I recently read Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. It was an eye-opening read that made abundantly clear the link between housing and the downward spiral into lifelong poverty that is a reality for many Americans. Desmond’s firsthand accounts shine a light on what poverty looks like, how easy it is to fall into, and how impossible it can be to extricate oneself from it. Most importantly, his writings reveal the central role of housing, housing policies, and exploitation in the continuing cycle of poverty in the U.S. While the book is set in Milwaukee, the situation is not much different for our Baltimore City neighbors – or even right here in Howard County.
If you’re like me, living a comfortable middle-class life in one of the wealthier suburban counties in the U.S., you may not fully grasp the reality of the housing crisis in this country. You are likely aware of growing homeless populations in American cities such as Minneapolis or San Francisco. You are likely aware of the vacant houses and slums in Baltimore; a story like this one in Baltimore City tweeted by Carol Ott of the Fair Housing Action Center of Maryland may elicit an unsurprised shrug from suburbanites. But these success stories from Howard County’s Bridges to Housing Stability show that the housing affordability crisis is not limited to urban centers; it is everywhere, from cities to suburbs to rural areas.
A tangled web of policies and economic shifts have brought us here, where the National Low Income Housing Coalition reports that 75% of all extremely low income families pay more than half their income on rent and that there is no state or county where a renter working full-time at minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment. Read that again: there is no state or county in the U.S. where a full-time, minimum-wage job will support rent for a family. That includes Howard County, where the NLIHC reports that a quarter of the households in this county are renters; the remaining statistics are sobering, where an $11 minimum wage in Maryland means that approximately $570 is considered to be an affordable amount of rent to pay, but Howard County’s fair market rent for a two-bedroom unit is nearly $1400. For folks whose income consists only of disability or other government assistance, the gap between affordable rent and market rent is even greater. When rent eats up a significant portion of a household’s income, all it takes is one crisis – a trip to the emergency room, a broken-down car, a lost job – to fall behind on rent, face eviction, and sink deeper into the quicksand of poverty.
And this was all before anyone had ever heard of coronavirus.
COVID-19 has made the nationwide housing crisis exponentially worse as job losses have led to missed housing payments. As moratoriums on failure-to-pay evictions and rent/unemployment assistance programs threaten to expire before the pandemic has ended, let alone before the economy has recovered, America faces an unprecedented economic and housing catastrophe. During a time when Americans are being urged to stay home for their safety, many face no longer having a home in which to stay safe.
Howard County is no different. Our own housing crisis was apparent prior to the pandemic, and it has been exacerbated by COVID-19. In the short term, all levels of government must step up with funding and policy changes to ensure that COVID-related home loss is avoided; in the long term, all levels of government must step up with funding and policy changes to expand, and to remove barriers to, the building and leasing of stable, affordable housing. As citizens, it is incumbent upon us to understand the realities of the housing crisis and its impact on the financial stability of families so that we may serve as champions of, and not barriers to, affordable housing in our communities. Desmond’s book is an excellent place to start.
Shelter is a human need; therefore housing is a human right.