John,

There are a little over three months left in the year and Congress has a major spending bill to pass. But there’s one major piece missing: support for housing assistance.

According to recently released survey data by the U.S. Census Bureau, 43% of households earning $50,000 or less were spending over half of their income on rent.¹ It’s a common rule of thumb that your housing cost should be no more than 30% of your gross income. But with rising housing costs and stagnant wages, that’s becoming more and more unachievable.

Right now, a full-time worker needs to earn $25.82 per hour to afford a modest, two-bedroom rental home and $21.25 per hour to afford a modest, one-bedroom rental home.²

Eviction rates are back to pre-pandemic levels, with Black people and Latino people disproportionately facing the highest rates. 13% of Black renters have faced the threat of eviction, which is nearly double the rate of white renters.³

We’re in a severe affordable housing crisis that has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic and skyrocketing inflation. Congress needs to act now and fund programs that will keep people housed and help prevent evictions.

In the spending bill that will pass at the end of the year, Congress needs to expand housing vouchers at least to an additional 200,000 households, allocate over $10 billion to fund, preserve, and operate public housing, and provide $100 million for legal assistance to prevent evictions. If Congress can afford to give billions of dollars in tax breaks to the wealthy and major corporations, they can certainly afford to house people living in the U.S.

Congress must act to expand affordable housing! Write a letter to your members of Congress and tell them to fund housing programs now!

People deserve access to safe, stable, affordable housing. It’s a human right. As inflation continues to cause pain at the gas pump and grocery stores, wages aren’t keeping up. In fact, 66% of workers say that inflation has outpaced the wage gains they’ve made in the past year.⁴

It’s said that a budget is a moral document. Now is the time to ask our representatives what and who they truly value. Is it the poor, vulnerable, and marginalized? Or is it the wealthy elite who fund their campaign coffers?

Our current housing crisis is tearing families and communities apart. It cannot continue like this. Write to your senators and representative and tell them to act now and include funding to expand affordable housing in this year's must-pass spending bill.

Thank you for all you do,

Deborah Weinstein
Executive Director, Coalition on Human Needs

¹ https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?text=B25074&tid=ACSDT1Y2021.B25074
² https://nlihc.org/
³ https://www.npr.org/2022/08/09/1112895439/eviction-affordable-housing
⁴ https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/27/two-thirds-of-american-workers-say-pay-not-keeping-up-with-inflation.html