The Excluded Americans: Homelessness and Housing Policies.

THEY HAVE become our context, our ragged public architecture the homeless and their aura of need and accusation have become the defining feature of our social space. They have simultaneously become one of the inexhaustible themes of leftist rhetoric. Now William Tucker, in his remarkable new book The Excluded Americans, smashes the rhetorical looking-glass and sees the problem face to face.

Mr. Tucker, journalist by profession, surveyor of lost truths by predilection, here provides a map by which we can travel the landscape of violated rights and bureaucratic adventures created by contemporary housing policy. The paradoxical resolution of his quest comes in his discovery of two distinct classes of "excluded Americans"-the people in the street, and the capitalists trying to build houses which might one day shelter the people in the street.

This enormously ambitious study begins simply enough, with an impressionistic account of an evening Tucker passed in the crevices of Grand Central Station, mingling with cadres of street people. While the opening tableau merely hints at Tucker's true scope, it nevertheless should convince the adventurous to persist through the first half of the book, a dry but indispensable interlude of number-crunching and historical review. Indeed, Tucker fortifies his own subjective commitments with precision by making his most impassioned arguments on rigorously quantitative grounds.

Tucker's principal scientific justification comes in the form of regression analysis, a statistical method for connecting seemingly random social conditions. He cross-correlates a number of plausible causes of homelessness in major American cities, and finds that two factors consistently predict the presence of large transient populations in a given urban area. The first cause, not surprisingly, is race. The second (quite surprisingly, if you are a doctrinaire social activist) is a high-priced housing market generated by government regulation.

Regression analysis can only show how social trends statistically coincide-it can't explain causal connections. Rather than rehashing one more time the tangled issue of American race relations, Tucker focuses on the more startling linkage between homelessness and housing markets: What connects housing costs for the middle class, he wonders, to the availability of basic shelter for the poorest level of society? And how can that connection account for 42 per cent of the homeless population, the figure generated by his regression analysis?

Tucker explains the connection by returning the entire debate on housing and homelessness to the broadest historical and ideological grounds. He argues that metropolitan home prices are only one important component of a cultural system in which ad hoc social policies-like rent-control and zoning-undermine fundamental private property rights and lower the supply of available housing. The onset of the homeless crisis, in fact, parallels the rise of government intervention in housing markets. In the first half of this century, despite great disparities in income, homelessness was negligible and high-quality housing was readily available, thanks largely to the productive dynamics of the market. Historically, housing changed hands rapidly, circulating from the upper to the lower classes at a rate and with an efficiency that would exalt the most ardent distributionist. Retrospectively Tucker writes in admiration of "the vast decentralization of property ownership brought about by democracy and capitalism."

Next Tucker illustrates that landlords, far from being absentee exploiters, have tended to belong to the social groups they housed. Carpenters and janitors, immigrants and first-time homeowners-this was the self-established class of entrepreneurs that traditionally managed and channeled the results of America's tireless housing industry. As long as the industry continued to churn out new housing, landlords and realtors found ways to maintain supplies at fair market values. In New York, for instance, between 1900 and 1930 developers put up a stunning 120,000 housing units per year.'s

As Tucker begins to document the concrete effects of regulation, The Excluded Americans takes flight. Writing with probing indignation, Tucker shows how bureaucracy and prejudice are natural co-conspirators-how local government, acting in the interest of neighborhood preservation and community control, have consistently barred working- and lower-class citizens from entering areas where they legitimately aspired to live. Zoning and tenant boards typically dominated by white, middle-class liberals) have done little except limit the supply of housing and increase property values for people already settled in communities. Newcomers and outsiders are allowed to fight for any overpriced scraps that occasionally become available on a regulated market.

The inequities of regulation are most pronounced in rental markets, where at least some of the Americans who are now homeless should have a chance of finding residences. The only beneficiaries of "the war between tenants and landlords" are a particularly ruthless tribe Tucker calls "the paper working class." By manipulating rental statutes members of the paperworking class-however much they claim to sympathize with social housing priorities-quickly cash in on their own bureaucratic skills through a black market of subleases and lease profiteering.

Tucker's lines of inquiry ultimately converge in a long section devoted exclusively to the epic travesty of New York City. In the face of this civic disaster, Tucker drops any pretense of analysis, and wisely lets the stories speak for themselves. There is little purpose in waving numbers at a city where a housing judge throws an 86year-old black landlord in jail for failing to provide heat for squatters, while a French marquis holds the lease on a five-room duplex on the East Side for $103.50 a month. It perhaps is enough to know that the various outrages here detailed are tolerated (even encouraged) by a municipal government which, as the city's largest landholder, has pursued a policy of forced socialization and dispossession.

Despite the anger in these pages, Tucker is in no rush to replace prevailing ideologies with his own, and his book is clear about the violence done when we try to formalize legally such ambiguous notions as "home." Americans are never quite sure about that word: we celebrate social mobility and self-determination, while at the same time yearning for the enveloping solidarity that "home" and all its associated concepts imply. In our best moments we guard these distinctive connotations, and tellingly refer to dislocated people as "homeless" rather than "houseless."

Tucker periodically alludes to these deeper issues, and in his low-key conclusion retraces some of the constitutional arguments for protecting property owners from tyrannical majorities. He is not opposed to government aid in this area, as long as it takes the form of housing vouchers, the Reagan Administration's preferred housing entitlement. Vouchers allow low-income citizens to participate actively in housing markets, if they are lucky enough to live in cities where such markets still exist.

For all his pragmatic suggestions, however, Tucker suspects that at the base of homelessness lies frightening and obscure social decay that escapes formulation. "I wonder if anyone really knows what is causing homelessness," he sighs (a bit too self-effacingly) on the book's last page. But even problems with obvious causes (such as, in this case, over-regulation, racism, and an inadequate mental-health system) rarely admit any obvious cures. It's impossible, for instance, to read his pages on the New York housing crisis and imagine any plausible solution to that nightmare of coordinated injustice. Because Tucker dismisses the possibility of any easy fiscal resolution to the tragedy, he is left to write in the conviction that simply witnessing the truth has some intrinsic value.

Professional defenders of the homeless often invoke religious beliefs in the service of their cause, and in fact the virtue of hospitality has always had a distinctly spiritual dimension: Ulysses wandering in disguise was befriended by a goatherd who told him simply, "Aliens and strangers come from God." But so do hosts, the hero might have replied. In our nation generations of landlords, builders, and architects were ready to play host to aliens and strangers of every sort. Only in the last few decades has federal and local government stepped in to make these sacred duties practically impossible. This is the saddest and starkest discovery of William Tucker's accusatory meditation.