a home truth
page 16
The Little Hawk
feature 4
• 28 • 17
The reality of Iowa City’s affordable housing crisis
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Flower child fashion edit
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dancing the line: the role of class in extracurriculars
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Q & A with Exchange students
PREVIEW
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springtime breakfast
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flower child
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By Lottie Gidal and Hannah Boer
Sunny days and warmer weather call for lighter breakfast recipes. Simple and filling, these three dishes can be made easily with ingredients already in your kitchen and are perfect to enjoy on a spring morning.
By Danielle Tang
Spring is in full bloom with these formal, flowery looks.
dancing the line By Maya Durham
Dance teams exemplify how class affects extracurricular activities.
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COVER PHOTO BY NOVA MEURICE
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q & A with exchange students
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a home truth
By Reese Hill
Students Nina Lavezzo-Stecopolous ‘20 and Daphne Knoop ‘20 recently participated in the Japanese foreign exchange program here at City High, spending two exciting weeks with their exchange partners, Mai Sanada ‘19 and Alisha Tone ‘19.
By Nova Meurice and Rasmus Schlutter
With nearly two thirds of Iowa City renters spending more than a third of their income on housing, Iowa City is in the midst of an affordable housing crisis.
April 28, 2017 3
spring breakfast By Hannah Boer & Lottie Gidal
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Sunny days and warmer weather calls for light and simple breakfast recipes.These three breakfast recipes can be made easily with ingredients already in your kitchen and are perfect to enjoy on a spring morning.
Banana Toast
-1 banana
-Bread -½ cup Greek yogurt -2 tsp vanilla -½ cup peanut butter -¼ cup roasted coconut -¼ cup honey
Directions: Toast two slices of your favorite whole grain bread. Spread peanut butter then greek yogurt on the toast and place banana slices on top. Drizzle with honey, and top with roasted coconut and
crushed pistachios.
cranberry orange pancakes 2 cup flour ¼ cup cornstarch 1 tbsp sugar 1 tsp salt ¾ tsp baking powder 1 tsp baking soda ¼ tsp nutmeg 2 cups milk 2 eggs 1 tbsp butter 1 cup dried cranberries Directions: In a large bowl, mix together flour, sugar, cornstarch, salt, baking powder and baking soda. In a smaller bowl, whisk the eggs, milk, and melted butter. Pour wet ingredients into large bowl with dry ingredients and mix until batter has only small lumps. Fold in cranberries and zest. Heat a pan or griddle over medium heat and melt a tablespoon
of butter. Pour about a ¼ cup of batter onto pan or griddle. Gently flip pancake when bubbles begin to appear on pancake’s surface and remove once both sides are golden brown. Repeat with remaining batter, adding butter to pan or griddle between each batch, if needed.
RASPBERRY SMOOTHIE BOWL 2 cups raspberries (frozen or fresh) 1 banana 1 tbsp almond or peanut butter ⅔ cup greek yogurt 4 ice cubes Directions: Place raspberries, banana, almond/ peanut butter, yogurt and ice into blender and puree until smooth. Pour into bowl and top with a few leftover raspberries.
April 28, 2017 5
FLOWER CHILD DANIELLE TANG
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Flowers courtesy of Every Bloomin’ Thing 2 Rocky Shore Dr, Iowa City (319) 351-7242
Red dress: Chi Chi London Pink dress: Needle & Thread
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dancing the line how class affects extracurricular activities By Maya Durham ART BY MAYA DURHAM
APRIL 28, 2017 11
S
omewhere in the world right now, there is a girl watching a Beyoncé video and dreaming of being a backup dancer. She twirls and shimmies, imitating the moves as her body responds to the beat of the music. She may never take lessons; she may never enroll at a dance studio. But the Dream Divas would want her anyway. “With Dream Divas, it’s open to everybody. No matter how old you are, what race you are, any of that,” Te’Angela Lewis ’17 said. “Coming into Dream Divas, you don’t need to have experience,” Shevonna Norris ’18 said. “You can come in at a beginner’s level, and we will work with you. When you’re confident and ready to perform, then you’ll do it.” Lewis and Norris are dancers with the Dream Divas, a nonprofit dance team in Iowa City. For many teens in Iowa City, the Divas offer an inclusive and accepting entry point into competitive dance. Without the Divas, many aspiring dancers in the Iowa City area might not have the opportunity to perform or learn how to dance. Unlike other dance teams, most of which are affiliated either with schools or studios, the Dream Divas don’t require their members to pay a fee or have any formal training. By contrast, to audition for other dance teams, such as the City High Dance Team, a level of professional training is all but mandatory. “Most of [the City High Dance Team] has been dancing for at least 13 to 14 years. If they’re 16, they’ve probably been dancing since they were 3,” City High Dance Team member Ellie Ballard ’19 said. This extensive training takes place at one of the selective — and expensive — local studios. According to Ballard, National Dance Academy and Nolte are the only studios that City High Dancers attend. Lessons at these academies can be a significant financial commitment — according to the studios’ respective websites, individual classes cost between $40 and $50. “It’s pretty expensive,” admitted
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Ballard. “Especially if you’re on a competition team. When I did it we would do around five dances and altogether I think it cost — to go to every single competition, for the costumes, and for the practices — it was probably around $1,500 [annually].” This kind of high-end price tag has become the norm for dance training. According to Professor Rebekah Kowal, chair of the University of Iowa’s Department of Dance, “Dance has definitely become more of a commodity and less of an art form.” The commodification of dance, which has been increasing for the past 20 years, she said, poses a problem on a number of levels. “It poses a problem for art making, in a sense that people are being trained to see themselves as winners and losers, they’re training to win, whereas in art-making that’s not usually a priority or a guiding objective. The competition studios are in tension with the practices of art-making,” she said. Kowal is also concerned that the high price of studios and the emphasis on competition is diminishing diversity in dance. “If those places are prohibitively expensive or not welcoming or making accommodations for racial and/or socioeconomic diversity, then downstream there’s going to be a problem for the art because there aren’t easy entry points,” she explained. The commodification of dance has been increasing in the last 20 years, she explained. Prior to the explosion of these studios in the 1990s, you had local studios that were much more arts-based and potentially more local and drawing in a variety of students who just have an interest. Kowal continued, “With the explosion of dance on television and the internet — that’s a driving factor — you have a focus on winning that hadn’t ever been there before. And access to a winning body is financial.” These two City High dance teams are not anomalies when it comes to this stark division in race
and class. In general, high school extracurricular activities have a direct link to socioeconomic status — a link with significant negative consequences. A recent article in American Educator cites evidence that wealthier children have higher school achievement, not because income is directly correlated with achievement but because “money is an obvious enabler of opportunities: cash buys books, and summer enrichment camps, and access to tutoring.” Money also buys access to expensive extracurricular activities, which have also been shown to boost school achievement. Jason Sole, president of the Minneapolis NAACP, agreed that socioeconomics and race play an important role in students’ extracurricular opportunities and subsequent success. “Research shows that people who have roots or are connected with a student group or a sports club do better in life than those who don’t have those connections,” said Sole. “The strongest argument they have is, ‘This helps us with grades, with our cohesion, with our peer support.’ If you look at who has the highest graduation rates, a lot of the time communities with low blackto-white graduation rates don’t get to execute our talents or be around people who are struggling with the same things as us. That group that’s not being supported at the same rate, they run a risk of not being able to finish high school as a result of not being able to have a safe space where they can connect with each other. That’s the main thing.” Alina Borger-Germann, a teacher at City High, agrees with Sole. “Anything that increases students’ participation in school life in a meaningful way is important,” said Borger-Germann. Sports participation is one example of the rich-poor divide in high school extracurricular activity. An article in CommonWealth magazine notes, “While youth in high-income school districts are playing as many sports as ever, students in low-income communities are far less likely to participate in athletics at all.” The article goes on
to say that this is a troubling trend, as sports participation plays a key role in academic success and “teaches students valuable skills such as strong work habits, self-discipline, teamwork, leadership, and a sense of civic engagement.” While wealthier parents sign their children up for sports leagues at early ages, pay for summer travel and buy expensive equipment, poorer parents don’t have the money or time to do the same. “In terms of the economic ladder, as people of color we might not be able to pay for uniforms and all of the things that other clubs can pay for, just because of how money is allocated,” Sole said. “[Many school administrators] know that if it really comes down to putting money in it for costumes and contests, and everything that traditional clubs have, they know they have to supplement some or all of the funds. And they’re not willing to do that. It’s 2017, they should be willing to do that so that everybody can execute their talents.” Despite this overall problem, the administration at City High has programs in place to lower cost barriers to extracurricular activities. “I have a fund that has been donated by individuals who just give a little bit here and there that say ‘Here, help kids participate in activities that they may not be able to,’” said Bacon. “So, we have an account that is available when a need is apparent and exists. If a coach or advisor or teacher comes to us and says, ‘Hey, I’m aware of this need that this kid might have,’ we do have some ability to help in those situations.” Yet the school’s two dance teams remain separated by race and class divisions. The Dream Divas team is not officially sponsored by City High, whereas the all-white City High Dance Team is. As a school-sanctioned sport, the City High Dance Team receives a small amount of funding from the school. “We don’t have school funding to provide uniforms or things like that, so we pretty much have to provide it all ourselves,” said Rude. “We do a ton of fundraising, [which] helps a lot, but it is a pretty hefty fee, especially the first year, because you have to buy everything.” Ballard added, “Plus we go to
Disney, which costs a lot. Flying itself is already kind of expensive, and staying at Disney costs a lot.” The Dream Divas fundraise too in order to help cover the cost of costumes. But they don’t do as much travel, so there are far fewer additional costs for participants. Dance team is the only extracurricular activity at City High that features two distinct groups with mutually exclusive membership. “I just think we’re looked at as two separate teams majorly because of our styles,” said Lewis. “Our style is different from their style, so it’s always that fine line between City Dancers and Dream Divas.” Rude and the members of the City High Dance Team agree. In an effort to bridge the gap between the two teams, Bacon encourages the Dream Divas to perform at City High events, such as pep rallies. At the winter pep rally, the Dream Divas and the City High Dance Team collaborated in a routine. “It was a really good experience, and I’m glad we got to do that. They’re really talented at their style of dance, and I thought it was really cool to be able to see that,” said Rude. The Dream Divas have noticed students comparing the two teams. “I feel like everybody at City makes it a competition between the two teams. It’s not a competition,” said Lewis. “We’re all friends. When we practiced together and when we performed together it was all good, good vibes.” However, members of each team see no possibilities of joining the other — that line appears uncrossable. “I feel like it’s the intimidation. We’ve been asked to be a part of the City Dance Team, and it’s always that factor of audition, audition, audition,” said Lewis. “It’s really strict, and you have to be at a certain level of dance that they’re at.” The City High Dance Team’s audition requirements are rigorous. “We have to learn two different routines that Barbie [Kopp, coach] choreographs and teaches us,” said Rude. “It’s a two-day process, so you have one day where you come in for two hours, learn the routines and Barbie will explain stuff about the
team, and you’ll get forms and like technique things that you’ll need to be able to do to qualify for the team. On the second day it’s the audition day, where you’re asked to audition in groups of three to four people.” Ballard added, “I think this year we’re gonna have last year’s seniors come back and they’ll help with the judging process, [which] I think [will help] ease the tension a little; I don’t think they’ll be so biased.” Kowal recognizes that dance, like other extracurricular activities, is marked by deep splits that will not be easy to mend. “Someone like Misty Copeland is held up as an example, but she has really survived. She is a survivor of this culture. People held her up as an achievement, and what she’s done is amazing, but certainly it’s not an excuse to not do more,” Kowal said. Despite the separation that socioeconomic status can cause in extracurricular activities, Bacon and the school’s administration continue to work towards integrating the two teams racially and socioeconomically. “That’s certainly something that’s concerned me over the years, and as a result of that I’ve tried to take a few steps in the right direction,” Bacon said. “We’ve tried to be very inclusive and encouraging of our Dream Divas to participate in spirit assemblies and any other event that they have an interest in partaking in with the school — homecoming parades, for example. We always want to make sure that they feel totally wanted. I felt so strongly about it.” The winter pep rally, he said, “was a step in the right direction, but we have farther to go.” Bacon went on to say that seeing added representation within the City Dance Team would be a “goal to be had.” He is aware that diversifying extracurricular activities at City High would address achievement gaps and help foster success for all students. “That’s something we think and talk about a lot,” said Bacon. “We’ve had lengthy meetings about how we can make our existing activities more diverse or what new acts to bring on board to interest and help more kids.”
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q & A With Japanese Exchange Students By Reese Hill
Would you believe there aren’t any frozen yogurt shops in Japan or that Vaseline is extremely expensive there? Two students, Nina Lavezzo-Stecopolous ‘20 and Daphne Knoop ‘20, recently participated in the Japanese foreign-exchange program here at City High and discovered this and much more while spending two exciting weeks with their exchange partners, Mai Sanada ‘19 and Alisha Tone ‘19. Sanada and Tone are sophomores from Gyoshu, a private school in Numazu, Japan, and came on the trip for a special program their school has installed for 10th-graders in the bilingual class. Both of them had been to America before and were eager to see it again, excited to compare school life in Iowa to school life in Japan.
Q: How has City High and this experience surprised you?
Tone: “City High had surprised me with its size! The school itself is huge and the number of students [was] huge too!” Sanada: “I was surprised that school buildings are so big. Also, hallways are more crowded than my school in Japan.”
Q: What surprised you about hosting a student?
Knoop: “Mai knows about as much pop culture as I do, which was kind of surprising. But then again, I don’t know much about pop culture.” Lavezzo-Stecopolous: “I was surprised by how fluent Alisha’s English was. Sometimes I forget her first language is Japanese! Through this experience I learned how incredibly strict high schools are in Japan, especially private ones. In her school Alisha isn’t allowed to wear nail
polish, dye her hair, wear makeup, or have her phone with her at school. And of course wear her uniform.”
Q: What is the biggest difference between here and Japan?
Tone: “I believe the biggest difference between the high school in America and Japan is that Japanese high schools have way more strict rules. For example in Japan, we have to wear uniform, can’t wear make up [or] nail polish, or long hair for boys.” Sanada: “Classes. We had seven 50-minute periods, but we had almost all of our classes in the same classroom.”
Q: Any really fun memories or things you liked about living with your host student? Sanada: “Everything is memorable, and I enjoy a lot, but I enjoyed [Daphne’s] cello practice [most]. She is very good at playing cello, and I can relax while listening. Also, we don’t have much teenager orchestra in my area in Japan, so it was interesting for me, too.” Tone: “There are MANY fun memories with Nina … I want it to be longer. Like, a month.”
Q: What was the best part about the exchange student program?
Knoop: “It’s just been super fun, because Mai is super nice just hanging out with her. And school’s a lot less boring.” Lavezzo-Stecopolous: “My favorite parts have been learning about a different culture and a few Japanese words … I’m really glad I got involved with this program; I recommend it to all.”
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a home truth
The reality of Iowa City’s affordable housing crisis By Nova Meurice & Rasmus Schlutter
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april 28, 2017 17
R
ehema Jack had been living in the Rose Oaks Apartment Complex for two years when her family found a notice from management taped to her door. The note said that the building was due for renovations. Now, her family had 30 days to find a new place to live. Jack’s family, which had moved to Iowa City from Syracuse, New York, had been looking for a house since they had first arrived in town to little avail, instead settling the six of them in a two bedroom apartment. “I mean like finding an apartment was okay, but finding a house was hard. My mom was here before us, so she found everything, she found the apartment that we lived in,” Jack said. “I guess [my parents] were angry, and the fact that they were already looking for a house, it was just too much pressure on them. And so they had to start looking right away. Her parents, unsure of what they could do, took the notice to the housing authority. Soon after, the authority helped them find a home, which they managed to move into before the date listed on the notice. Although Jack’s family did ultimately find a suitably sized and priced home, her experience is nevertheless indicative of a broader dearth of affordable housing in the Iowa City area. “Iowa City is in a housing crisis,” Mazahir Salih, former president of the Center for Worker’s (CWJ), said. The issue, she explained, stems from the large numbers of students needing apartments near the University of Iowa. Between the demand for affordable housing coming from these students and from low wage workers, prices of apartments have risen. Some developers, such as the Minnesota-based College Fund Properties II which bought Rose Oaks in 2016, have also been upgrading affordable rental properties, which inevitably leads to rent increases. When the tenants of Rose Oaks found out that they couldn’t renew their leases, some of them reached out to organizers at the CWJ. From there, they formed a tenants association and began negotiating with the developer, who ended up allowing them to stay in the apartments until their leases expired and helping them with some moving costs.
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While Jack’s family did manage to find housing alternatives, many families living at Rose Oaks were not as fortunate—some tenants, many of whom were low-wage workers, were forced to find housing outside of Iowa City or live temporarily with friends or at the Shelter House. That precarity of home has come to define the growing housing crisis in Iowa City and the entire United States. But even these small victories are but consolation against a larger tide of rising prices and shrinking quantity of housing. Salih, though pleased with the results of negotiations with the developer, emphasizes that the diminishing supply of affordable housing is problematic for the city as a whole. “We’re going to lose workers if this keeps happening, because the low-wage workers cannot live in the city with prices like this,” she explained. “This will not only hurt the lowwage workers, it will hurt us as a city that we’re losing workers. The issue of limited affordable housing is not just confined to Iowa City. Indeed, in the United States in the last two decades, rents have been rising, outpacing the growth of wages and housing assistance programs. The problem is also statistically visible on the local level—61% of Iowa City renters pay more than 30% of their income towards housing, rendering them federally defined as “housing cost burdened,” which means that they often have to sacrifice other necessities such as proper food, clothing, transportation or medical care. To offset some of the rent burden, a few federal programs exist to help low-income individuals and families pay for housing. The most prominent of these, the Housing Choice Voucher Program (also known as the Tenant-Based Section Eight Program) provides vouchers to pay the difference between the 30% of the tenant’s income and the market price of rent. These vouchers, however, are flawed in several notable ways. First, they are not universally accessible—metro areas are given a limited number of vouchers, so there are often lengthy waiting lists to receive them. As of, Iowa City had 1,215 vouchers and 815 resident applicants on the waiting-list. Secondly, the market prices calculated by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) are often underestimates. Their estimates are drawn by finding the 40
PHOTOS: The Rose Oaks apartments are currently being renovated and rebuilt. PHOTO BY NOVA MEURICE
percentile of rents for “typical units” of “recent movers” in an entire metro area (including far-away suburbs or neighborhoods). Consequently, the HUD’s calculated market price often limits voucher-holders, relegating them to low-income neighborhoods. Salih felt these shortcomings acutely when, as a student, she needed to find a home for her family that matched her voucher value. “It was my own crisis really. I felt the pain looking for the four-bedroom, because it’s funny: the price of the four-bedroom is really high, but the value of the Section Eight is really low,” she said. “They tell you that for a
four-bedroom, they will not give you more than $1,500. But four-bedrooms on the market will be between $1,800 and $2,000, you’re not really going to find anything less than that. This is the thing: they say that [$1,500] is the market rate, but actually it is not the market rate because this is a university town, and a four-bedroom can be rented for $2,000, which is $500 for each room for the students. That’s why the people who have Section Eight struggle a little bit, is because that threshold of the market rate. You will really really take a long time to find a house that matches the price of a housing voucher.” In order fill in some of the gaps left by feder-
al programs, several non-profits have emerged in Iowa City. The Johnson County Affordable Housing Coalition (JCAHC) has been one of these organizations involved in advocacy, education, and public/private partnerships. Sally Scott, the founding member of the JCAHC, has been involved in community development studies at the University of Iowa Public Policy Center, and currently heads the JCAHC. “The Coalition itself doesn’t do any construction. We’re a place where people can come together on the issue,” Scott said. “We have folks around the table who are housing developers, non-profit and for-profit, people who do
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homeownership, rental housing, who are financial intermediates.” The JCAHC has hosted a number of events in Johnson County in hopes of addressing some of the social stereotypes associated with affordable housing, but also to demonstrate the financial feasibility of affordable housing to interested developers. Through neighborhood bus tours, renter testimony, the group has encouraged developers to see affordable housing as necessary asset, and one that does not exclude profit. “[Developers] do want to make money,” Scott said. “It’s just that the regulations and incentives that the counties are putting out need to be structured in such a way so that developers can make money and also create the housing that needs to be created.” The financial restrictions of housing investment in Iowa City have driven much of the Coalition’s advocacy, and have often made it difficult for the city to move forward on affordable housing projects. However, during the summer of 2016, in conjunction with the Johnson County Housing Authority, faculty at the University of Iowa Public Policy Center, and a number of bankers and developers involved in the Iowa City housing market, the Coalition helped formulate a 15 point housing outline to help address housing shortages and improve affordability for lower-income renters in Iowa City. The Iowa City City Council later passed this
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outline as the Affordable Housing Action Plan, designating $500,000 of city money along with $600,000 from Johnson County towards land-banking investments and inclusionary housing efforts. “[The money] could be used for either single family homes or multiple home development. A chunk of that money goes to an organization called the Johnson County Affordable Housing Trust Fund,” Scott explained. “To the extent that the land-banking plan of the piece will also go into effect, the goal is to use the city money to pay the interest of a bond, while
the bond will be for much more.” Along with city purchasing of land for both private and public affordable housing developments, inclusionary housing has been one of the most widely implemented forms of policy used to address housing inequity. Inclusionary housing legislation requires developers, especially those receiving some level of public funding, to incorporate affordable housing units or homes into their housing developments. It was the lack of inclusivity in a recent project at Riverfront Crossings that served as the impetus for the Johnson County
Affordable Housing Coalition’s increased involvement in the Iowa City and Johnson County housing market. “Close to three years ago, we started advocating for affordable housing at [Riverfront Crossings], a very large swath of town that was slated to undergo redevelopment,” Scott said. “Yet in the plans, which were quite far along when we got involved, there was virtually no mention of affordable housing. All this public money coming in and yet a large part of the public wouldn’t be able to live there.”
Now, with the Affordable Housing Action Plan ordinance and revised developments plans, over 300 primarily rental units of affordable housing are set to be included in the Riverfront Crossing area. This, Scott hopes, will begin a trend of affordability and accessibility in both current and future Iowa City housing developments. “For the first time in Iowa there could be an inclusionary housing ordinance guaranteeing that some portion, depending on the source of founding, of every bigger development would be affordable,” Scott said. “That felt like a big breakthrough for us, and also a pretty well-tested mechanism. There were a number of other cities or parts of cities which have implemented something like this across the country.” Jerry Anthony, a University of Iowa Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, and the author of the 2014 report Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing, also emphasizes the importance of developing a mandatory inclusionary zoning policy that the Johnson County Affordable Housing Coalition implemented in Riverfront Crossings. “It’s not rocket science. It’s tested, and it’s proven to be very, very successful,” Anthony said of the policy. The opposition, he explained, usually comes from developers who argue that increased regulation will impede economic growth and development from real estate. However, Anthony argues, the same argument was used when the City Council was looking to adopt zoning fifty years ago. Despite the opposition from developers, the adoption of zoning went forward and helped form Iowa City’s unique character and shape, which is currently highly sought after by developers. Systemic biases against affordable housing developments and the people that live within them along with commonly held misconceptions about what affordable housing looks like have also led to resistance to significant developments, even in Iowa City, which is generally progressive. “There’s a lot of ‘not in my backyard’
kind of attitude towards multi-family housing, so when they ask for that change, there is a lot of opposition,” Anthony said. “So low-income families are concentrated in certain areas, and because there’s a correlation between income and race, that might be the reason for the opposition, but we haven’t explored it or considered alternate hypotheses as well.” The model of affordable housing implemented by Iowa City and much of the country has had difficulty counteracting this opposition to development. In Iowa City, affordable housing efforts have generally been concentrated in areas with less expensive land. According to Anthony’s 2014 report, this produces relatively socioeconomically and racially homogeneous neighborhoods. “I suspect that one of the reasons that we have this trend is because of our zoning policies,” Anthony said. “Our zoning policies have historically concentrated multi-family housing, which is generally rental housing, which is generally accessible for low-income people.” Additionally, Anthony suspects that other covert mechanisms have also contributed to the racial and socioeconomic segregation of Iowa City. Such mechanisms, he said, include lending discrimination or the tendencies of real estate agents to push people to move to neighborhoods occupied by people like them. Anthony, however, has not conducted a study to further investigate the issue, so he cannot definitively say to what degree these instances of covert discrimination are occurring in Iowa City. Such a study would be expensive and time-intensive, but funding would likely be difficult to obtain due to Iowa City’s size. “If we were Chicago and we found an issue like this, it would be easier to get funding, from say HUD or some non-profit, but because we’re a small city, HUD and other national non-profits aren’t interested in a small city like this,” he said. “The money has to come from the city government or a local non-profit.” Like Scott, Anthony hopes that the recently passed Affordable Housing Action Plan will begin to pave the way for further inclusionary housing efforts, and help in the development of affordable properties in areas in which land prices are greater.
February 10, 2017
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housing assistance by the numbers 5 million people nationwide use Housing Choice Vouchers
41% of voucher
holders are elderly or disabled
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Furthermore, he hopes that that the City Council will consider mandatory inclusionary zoning in all residential areas, which he believes would address many problems caused by affordable housing shortage. “There are very few public policies that one can call a silver bullet or a magic solution that can solve many problems at the same time, and this is a very complex problem, of segregation and that low-income people do not have enough housing, but there’s one silver bullet that can solve many of these problems, and that silver bullet is called inclusionary zoning,” he said. Despite the efficacy of inclusionary zoning, Anthony believes that it is unlikely that such a measure would pass without considerable public support. “I think that they need more support from elites in the city, both democratic and nondemocratic elites,” he said. “They have to be writing letters to newspapers saying that we need inclusionary zoning.” Salih also proposes that changing the minimum wage would also be effective in alleviating some of the effects of Iowa City’s affordable housing crisis. “If the minimum wage now is down and there’s no affordable housing, that means that people will most likely work more than two jobs,” she said. “Then parents aren’t going to have time for their children, and this effect will be on the children and schools. Everything is connected.” A minimum wage rise, however, is unlikely to happen due to the current legislative atmosphere. Recently, the Iowa State Legislature further complicated the search for affordable housing by passing a bill which prohibited counties from adopting, enforcing, or otherwise administering an ordinance, motion, resolution, or amendment “providing for any terms or conditions of employment that exceed or conflict with the requirements of federal or state law relating to a minimum or living wage rate, any form of employment leave, hiring practices, employment benefits, scheduling practices, or other terms or conditions of employment.” The bill, signed into law by Governor Terry Branstad on March 30, brings the Johnson County minimum wage down from $10.10 to $7.25. The bill also stipulates that counties may not make laws that set “standards or requirements regarding the sale or marketing of consumer merchandise that are different from, or in addition to, any requirement estab-
lished by state law.” This section of the law, according to the Housing Authority of Iowa City, will eliminate the City Council’s 2016 Human Rights Ordinance which prohibited landlords from refusing tenants on the basis of their Housing Choice Voucher status.
W
hile legislators and city council members debate the relative merits of various housing policies, many families will continue to contend with the issues posed by the lack of affordable housing in the area. “It’s not like everyone is going to rise up in the streets. There are just a lot of people living difficult, difficult lives,” Scott explained. “Unless you’re focused on it you don’t really hear about it. I think we’ve always got a bit of that issue in our community.” Ntihebuwayo Dancile ‘17, for instance, a friend and former neighbor of Jack, started looking for other accommodations when her dad heard rumors that the owners of Rose Oaks was thinking of redoing the complex. “It was difficult because I just kept thinking, ‘how am I going to get a house? How am I going to get a house and the money too for the rent?” she remembered. “It was really hard to find anything.” Like Jack, her family was lucky enough to eventually find a house, but not without a catch: it’s in Cedar Rapids. Such a transition might seem difficult, but compared to the sustained stress of maintaining rent in subpar housing, Dancile and her family met it with some relief. “We don’t have to do rent, rent, rent every time. We now can actually save our money,” Dancile said. While her move has alleviated some of her stress, Dancile’s new home has brought about some fresh complications. Dancile and her sister decided to live with a friend so they could stay at City High, so they only see their parents on the weekends now. Even so, the few cer-
tainties this arrangement guarantees is preferable to the uncertainty that comes with living rent burdened. Both Dancile and Jack have found some way of managing through a housing crisis that spans scales and regions, but their resolutions are of some fragility. As the Federal HUD budget is slated for cuts, and city and local governments begin to take an increasing role in filling the housing gaps, the problem Iowa City is currently facing is not an unusual one. This problem is not only one of sufferings inflicted, but also of the dereliction of opportunity. Fair and affordable housing efforts have been effective at providing greater economic mobility and general health improvements to their beneficiaries.
“If a kid is not distracted by an unhealthy or unstable situation they’re going to do better in the school,” Scott elaborated. “Also, for adults there’s an economic impact and nail down their housing situation they’re more likely to hold a job, to stay in school, whatever they need to be doing with their life at that time.” For Dancile’s family, the chance to find a home at an affordable price, even at some distance from their previous residence, has already opened possibilities. “It’s easier now--[my dad] found a job he likes. After we moved, my mom works off and on and my dad works every day, so we balance it out, so that helps,” Dancile said. “It’s just the starting that is hard.”
It was difficult because I just kept thinking, ‘how am I going to get a house? How am I going to get a house and the money too for the rent?
nithebuwayo dancile ‘17
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