week, but we will have a new story for you on October 20th. See you then.