Recently, a woman contacted Columbia Community Care needing assistance; she was living out of her car in Harper’s Choice Village in Columbia, but it was in need of repair and a jump start. She had lost her job earlier in the pandemic, and she now had a new job, but she needed her car repaired so that she could drive to work. The woman, a veteran of the U.S. Army, updated the CCC Facebook group some time later and thanked them for their support and helping her get into a shelter.
There’s a man named Rod who has worked for years at my local village grocery store. He is probably in his 60s or 70s and is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. If I encounter him stocking shelves, he’ll ask if I need help finding anything. When checking out at the register, he’ll notice that I buy a lot of grapes and ask if I’ve ever tried eating them frozen as a treat. I don’t know where Rod lives, but I have often seen him walking to or from work, even in single-digit temperatures, never in a proper winter coat.
Some of you may be familiar with a gentleman named Athar Khan, affectionately known as the “Columbia Bike Guy.” Athar can often be seen riding his bike throughout Columbia, cleaning up trash out on the roadways, or visiting local businesses. He is friendly, greeting anyone who speaks to him with a smile and a peace sign, shaka, or añjali mudrā. Athar suffers from debilitating mental illnesses and lives in Section 8 housing in Harper’s Choice Village.
What do these anecdotes all have in common? They demonstrate the vital importance of affordable housing and public transit in our communities to ensure that people from all walks of life have the opportunity to enjoy living and working in Howard County.
Howard County’s cost of living statistics paint a bleak picture. According to MIT’s living wage calculator, a family of four needs a household income of roughly $60,000 just to make ends meet in this county, yet our minimum wage of $11 an hour adds up only to $23,000 a year. The minimum household income needed to rent a two-bedroom apartment in Howard County is $55,000 a year, but almost a quarter of HCPSS students meet the eligibility benchmark for receiving free and reduced-price meals, which is about $48,000 for a family of four. The calculus here becomes more complicated, and more dire, when you consider the cost of child care, health care, and transportation.
Housing is the bedrock of stability for any family, and life is extremely precarious without it. Families who are teetering on the edge of financial solvency are often one crisis away from an eviction, after which a cascade of impacts may lead to their succumbing to a level of poverty from which they may never be able to extricate themselves. However, accessibility to affordable housing and public transit ensure that lower-income families are more likely to avoid such an exigency – and it gives them a foundation on which to thrive rather than merely survive. For Howard County to be a community of opportunity for everyone, it must expand affordable housing and transit for those who need it – people in financial crisis, minimum-wage workers, the disabled, and many others.
I will be writing more about housing, specifically affordable housing, in the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned.