We know how quickly Congress responded last week to air travelers who had to wait an extra hour or two to get to their travel destinations.
Imagine waiting 28 years.
That’s how long a person — a single mother with a child, for example, working at a low-wage job – may have to wait for housing assistance for a one-bedroom apartment in the District of Columbia, according to a District government Office of the Inspector General report in March. And that was before the federal budget sequester forced cuts in a range of already inadequately funded housing assistance programs.
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Years-long waits for affordable housing are the norm throughout the country, with cities like Washington keeping waiting lists of more than 40,000 applicants. But the cruelty of the federal budget sequester is that the people whose waits were finally about to pay off are now being turned away.
“Between now and September 30, the cumulative effects will be quite significant,” warned Linda Couch, senior vice president for policy and research at the National Low-Income Housing Coalition.
An estimated 140,000 families will be denied housing assistance vouchers this year as a result of sequestration, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. “Sequestration will also contribute to further losses of public housing, impede the development of affordable housing for low-income seniors and people with disabilities, cause more low-income children to be exposed to lead-based paint in older rental housing, and cut counseling services for families at risk of foreclosure,” the center said in an April report.
In Fairfax County, Va., where several members of Congress live when they are in Washington, Elmer Gilbert Winn Jr. may be, because of the sequester, about to become homeless, just as he was 12 years ago. According to The Washington Post, the disabled 59-year-old lost a housing voucher he had just received because of the funding cut. That voucher would have enabled him to move from an apartment he has been sharing for the past 12 years with another seriously ill person who may have to move to a nursing home. The money he gets from Social Security, $710 a month, wouldn’t cover the rent for an apartment anywhere in the Washington area.
Winn used to sleep behind stores in Fairfax or in the woods, and he told The Post, “I can’t live outside … no way. I can barely survive indoors, going room to room.”
There are more stories like this from all over the country in the weekly Sequester Impact reports produced by the Coalition for Human Needs.
“There are some myths about housing assistance,” notes Couch of NLIHC, and chief among them right now is that housing aid is protected from spending cuts in the same way that the SNAP, or “food stamp,” program and Medicaid was spared. But unlike the SNAP program, Medicare and Medicaid, “housing assistance is not an entitlement in this country,” Couch said. And for that reason “housing programs are taking hits across the board.”
In the District, the city’s housing authority has for the first time in its history closed its waiting list for low-income housing. So have other housing authorities around the country. And, as Couch explained, cutbacks this in the voucher program will have ripple effects for years, since a housing authority’s future allotment is based on the number of vouchers used in the previous year. The voucher cuts are “really a sadistic exercise,” she said.
They are also costly. Jobs are hard enough to come by for people with stable addresses; try landing a job if your address is a shelter or, worse, the street. Children of parents who don’t have stable, affordable housing are more likely to fail in school, and the rest of us pay for the consequences. Even if the parent has an apartment, the child suffers if that parent has to work two or three jobs to pay rent and basic expenses. When communities don’t have funds to rehabilitate vacant properties so that they can become stable, affordable homes, it’s not just the people who need to occupy those homes who lose out; entire communities become losers as those properties remain blights that pull down property values and make the community less safe.
In addition to the jobs crisis we’ve repeatedly stressed, America also has a housing crisis. One symptom of that crisis: The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently estimated that the number of unassisted renters with “worst-case housing needs” — people with income that is less than 50 percent of the median income of the area they are residing in and who either pay more than half of their meager income for housing or pay for housing that is severely substandard – is now 8.5 million, a 43 percent increase since 1977.
That’s 8.5 million people, among millions more who are financially struggling and in need of an affordable roof over their heads, who could use a sense of urgency from Congress right now. And what they need is not what airline passengers got – money robbed from the future to pay for the present. What they need – what we need – is an end to the sequester and an end to the austerity policies borne out of conservative obstruction. In the manic obsession to reduce the federal budget deficit, we are creating human deficits that are far worse.
Tell Congress a years-long wait for a place to live should get at least a much of their attention as a hours-long wait at an airport. Tell your member of Congress to repeal the sequester.
