NPACH Perspective:
New Year's Resolution Out of Touch
"If you don't already own a home, I'd like to suggest that becoming a homeowner in 2005 be among your New Year's resolutions. As long as you have a steady salary, good credit, and few long-term debts, purchasing a home is probably within your reach."
U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Alphonso Jackson
HUD News Release, December 22, 2004
Each year the
National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) issues the
publication Out of Reach, a report documenting the
struggle low-income individuals and families face in
accessing and maintaining affordable housing. Utilizing a
measure called the “housing wage,” this year’s
report indicates that that there is not a single jurisdiction
in the country where a person working full time earning the
prevailing minimum wage can afford a two bedroom rental home.
Other indices of the nation’s housing crisis have become
all too familiar: More than fourteen million households pay
over half their income on housing; five million households
suffer from ‘worst case’ housing needs; and as many
as 3.5 million Americans, of which over one million are
children, lack housing altogether.
Despite these
sobering statistics, the Administration continues to glorify
homeownership as its sole housing strategy for American
households, ignoring the fact that the increased
privatization of the national housing stock has directly
contributed to the depletion of affordable housing and to an
increase in homelessness. Moreover, affordable housing
production initiatives, rental assistance, and emergency
shelter programs have been short-changed. As an example, in
2004 we witnessed the squeezing of the Section 8 program and
the continued dismantling of USDA rural housing, a $19
million dollar cut to the McKinney-Vento homeless assistance
program, cuts totaling over $57 million to housing for
persons with HIV/AIDS, persons with disabilities, and the
elderly, and resistance to a national housing production
program. Such budget cuts and policies hardly represent
appropriate tools or effective strategies to create a nation
of homeowners, unless social Darwinism happens to be the
model.
Record levels
of homeownership are to be applauded, but not at the expense
of affordable alternatives. Indeed, if purchasing a home were
only as easy as the HUD Secretary suggests, and a
“steady salary, good credit, and few long term
debts” were trivial matters, than perhaps the numbers
produced in NLIHC’s annual report might not be as
ominous. Sadly, while Out of Reach tells us that the
housing affordability gap is widening, the HUD Secretary
seems to be telling us that the Administration is out of
touch.