How to Stop Housing from Becoming Unaffordable
Living in a large American city means you’re probably either paying too much for rent, living with too many people to make the rent, or struggling to make rent at all.
Housing is a basic human need. In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, shelter’s on the bottom level along with water, food, sleep, and clothing, the basics that people need to take care of before moving on to safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Having a roof over your head should be a basic human right, but lately housing insecurity has grown into a major concern, thanks to wages failing to rise to match inflation, and gentrification coming to historically Black and brown areas.
The main concern with housing today is the high price of rents. According to a Pew report analyzing data from 2015, 38% of renters are rent-burdened, which means they’re spending more than 30% of their income on rent. 17% of renters are spending half or more than half of their income on rent. The stats are worse for Black renters, with 46% being rent-burdened. Since many Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck, being rent-burdened can lead to housing insecurity, which ranges from moving homes often, to living in a home with too little rooms for the amount of people.
One large example of a housing rights struggle is happening in California, which just passed a state law that prohibits double-digit rent increases and no-fault evictions, but landlords have been rushing to raise rents and issue evictions before the law takes place in January. And thanks to years of discrimination and the racial wealth gap, it’s mostly Black and brown people being priced out of renting, let alone owning, a home.
Experiments in Housing Policy
There are housing policy changes that have been tested or established all over the world. Last July, Portugal’s parliament passed a Basic Housing Law that made its government responsible for ensuring housing for all citizens, according to City Lab. In addition to prioritizing affordable housing and banning evictions across Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, it creates a way for entire neighborhoods to lodge complaints about housing quality or proposed developments, with the hope that it’ll help curb gentrification in Lisbon.
Also, last year an experiment in Seattle addressed the opportunity gap between the segregated North and South sides. According to Vox, researchers in the city wondered why people who received housing vouchers didn’t try to move to a neighborhood that had more resources and schools with higher test scores. An experimental group received assistance along housing vouchers. They were told which neighborhoods had more opportunity for their kids, and had “navigators” to help them through the application process. The amount of families who moved to higher opportunity neighborhoods went from 14 percent without assistance, to 54 percent with assistance. The Vox article points out that this method could help alleviate housing segregation.
While it is early, and it’s hard to tell whether a housing policy change in one town or another country would work in America, these changes give hope that there is a way to stop the current trajectory of rising rents and growing housing insecurity.
