State of Housing: A Growing Insecurity Crisis

This post is part of a series in which LinkedIn Influencers analyze the state and future of their industry. Read all the posts here.

Each day, before I head to the office, I take a moment to reflect on the enormous challenge before my organization. We’re working in communities across the country to tackle some of the most pressing housing problems facing low-income families, and our work has never been more important.

To me, housing is so much more than shelter—it’s a foundation that gives families a fair shot at success. Doing well in school, landing a good job and staying healthy can easily fall out of reach if you don't know where you're sleeping tonight or how you'll make this month's rent. A safe and stable home is the essential first rung on the ladder of opportunity, but that rung is beyond the reach of too many families today.

In cities across the U.S., rents are rising, wages are stagnating and working families are having a harder time finding a decent home that they can afford. As a result, millions of working families are barely scraping by, living just one unforeseen event from disaster, while hundreds of thousands more have already reached the tipping point.

On any given night, more than 600,000 people sleep on the streets or in homeless shelters, nearly a quarter of whom are children. I see it every day in my home city of New York, where there are enough homeless children to fill Madison Square Garden and still leave four thousand without a seat.

A much larger group—more than 19 million families—live on the brink, paying more than half of their monthly income on housing. They are the near-homeless, the next-homeless, often just one paycheck away from losing their homes—and many are left with the impossible choice between paying rent and buying groceries.

Think about it: millions of families, every day and in every community, living in crisis. Mothers and fathers riddled with anxiety over how they’ll cover rent this month. Parents trying to keep their children healthy when they’re living in a mold-infested, dilapidated apartment. Children trying to concentrate in school when they spent the previous night in a crowded shelter.

These are the families I think about when I get up for work each morning. They are the faces of America’s worsening housing insecurity crisis.

Today almost 30 percent of renters pay more than half of their monthly income on housing, an all-time high. There are just over 12 million extremely low-income renters in the U.S., but less than 7 million apartments they can afford—a supply gap that has more than doubled over the past decade. And these trends aren’t expected to change anytime soon.

Meanwhile, as demand continues to rise, public resources that support our work are dwindling due to budget cuts. That’s forcing us to do more with less just to maintain our current level of support, while millions of families stay stuck in unfit or unaffordable housing.

This is more than just a housing problem—we are facing a broad social crisis. Studies show that kids who are homeless or in unstable or poor-quality housing are more likely to have serious physical health problems like asthma, more likely to suffer from a developmental disability or a mental health issue, less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to abuse substances or spend time in jail. And that doesn’t even account for the stress it puts on adults—their health, their relationships, their work. Each of those outcomes has serious implications on our society, not to mention the government’s budget.

This is the current state of the affordable housing industry: skyrocketing demand, shrinking supply and rapidly disappearing support from the public sector. But it doesn’t have to be the future.

As a country, we devote too little attention and woefully few resources to affordable housing, and that won’t change until we urge our elected officials to make it a priority. For too long we’ve accepted homelessness and housing insecurity as facts of life. We shy away from serious conversations: Why are so many individuals and families still left behind? How can we stand by as millions of families live on the brink of economic catastrophe?

Despite yesterday’s setbacks and today’s roadblocks, I am hopeful about tomorrow. Homelessness is a solvable problem. Housing insecurity is a solvable problem. And I’m excited to work together toward a day when every person in this country has access to a safe and stable home in a community filled with opportunity.

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Enjoyed this post? Read what other Influencers had to say:

• David H. Stevens on the State of Real Estate: Has Housing Really Recovered?
• John Burns on the State of Housing: Booming, Busting and Muddling Along
• Pete Flint on State of Real Estate: Not Your Father’s Industry

Photo: Dejan Stanisavljevic/Shutterstock