(USA TODAY) Ted Houghton, February 22, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has shuttered thousands of hotels across the country, many forever. Experts say tourism won’t come back for five years. And in the new age of Zoom meetings, business travel will never be what it was.
And who knows what will happen to office buildings? So many of us have got used to working from home. Or retail? Malls were already struggling before the pandemic; many won’t make it through this year.
If we do nothing to address this economic distress, these now obsolete properties will be boarded up and abandoned, bringing down the neighborhoods that surround them. They will reverse decades of investment that brought back neighborhoods in the Bronx, Chicago’s South Side and South Central LA. But this time, the distress will also ravage the central business districts of cities large and small.
Meanwhile, more than 700,000 Americans are homeless on any given night. And that number is only expected to grow, as evictions resume in the aftermath of COVID-19.
We can’t afford to let that happen. The pandemic laid bare the enormous social and economic costs of letting so many people remain homeless: cities had to scramble to create (and pay for) thousands of new socially distant shelter beds, and homeless children fell hopelessly behind in their remote schooling.
In New York City, where I live, homelessness and housing instability are so routine that one in ten school children becomes homeless at some point during the school year. Shelters have gone from being a last refuge of the destitute to being the only viable option for many low-income working families — over one-third of households in New York City shelters are now headed by someone with a job.
Newly available, now obsolete properties present our nation’s leaders an opportunity to tackle these two crises simultaneously. We can redevelop distressed buildings to address blight before it begins, and create substantial new affordable housing for homeless and low-income families and individuals. And if we do it quickly, we will jumpstart our nation’s economic recovery, with good paying jobs for Americans of all skill levels.