Mathew Davis is forty-nine years old. He sleeps in a homeless shelter in Austin, Texas. He earns a few hundred dollars a month donating blood plasma twice a week — lying in the chair for an hour while the machine takes what his body will give. Four thousand five hundred apartments the city of Austin classifies as affordable sit vacant. The cheapest unit the city offers him is a tiny home at four hundred and fifty dollars a month, with no running water and a communal bathroom he shares with strangers.
“I don’t make enough money really to afford anything,” Davis said. “I just keep trying to swim uphill.”
Davis is not an edge case. He is the design.
The federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, established by the Tax Reform Act of 1986, allocates federal tax credits to affordable-housing developers through state-level housing finance agencies. The state agencies set the income targets that determine which households the units are reserved for. In recent years, the targeting has hardened toward households at or above fifty percent of area median income. Households at or below thirty percent of area median income — the disabled on Supplemental Security Income, the elderly without savings, people with no income at all — are increasingly priced out of what their state agencies financed. The dollars are real. The unit counts are real. The vacancy rate is real. And Mathew Davis is still on a shelter cot.
This is not a malfunction. It is the predictable outcome of a financing regime that writes checks to developers contingent on serving tenants at fifty percent of AMI and up. The math does not lie. If the units must house households above a certain income threshold, and the poorest renters fall below that threshold, then the units cannot serve the poorest renters, and the units will sit empty until market-rate tenants can be. The same curve is bending upward in cities across the country. The pattern is not Austin’s. The pattern is the program’s.
The vacancy rate is what your office produced.
Mathew.
Your spreadsheet does not register Mathew Davis. The income column reads zero, or a few hundred, and the cell turns red, and the application goes to the back of the queue. You do not see the arm punctured twice a week at the plasma center. You do not see the bandaged vein. You do not see the man lie back in the chair for an hour while the machine takes what his body will give. You see the cell. The cell is what your spreadsheet was built to see.
The metallic taste in your mouth at the morning briefing is not from your coffee. It is from the rent roll. The rent roll has four thousand five hundred empty lines. The empty lines are not losses. They are the policy working. The policy was not to house the poorest. The policy was to house people who could pay. You built it to fail the way it is failing.
The cold in your sternum when you read the vacancy report is not surprise. It is your throat closing on a swallow you will not finish. The vacancy rate is what your office produced. The shelter census is what your office produced. The two numbers add up to the same policy.
Your fingers on the keyboard at the HFA meeting are not still. They tap. They tap the way yours tap when you know what you have approved. The agenda item reads “Income targeting revisions for fiscal year 2027.” You will not lower the targeting. You will keep the targeting at fifty percent of area median income, because at fifty percent, the developers can pay the loans back, and at thirty percent they cannot. Mathew Davis will not be on the agenda.
Imagine your own son on the plasma schedule. Imagine your own daughter sleeping on the shelter floor with a few hundred dollars in her pocket and a four-hundred-fifty-dollar rent standing between her and the cheapest unit the city offers, which has no running water. You would not accept this for your own. You built it for someone else’s. The someone else has a name. Mathew. He is forty-nine. He is sleeping in your city’s shelter tonight.
You slept in your bed last night. Mathew Davis slept on a shelter floor. You will eat breakfast this morning. Mathew Davis will eat whatever the shelter provides, or he will not eat. You will drive to a building with running water. Mathew Davis will walk to a plasma center to have his blood drawn, twice this week, so he can be poor enough to qualify for the unit you have not built. Your program did not fail him. Your program was not built for him.
The four-thousand-five-hundred empty apartments have running water, and kitchens, and in some cases balconies. They sit empty because the people for whom they were built cannot afford the rent either. The not-poor-poor and the very-poor are not the same people. The four-thousand-five-hundred empty apartments were built for the not-poor-poor. Mathew Davis is the very-poor. The same vacancy line stretches across the country. The not-poor-poor cannot afford the units either. The very-poor were never inside the program’s reach.
Pennsylvania is now tracking expiring affordable units in a statewide database — a tacit admission that the existing stock is finite, and that no replacement pipeline is guaranteed. A database, of course, is not a unit. It is a roster of units that may soon not exist.
The apartments are still empty. The shelter is still full. The program’s name has not changed.
“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Matthew 25:40
The least of these is not a category. The least of these has a name. He is forty-nine years old, and he donates plasma twice a week so the rent will be a little less impossible. The program does not build for him. He is still waiting.