Imagine you’re a home health aide in Arlington...

Your alarm goes off at 4:45 a.m. You pack a quick lunch, check on your kids, and catch the first bus so you can help an older neighbor get out of bed safely, take her medications, and have breakfast before her daughter leaves for work.

You love your job. It matters. But by the time your shift ends, more than half of what you earned today is already spoken for by rent.

You share a two bedroom apartment that is officially called “affordable.” On paper, it is priced for a household earning much more than you do. In real life, after rent, you are left juggling groceries, gas, child care, and the unexpected costs that always seem to show up at the worst time. There is never quite enough room to breathe.

This new analysis shows that thousands of Arlington renters live in this kind of reality every single day.

Nearly 10,000 renter households in Arlington live on very low incomes, at or below 30% of the Area Median Income (AMI). That is about $49,000 per year for a family of four.

Only about 1,680 rental homes are priced at a level these neighbors can afford.

About three quarters of renters at this income level are severely cost burdened, paying more than half of their income for housing each month.

At the same time, most “affordable” housing in Arlington is priced for households with higher incomes. Since 2018, the number of rental homes affordable to those higher income bands has grown by more than 4,600 units. For renters at the very lowest income level, we gained only 95 new homes in the same period.

At Arlington Community Foundation, we are working to close this gap by focusing on deep affordability, housing that is truly within reach for neighbors like the one you just pictured. Our new paper explains what the most recent data shows, why this matters for our whole community, and how public and private resources can work together to keep more families stably housed here.

If you would like to dive deeper, we invite you to read the full paper here or at the button below.

Thank you for taking the time to understand this part of our community’s story.

About Arlington Community Foundation

Arlington Community Foundation provides the tools and expertise to personalize and maximize charitable giving, builds connections between community members, resources, and local nonprofits, and drives initiatives and advocacy to create economic opportunities and prevent displacement.

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