The US News & World Report has reposted a long and lachrymose Kansas City Star article on the growing shortage of affordable housing in Johnson County, Kansas.

Although detailed and reasonably fair–Neither Trump nor Brownback is faulted–the article by Lynn Horsley never dips below the surface. The reader gets no real sense of why there is a growing demand for the limited supply of low income housing in such a prosperous county at such a prosperous time.

Horsley does observe a bread crumb, but she chooses not to follow. “In Johnson County,” she writes, “30 percent of jobs pay less than $15 per hour, the [Johnson County Housing Coalition] said. Thus, one in four Johnson County residents is burdened by housing costs, spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent.”

The math here is a bit random, but Horsley presumes something that is true more often than not: the resident in question is unmarried. If each member of a married couple were making just $15 an hour, together they would be making $60,000 a year, enough to afford an unsubsidized market-rate apartment.

Although the media refuse to acknowledge the obvious, poverty in the United States is largely the result of family breakdown. One of the many contributors to family breakdown–the list is long–is the much prized Section 8 voucher.

Families that earn less than $40,000 a year are generally eligible for these vouchers. As Horsley notes, “The vouchers are key because they cover much of a rental unit’s costs and help assure that low-income residents pay no more than 40 percent of their income for shelter.” There are roughly 2,000 vouchers afloat in the county, and there is a demand for many more.

By the time HUD introduced the Section 8 program in 1974, the federal government had already sown the seeds for the corrosion of all public housing programs and the corruption of many of its residents. In an act of seeming compassion, the feds had shifted from fixed rents in public housing to rent based on income.

A female tenant who was paying a fixed rent had no reason not to get married. A female tenant who was paying 25 or 30 percent of the family income for rent had good reason not to add income. If Aid to Families with Dependent Children and Medicaid did not give a woman enough incentive to keep her man at a distance, sliding rent gave her one more.

When the transition was made in the 1960’s, public housing managers, at least the vigilant ones, were still checking the units to make sure only the people listed on the lease were living in the unit. With Section 8, the units were everywhere, and there was no manager to check. As often as not, a woman would fill out the lengthy household income form, get a voucher based on income, find a landlord willing to accept a Section 8 voucher, and then allow the man to move in.

As long as the woman paid her share of the rent, the landlord had no incentive to verify she was reporting the household income accurately. That was the government’s problem and, by and large, the program managers didn’t care. It wasn’t their money. Needless to say, this arrangement did nothing to encourage stable relations, let alone marriage.

A half century after Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty the body count continues to mount, even in Johnson County, Kansas.