I sat in the housing authority lobby for two hours to ask one question

I make decisions slowly, which mostly means I read things for months before I talk to a human. I finally decided the reading had stopped teaching me anything and drove to the housing authority office in the county I'm most serious about.

No appointment. I took a number. Two hours, most of it watching.

What I saw was a lobby full of tenants, not owners. I was the only person there in the owner line and that line was one chair. In the tenant line people were waiting to turn in paperwork, waiting to ask about a move, waiting on a portability question I didn't understand. The waitlist conversation happened three times while I sat there and the answer was always some version of it's closed.

That's the thing I came away with and it wasn't the thing I went for. I'd read that voucher demand exceeds the supply of participating units. Reading it is a sentence. Sitting in the room is different. There were people in that lobby who had a voucher in hand and could not find an owner who would take it.

My actual question, when I got to the window, was whether they publish the payment standards by bedroom size and where. The woman printed the sheet and handed it to me in about ninety seconds. Two hours for ninety seconds and I'd do it again, because the two hours were the part worth having.

I'm still not buying anything this year. But the picture in my head of who the tenant is has changed from an abstraction into a specific woman in a green coat who had been to that office three times about the same form.