Three Big Things

This originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog, Housing Is A Human Right

Periodically, this weekly newsletter will list interesting developments on the path to a fully-realized human right to housing. This week’s three big things:

1.     Gen Z Can’t Afford the Rent

That is the title of this New York Times article that derived from a Times survey about housing. The piece includes interviews with young paralegals, servers, and nonprofit workers who are paying as much as 85% of their income on rent:  

The rule of thumb that one’s cost of housing shouldn’t exceed 30 percent of their monthly income is becoming less realistic for many in Gen Z, typically defined as people born between the late 1990s and early 2010s. Homeownership feels unattainable — more than a third of Gen Z respondents in one survey said it’s something they think they’ll never be able to achieve .  .  . Renting hasn’t been an easy alternative either, with those in search of apartments facing bidding wars and high rent costs. About one third of the generation’s adults live with their parents and plan on staying with them as a long-term housing solution. Others are sleeping in living rooms, rushing moving in with their partners and migrating out of big cities.

This is obviously a bad situation for these young people. But it is also ominous news for the defenders of the peculiar U.S. overreliance on housing as a for-profit commodity. Social movement history shows conclusively that as the group affected by injustice becomes larger and more diverse, the movement to remedy the injustice grows more powerful . A Colorado survey showed that a whopping 91% of young people ages 18-34 support rent control policies, including more than two-thirds who identify as Republicans.

No wonder rent control and other affordable housing proposals keep winning at the ballot box and a majority of Americans believe in universal housing vouchers.  

2.     Lack of Affordable Housing is Forcing People with Disabilities into Institutions

Shelby King of Shelterforce writes about how the 61 million adults living with disabilities in the U.S. may possess in abstract the hard-earned constitutional right to choose community living, many cannot exercise that right because of a lack of affordable housing. Millions are forced to live in nursing homes or other institutions. In our eviction court practice, we routinely see people priced out of the housing market because their entire income is a monthly $914 Supplemental Security Income (SSI) check.

“In no state in the United States is the SSI benefit enough to afford a one-bedroom apartment at full-market rent, even if you spent 100 percent of your benefits on rent,” King quotes Rebecca Vallas, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, saying. “You’re not allowed outside income without it counting against your benefits, so we as a government just decided we’re going to have people live at this sub-poverty level.”

King’s article includes several heartbreaking stories of people forced unnecessarily into nursing home settings which are unsuited for them. And she outlines several ways to stop this injustice—beginning with raising SSI payments to a level that matches the cost to live independently.

3.     Lack of Affordable Housing is Killing Children

We have cited here several times the unquestioned evidence shown by decades of research that housing insecurity causes profound negative effects on the health of children. Those effects include mental and physical health problems and developmental delays. We have also shared stories about our clients and others who have been forced to sleep in their cars with their children post-eviction.

Tragically, this September news report from Syracuse, New York shows the ultimate harm that evictions and housing insecurity can cause:  

The Syracuse Police Department now says the death of a one-year-old girl Dlyla Rolon, and serious injury of her parents, 36-year-old Joshua Rolon and 39-year-old Delilah Rodriguez, is believed to have been caused by carbon monoxide poisoning, as the car they were sleeping in was left running . . .

The family had been evicted from their home, which is why they slept in the car, and they had been sleeping in it for several days prior to being found unconscious in the parking lot around of Grant Village Apartments, in Syracuse’s Eastwood neighborhood, Wednesday morning.

I don’t have a clever close to this story. As people, as a nation, we just have to do better.