Got Housing?

In October, the House of Representatives passed legislation called the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund Act, and the bill has been introduced in the Senate. If it is signed into law, it will create 1.5 million new units of affordable housing stock over the next 10 years, primarily serving low-income renters. This sound great, but given the scale of the problem low-income families face in obtaining affordable housing, the Trust Fund Act really only begins to get at what’s needed in the way of reform.

Last month I blogged about the connection between housing and hunger. This is a subject on my mind a lot since we began studying it in Working Harder for Working Families. About one in four families that qualify for housing assistance receive it. In some areas of the country, people have been on waiting lists for up to a decade. Nationally the average wait time is more than two years. Another problem is the income eligibility requirement. Frankly, income eligibility does not correspond to the reality of housing costs around the country. If income levels were more in line with what housing actually costs, the number of people who should be eligible for assistance would multiply exponentially. 

Housing is the costliest item in almost every family’s budget. The National Low-Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) released data in 2006 on what an average two-bedroom apartment costs when converted to an hourly wage.  The data show there isn’t a state in the country where a modest two-bedroom unit could be had for less than $10 per hour. A two-bedroom unit in New Jersey requires an hourly wage of more than $21 per hour, equivalent to an annual income of more than twice the poverty threshold for a family of four. NLIHC created a map showing wage rates across the country, and I encourage you to look at it if you are having trouble making the connection between housing and hunger. This map is a startling illustration of how important the issue of housing assistance should be for anyone who cares about people at risk of hunger.

According to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, 3.5 million people, 1.35 million of them children, go homeless each year. That's about 10 percent of people living in poverty. There are several reasons why people become homeless but generally it is not being able to afford shelter. Where there is homelessness there is poverty and where there is poverty there is of course hunger. If 10 percent alarms you, as it does me, one conclusion we must draw is too few people are receiving housing assistance.

Housing programs assume that families spend about one-third of their income on housing. Thanks to studies like the one by NLIHC, we see how ludicrous that assumption is when a family's breadwinner is working a low-wage job. For poor families, the truth is usually they have to spend around half of their budget on housing. In many major urban areas, it’s not uncommon for it to rise to two-thirds and even three-fourths of their income. This doesn’t leave a lot of money for food, now does it?   

Comments

[Estate Agents Finder]

Simply creating new housing stockc wont help this indystyr, you need to find som real solution to the probem