In an obscure but public meeting last week, local and federal housing officials discussed a controversial idea that could transform U.S housing policy: What if the government gave money directly to renters, rather than relying on a complicated voucher system that drives both tenants and landlords up the wall? You’ve heard of universal basic income. What about universal basic rent?The status quo is not working particularly well. More than half a million Americans experience homelessness on any given night, housing stock is in too-short supply, and rent and mortgage payments consistently rank among the heftiest bills families have to bear. For decades, most federal housing assistance has come in the form of a voucher program known as Section 8. But the program is cumbersome and bureaucratic. Landlords are often reluctant to jump through the government’s regulatory hoops to get the money, so they opt out. Because of funding constraints, only a quarter of those eligible for vouchers even get one, and those lucky few often must scour dozens of ads before finding even one unit that might accept the subsidy.President Joe Biden promised during his campaign to make these vouchers available to all low-income families who qualify, and Congress is debating a measure as part of his economic package that would add roughly 750,000 more vouchers to the program. If it becomes law, that expansion would surely help some Americans find homes. But it wouldn’t solve the underlying problem: Most landlords don’t want to rent to voucher recipients.[Read: How housing policy is failing America’s poor]The coronavirus pandemic showed the viability of an alternative path—one that officials in Biden’s administration now seem willing to at least discuss. Congress tried a lot of things to help people struggling with the economic fallout from COVID-19. One initiative, a government-administered eviction-prevention program, has been mired in paperwork and delays, and only one-fifth of the money the feds allotted to it has been distributed. Another program, in which the IRS simply mailed Americans stimulus checks, got money in people’s hands right away.These recent experiences might inform federal leaders as they research new ways to improve housing assistance. Last Thursday, at a public meeting organized by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, policy experts and housing-authority officials considered new voucher-program ideas that could merit formal study. Making vouchers more like cash for renters, as opposed to subsidies for landlords, was one of the top three ideas that emerged from the meeting, and it will be explored further at a second gathering later this month. The leading proposals could be tested under a HUD program known as Moving to Work, which has been around since 1996 but was expanded by Congress in 2016.Distributing rental subsidies as cash was the second-most-popular idea discussed at the meeting, and participants acknowledged that it could involve a cost-saving element, too, as it would reduce, or even eliminate, the need for regular HUD inspections of voucher-eligible housing. At the conclusion of the three-hour session, committee members voted to continue their discussion of the idea at their next scheduled meeting, on October 28.“I think it’s interesting in light of [universal basic income], and I think it would be interesting to decouple the government from trying to figure out the right type and size and quality of housing and leave that up to people,” Chris Lamberty, the executive director of Lincoln Housing Authority, in Nebraska, said at the meeting.A couple of hours into the virtual call, Todd Richardson, the head of HUD’s research arm, noted that meeting participants seemed relatively excited about the cash-assistance idea. He warned, though, that it might not “pass muster” with the agency’s legal department. Asked for clarification as to what the legal concerns may be, a HUD spokesperson told The Atlantic that the public meeting posted on the Federal Register was not “intended for press” and “I don’t think we had put an invitation to the press.”Moving to Work isn’t the only vehicle policy makers could use to test the idea of distributing cash-based rental assistance to tenants. Congress could also authorize a pilot study, like it did in 2019 when lawmakers approved a new voucher program to help families relocate to richer neighborhoods.And in Philadelphia, starting early next year, a new study will explore how families fare when they receive rental assistance as cash. “There’s never been a full evaluation of using cash to renters for our tenant-based vouchers,” Vincent Reina, one of the University of Pennsylvania researchers who will assess the program, told me. “There’s been some explorations, but a true, proper evaluation is something that we’ve never really done.” Reina attributes the lack of study to political resistance. “Cash transfers are often more contentious,” he said.The closest thing to a real test of the idea occurred in the 1970s, when Congress authorized the Experimental Housing Allowance Program. That program, which ran for longer than a decade in a dozen U.S. cities, provided cash assistance for housing directly to more than 14,000 low-income families. In a report filed to Congress in 1976, program evaluators noted that housing allowances were being well-received by their local communities and that the housing payments were being successfully administered to renters.[Read: The power of landlords]It’s clear that at least some current HUD staff are considering this old research. In 2017, Richardson published a blog post suggesting that the 1970s housing-allowance experiment could inform the Moving to Work program today.Public-housing authorities might resist the idea, as it could require them to relinquish some control. Other authorities might lack trust that the funds would go toward rent. The findings from the Experimental Housing Allowance Program also suggested that cash subsidies could lead to lower-quality housing options for renters, though experts caution against drawing firm conclusions from the half-century-old study.Studying the idea of cash rental assistance has great potential, Phil Garboden, a professor of affordable-housing economics, policy, and planning at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told me. “I imagine vouchers will continue to exist in their current form for quite some time, but studying it is a terrific idea,” he said. “We absolutely do not have good data on it.” Garboden hopes researchers could tease out whether landlords avoid taking the vouchers mainly because they don’t like to deal with the red tape involved, or whether they’re simply resistant to renting to poor people.Some renters might prefer the voucher status quo, but for others, cash could prove easier to use. Being able to pay for housing with cash or some dedicated housing subsidy might alleviate some of the administrative hassle that comes with navigating the U.S. welfare system—what the Atlantic writer Annie Lowrey coined “the time tax” earlier this year.“Different forms of support work differently for different people, and a voucher could be a really effective mechanism for some households and some markets and less effective for others,” Reina told me. “It’s not to say vouchers can’t work, or can’t be improved, or shouldn’t be made universal, but we know through our existing voucher research that elderly households, households with kids, and households where the head is Black are less likely to use vouchers.”Stefanie DeLuca, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins who was in attendance at Thursday’s meeting, told me that distributing housing assistance as cash could feel dignifying for some tenants. “The research on the Earned Income Tax Credit points to the idea that recipients experienced a sense of agency and dignity when they received a lump sum of money, and I suspect that renters being able to present themselves to landlords as paying like any other potential tenant could feel quite empowering,” she said.Still, DeLuca’s own research suggests that the existing housing-voucher program could be improved in real ways to entice more landlords to participate, even in competitive markets. Researchers have been studying landlord signing bonuses and ways to get landlords their money faster. Even COVID-19 has helped hasten the digital streamlining of HUD contracts, making them less annoying to manage.A new bipartisan bill introduced in May by Senators Chris Coons and Kevin Cramer would seek to remove red tape for Section 8 landlords. HUD is also beginning a new, major study of landlord incentives as part of its Moving to Work expansion.And to be sure, one reason lawmakers have long resisted cash transfers is fear of political blowback. Over the years, Republican and Democratic politicians have embraced the myth that welfare rewards laziness, and that cash benefits in particular will spark public outrage.But as we emerge from the pandemic, it’s clear that cash assistance to Americans is more politically viable—even more popular—than many in Washington previously thought. The U.S. government has also proved that it can cut checks quickly when it deems it necessary. In fact, distributing money can be easier than administering a byzantine social-insurance program that eligible participants may not even know about. If landlords continue to resist housing vouchers, perhaps the government will take that decision out of their hands and simply give renters cash.

’Tis the season of Kyrsten Sinema. The wig-wearing triathlete senator from Arizona has quickly become one of the most hated figures in present-day American politics. She’s blocking her own party’s agenda; she’s shutting down questions from reporters; she’s schmoozing with lobbyists and jetting off to Europe. Sinema is “not demonstrating the basic competence or good faith of a member of Congress,” Representative Ro Khanna of California told Rolling Stone. Progressive activists have committed to “bird-dogging” Sinema until she caves. And as Democrats devote countless column inches to deciphering Sinema’s motivations, progressives have vowed revenge in the form of a primary challenge. Sinema is not doing what her voters want, liberals argue, so Arizonans should elect someone who will.But Sinema does not seem rattled by any of it—and it’s not clear that she should be. Unseating her would be difficult. She isn’t up for reelection until 2024, so any primary challenge is years away. Voters’ memories are short, and the political landscape will be different by then. Ousting a sitting senator is a dubious project, and even if lefties were to defeat Sinema with one of their own, a more progressive candidate might find it harder to win a general election. Arizona is still a purple state, and Sinema’s popularity among independents and Republicans remains fairly high. “I’ve seen [progressives] throw everything at her to create this narrative that she’s in this very perilous situation,” Mike Noble, the research chief at the Arizona-based nonpartisan polling firm OH Predictive Insights, told me. But “I don’t see a need for her to be hitting the panic button.”[Read: Will Kyrsten Sinema change her mind?]Polls show Sinema’s support among Democrats waning. Her approval rating on the left fell 21 points from March to September, according to Morning Consult. The progressive polling firm Data for Progress tested potential challengers in a recent survey of individuals it describes as likely Democratic primary voters. “We find that U.S. Senator from Arizona Kyrsten Sinema is poised to lose her primary in 2024,” a press release about the survey reads. “Life comes at you fast.”But polls, as any pollster will eagerly tell you, are merely a snapshot of a moment in time. And this particular moment in time, however high-stakes it feels, is in the year 2021. It’s difficult to predict who these likely Democratic primary voters will be, let alone anticipate America’s political atmosphere. “She shouldn’t be panicking,” Garrett Archer, an Arizona-based data analyst, told me. “The primary is so far away, we don’t even know what the makeup of the electorate is going to look like.” Life, in other words, might not come fast enough for progressives.Sinema, whose office did not respond to multiple requests for comment, is not underwater yet. She’s lost some standing among Arizona Democrats, but her approval rating is still at 56 percent, according to Noble’s most recent poll. (At this early juncture, approval polls are probably more reliable than likely-voter models.) Sinema can afford to anger the Democratic base a little, so long as she gets at least 50 percent of it in her primary race, Noble said. John McCain won only 52 percent of the GOP primary vote in his last election, in 2016, but he still won the general by 13 points. Similarly, Sinema’s power is her cross-party appeal: 42 percent of independents view her favorably, and she’s almost as popular among Republicans.Another Democrat could challenge Sinema in 2024 and win. That person would have to be similarly well known, with plenty of money and optimism to spare: Winning a primary challenge against an incumbent senator is extremely difficult; only five people have done it this century, according to FiveThirtyEight. Four of those five went on to lose the general election. (And Sinema’s state is more difficult terrain for Democrats than any of those primary victors’ states were.) If another Democrat did win the nomination over Sinema, they might struggle in the general. The new candidate’s fate would depend, in part, on the GOP nominee: a Donald Trump type could turn off Arizona’s Mormon community and suburban voters; a more moderate candidate could win them over.[Read: The GOP women who ditched their party to vote Democrat]Sixteen percent of Republican women in Maricopa County, where most Arizonans live, broke with their party to vote for Sinema in 2018, making her the first Democrat to win a Senate race in the state in 30 years. I wrote about some of those women then—and I called them up again for this story. Jane Andersen, a former Republican, told me that Sinema represents the interests of moderates. “She was elected in a state that has extreme conservatives and a lot in the middle,” Andersen said. “She’s doing a fantastic job.” Relying on conservative and independent voters to build a Democratic majority in the Senate always carried the risk that, when push came to shove, those voters wouldn’t go along with Democrats’ goals. I recognized a little bit of Sinema in these women—an eagerness to buck expectations. “Censure and threats from one’s party can be a badge of honor,” Laura Clement, an ESL teacher and independent voter from Mesa, told me in an email. “She’s powerful, and I want to keep people like her in power.”Winning reelection as a Democrat, though, might not be Sinema’s calculation at all. She may not even be in the party in three years’ time. The senator has clearly squandered her support among national Democrats, and she also appears to have alienated her in-state Democratic allies. In the meantime, she’s been cultivating a network of wealthy donors. What does it mean? Some political commentators have speculated that Sinema could be planning to ditch the Democrats and become an independent. She might even caucus with the Republican Party if the GOP takes back Congress next year. It’s happened before: Jim Jeffords of Vermont and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania switched parties while serving in the Senate. And Sinema’s supporters might not be wholly opposed to the idea. “She doesn’t just quickly line up to vote in lockstep when the party leader blows the whistle,” Clement said. “I love how she keeps everyone guessing.”

Ever since I entered what can generously be called my “mid-30s,” doctors have asked about my pregnancy plans at every appointment. Because I’m career-minded and generally indecisive, I’ve always had a way of punting on this question, both in the doctor’s office and elsewhere. Well, we can always adopt, I’ll think, or say out loud to my similarly childless and wishy-washy friends. Adoption, after all, doesn’t depend on your oocyte quality. And, as we’ve heard a million times, there are so many babies out there who need a good home.But that is not actually true. Adopting a baby or toddler is much more difficult than it was a few decades ago. Of the nearly 4 million American children who are born each year, only about 18,000 are voluntarily relinquished for adoption. Though the statistics are unreliable, some estimates suggest that dozens of couples are now waiting to adopt each available baby. Since the mid-1970s—the end of the so-called baby-scoop era, when large numbers of unmarried women placed their children for adoption—the percentage of never-married women who relinquish their infants has declined from nearly 9 percent to less than 1 percent.In 2010, Bethany Christian Services, the largest Protestant adoption agency in the U.S., placed more than 700 infants in private adoptions. Last year, it placed fewer than 300. International adoptions have not closed the gap. The number of children American parents adopt each year from abroad has declined rapidly too, from 23,000 in 2004 (an all-time high) to about 3,000 in 2019.Plenty of children who aren’t babies need families, of course. More than 100,000 children are available for adoption from foster care. But adoptive parents tend to prefer children who are what some in the adoption world call “AYAP”—as young as possible. When I recently searched AdoptUSKids, the nationwide, government-funded website for foster-care adoptions, only about 40 kids under age 5, out of the 4,000 registered, appeared in my search. Many of those 40 had extensive medical needs or were part of a sibling group—a sign that the child is in even greater need of a stable family, but also a more challenging experience for their adoptive parents.At a glance, this shortage of adoptable babies may seem like a problem, and certainly for people who desperately want to adopt a baby, it feels like one. But this trend reflects a number of changing social and geopolitical attitudes that have combined to shrink the number of babies or very young children available for adoption. Over the past few decades, many people—including those with strong commitments to the idea of infant adoption—have reconsidered its value to children. Though in the short term this may be painful for parents who wish to adopt infants, in the long term, it might be better for some children and their birth families. Many babies in the developing world who once would have been brought to America will now be raised in their home country instead. And Americans who were planning to adopt may have to refocus their energies on older, vulnerable foster children—or change their plans entirely. Infant adoption was once seen as a heartwarming win-win for children and their adoptive parents. It’s not that simple.For much of American history, placing a child for adoption was an obligation, not a choice, for poor, single women. In the decades after World War II, more than 3 million young pregnant women were “funneled into an often-coercive system they could neither understand nor resist,” Gabrielle Glaser wrote in her recent book, American Baby. They lived with strangers as servants or were hidden away in maternity homes until they gave birth, at which time they were pressured into closed adoptions, in which birth mothers and their babies have no contact.Data on adoption are and have always been fuzzy and incomplete; for decades, no one tracked many of the adoptions that were happening in the U.S., and not all states reported their adoption figures. “There are no valid numbers from the ’40s and ’50s” because “just about all of these transfers existed in a realm of secrecy and shame, all around,” the historian Rickie Solinger told me. Still, adoption researchers generally agree that adoptions of children by people who aren’t their relatives increased gradually from about 34,000 in 1951 to their peak of 89,000 in 1970, before declining to about 69,000 in 2014—a number that includes international adoptions and foster-care adoptions. Given population growth, the decline from 1970 indicates a 50 percent per capita decrease.What happened? Starting in the ’70s, single white women became much less likely to relinquish their babies at birth: Nearly a fifth of them did so before 1973; by 1988, just 3 percent did. (Single Black women were always very unlikely to place their children for adoption, because many maternity homes excluded Black women.) In 1986, an adoption director at the New York Foundling Hospital told The New York Times that though “there was a time, about 20 years ago, when New York Foundling had many, many white infants,” the number of white infants had “been very scarce for a number of years.”Still, throughout this era, American families adopted thousands of infants and toddlers from foreign countries. In the ’50s, a mission to rescue Korean War orphans sparked a trend of international adoptions by Americans. Over the years, international adoptions increased, and Americans went on to adopt more than 100,000 kids from South Korea, Romania, and elsewhere from 1953 to 1991. In 1992, China opened its orphanages to Americans and allowed them to take in thousands of girls abandoned because of the country’s one-child policy.But to many American evangelical Christians, these numbers were still too low to combat what they considered to be a global orphan crisis. During the ’90s, evangelicals in particular kindled a new foreign- and domestic-adoption boom, as the journalist Kathryn Joyce detailed in her 2013 book, The Child Catchers, which was critical of the trend. In the late 1990s, Joyce reported, representatives from Bethany Christian Services and other adoption agencies occasionally pressured single women to relinquish their babies, gave them false impressions about the nature of adoption, and threatened them when they changed their mind. (Bethany cannot verify the negative accounts of its practices that appear in Joyce’s book, Nathan Bult, the group’s senior vice president of public and government affairs, told me. In an interview, Joyce stood by her reporting.) A major 2007 meeting of Christian groups led to a “campaign to enroll more Christians as adoptive and foster parents,” the Los Angeles Times’ Stephanie Simon reported that year. The practice of adoption was seen as parallel to evangelical Christians’ “adoption by God” when they are born again. American Christians went on to adopt tens of thousands of children from other countries. “Early on, there was a strong belief that adoption could often be the best outcome for a child whose mom may have felt unable to parent,” Kris Faasse, who ran several of Bethany’s programs from 2000 to 2019, told me.In recent years, though, international adoption has slowed to a trickle because of changes abroad and within American adoption agencies. During the foreign-adoption boom, most of the children adopted from abroad found happy homes in the U.S. Some, however, turned out to not really be orphans, but instead children placed in orphanages temporarily by their impoverished parents. This sparked reforms and had a chilling effect on their home countries’ policies. Some of the most popular source countries for adoptable children—including Russia, Guatemala, and Ethiopia—shut down their adoption programs years ago because of corruption scandals or tensions with the U.S. government. China expanded its domestic-adoption program and reversed its one-child policy in 2015, dramatically reducing the number of girls who were relinquished for adoption.Then, last year, Bethany closed its international-adoption program, instead focusing on its in-country foster-care and adoption programs. (In other words, Ethiopians, not Americans, will adopt Ethiopian children.) The Christian Alliance for Orphans, which helped launch the American Christian adoption boom 14 years ago, now says that the priority in international adoption should be keeping a child with her family or, failing that, placing her with a stranger in her home country, and taking the child abroad only if the first two options aren’t available. “And always, always, in that order,” Jedd Medefind, the president of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, told me recently.Even Joyce, the Child Catchers author and a critic of the evangelical adoption movement, says the groups have changed. About four years ago, Joyce appeared on a Christian Alliance for Orphans panel, and even then she noticed more talk of family preservation. The adoption movement had seemingly grappled with the criticism, she told me. Plus, there are now so few international adoptions that, “on a practical level, it probably just doesn’t make as much sense to have a movement that is advocating for that so hard.”As international adoptions have declined, parallel cultural changes have led to a reduction in American babies who would, in an earlier era, likely have been relinquished. The American birth rate is at an all-time low. Teens, who are less likely to be ready to raise children than older women, are getting pregnant at the lowest rates ever. Single motherhood is less taboo, so although unwed women, who were once more likely than married people to place their children for adoption, are now having 40 percent of all babies, for the most part they are choosing to raise their children themselves.Some imagine that outlawing abortion might create a rise in adoptions, but that’s unlikely. In one study, only 9 percent of the women who were denied an abortion chose adoption. Even as single parenthood has become less stigmatized, placing a child for adoption has become more so. Adoption is “an extremely rare pregnancy decision,” Gretchen Sisson, a sociologist at the University of California at San Francisco, told me.And in addition to rethinking international adoption, some groups are also reconsidering whether single, poor American women should be encouraged to place their babies for adoption. They seemed to have absorbed the growing concern that people of color are surrendering their children to white adoptive parents, the bad press about families who weren’t equipped to raise their newly adopted children, and the idea that “families belong together” should apply to poor people too. Over the past 20 years, “there was a shift,” Faasse, the former Bethany staffer, told me, “toward ensuring that mom was fully informed of her options ... ‘Let’s not just look at what your decision is today, but what will it look like in the future?’”Bethany is now trying to help struggling American birth mothers parent their own children, as growing numbers of single women aim to do. In 2019, the group created a special program for drug-addicted birth moms intended to help them stay with their babies. Another program connects struggling birth parents with supportive families, with the aim of preventing the removal of the birth parents’ children. “At Bethany, we want to do all we can do, first and foremost, to keep kids with their birth families when it is safe and possible to do so,” Cheri Williams, Bethany’s senior vice president of domestic programs, told me. The next best choice after that, she said, isn’t adoption by strangers, but rather by the child’s relatives.These changes won’t eliminate abuses within the adoption industry. A process that involves people surrendering their biological children is bound to be fraught. Still, a single, pregnant woman is likely to have a different experience with an organization like Bethany today than she would have decades ago. “Expanding the numbers of children who are adopted domestically, for the sake of expanding the numbers of children who are adopted domestically, is not something that we want to be doing,” Bult, at Bethany, told me. “An expectant mom should never be coerced into making an adoption plan for her child,” he added.To adoption reformers, the practice is now largely seen as a way to provide families for older, special-needs children rather than a way to provide healthy babies to people who want to parent. The result is often a difficult, expensive process for couples who want to adopt a baby or toddler. Adopting a newborn can cost $45,000 or more. “There is increasingly an advertising bid war to find birth parents,” Daniel Nehrbass, the president of Nightlight Christian Adoptions, told me. A cottage industry of adoption “facilitators” has sprung up that “may charge $25,000, which is basically an advertising fee to the family in order to find the birth mom.”Though adoption experts told me that most people who pursue infant adoption are ultimately successful, some spend their savings to do it or wait years to adopt: One survey found that 37 percent of adoptive families wait longer than a year. Others encounter scams or birth mothers who change their mind. The journalist Erika Celeste had been trying to adopt a baby girl for years when she was tricked by Gabby Watson, a notorious adoption scammer who posed as a pregnant woman and strung along hundreds of hopeful families. Nearly every adoptive parent I interviewed for this story said that the grueling process was worth it in the end—even though “the end” invariably came after an emotional spin cycle.But aspiring adoptive parents who are disappointed by a difficult system might not get the chance to see the other side of these changes—the one in which poor, single women get to parent their own babies, even if they never thought they could. Bult introduced me to Brijon Ellis, a 24-year-old in Ypsilanti, Michigan, who exemplifies this shift. When Ellis got pregnant at 15, she told me, a family member pressured her into placing her daughter into a closed adoption through Bethany. After signing the adoption paperwork, Ellis remembers crying so hard in the hospital that her face swelled.Three years later, at 18, Ellis got pregnant again, this time with twins. Ellis called Dawn, the same Bethany social worker who had arranged her daughter’s adoption, to learn about her options. But this time, whenever Dawn mentioned adoption, Ellis grew teary-eyed and equivocal. Dawn picked up on her reluctance, Ellis said.Instead, Dawn told her about Safe Families, a Bethany program that gives struggling birth parents clothes, food, child care, and other support. Ellis carried her twin boys to term, and they are now 5 years old and living with her. “As soon as I figured out and made a decision that I was going to have these boys, my mindset changed,” Ellis told me. “I became more wise. I had this wisdom just fall over me.” She seemed pleasantly surprised at her own ability to be a mother, once she finally got the chance.