While there is racial disparity in homelessness, it knows no boundaries. The rural homeless are "more likely to be white, female, married, currently working, homeless for the first time, and homeless for a shorter period of time."
Any lower-income or middle-class person who pays more than 30 percent of their income for shelter suffers from housing injustice. Anyone whose children attend segregated schools suffers from housing injustice. Anyone whose landlord refuses to make necessary repairs suffers from housing injustice.
In 1950, the average American household spent more on food than it did on housing. Ten years later, housing had crept past food as a percentage of the household budget. By 2016, the average household spent between two and three times as much on housing as it did on food.
Housing is a nationwide crisis. A person working a minimum-wage job in 2017 could not afford a two-bedroom apartment in any county in the United States.
And the culprits are the same ones driving so many of our other social crises. Many of them are based on Wall Street, and all of them put profits over people.
Many families lost their homes in the financial crisis of 2008, driving up rental prices around the country. Many of the same banks who helped cause the crisis bought up foreclosed properties and turned them into rentals, profiting from the tragedy they created.
Time for Ideas -- and ActionTo end this national disgrace, we need to come up with big and bold housing initiatives -- and we need to make them a fundamental part of the progressive agenda. They should start from a simple, clear declaration: Housing is a human right.
That means that everyone has the right to shelter. It means that everyone's home should be safe, healthy, and affordable. And it means that no child should grow up in housing conditions that limit her or his ability to prosper and flourish.
Some groups are pushing neoliberal solutions to housing shortages, like the "YIMBY" movement to encourage unrestrained construction. This will lead to a proliferation of luxury housing, not affordable homes. The free market has proven incapable of reliably meeting certain social needs. Government, not the mythical free market, must drive the solutions.
How can we turn these ideals into action? We need a national conversation about that, but here are some places to start:
...Build publicly-funded social housing -- lots of it
Current housing initiatives have failed to meet the need. They're severely under-funded, which is a large part of the problem. But programs like Section 8 depend on the private sector to maintain and manage rental properties. At the same time, governments have stopped building public housing, and are not adequately maintaining the housing that already exists.
We need big, bold initiatives in housing construction. Ryan Cooper and Peter Gowan have a plan to build 10 million units of "social housing" that would house both fully-subsidized, low-income families and middle-class renters paying "solidarity rents." This would help subsidize the housing, while also helping to reduce the racial and class segregation that is now endemic
(The full proposal is available from the Public Policy Project, here. Video of my conversation with Cooper about the plan is here.)
...Housing reparations for black and brown communities
Communities of color have been the targets of financial exploitation for many decades. Of the homes in these communities are still underwater, while residents pay more in lending costs for home and car loans. The corporations that have exploited them should be required to make reparations by funding financial reinvestment, affordable loans for community members, principal reduction, and other programs of restitution.
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