Leadership Award Winners Challenge Myths about the Real Housing Crisis

Washington, DC – Public perception about housing and homelessness may be as big an obstacle to addressing the housing crisis as inadequate public funding, according to several winners of the Ford Foundation's 2002 and 2001 Leadership for a Changing World award.

"Many politicians would have you believe that affordable housing is a lost cause. Nothing could be further from the truth," says Brad Lander, Executive Director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, a community development corporation that has created hundreds of affordable housing units, with residents now collectively owning most of these units in Brooklyn. "Ask Ricardo Sosa, a N.Y.C. firefighter who was part of the rescue effort on September 11, 2001," says Lander. Sosa's battalion lost over 20 men that day. The sad truth is that N.Y.C. firefighters cannot afford to live in the city they protect. A lifelong Brooklynite, Sosa recently thought his family would be forced out by rising housing prices.

But now, Sosa owns a beautiful two-family home just one mile from his firehouse. He bought the home at below-market price from Fifth Avenue Committee, agreeing to rent an attached unit to a low-income family at an affordable rate. "You see, affordable housing programs work. My family and I are living proof," Sosa said in a recent speech. "Keeping firefighters living in our neighborhoods is a good investment."

Indeed, innovative housing programs are good investments for middle-class families in need of affordable housing, and the homeless, across the country. Winners of the Leadership for a Changing World award are achieving remarkable, replicable successes in urban, suburban and rural America; one is successfully fighting to prevent AIDS patients from joining the ranks of the homeless.

Meanwhile, the related crises of homelessness and scarcity of affordable housing are growing:

• Requests by cities for emergency shelter assistance are up 19 percent, the steepest rise in a decade.¹ Yet the federal housing assistance budget has dropped 51 percent since 1976.²
• The number of working families who spend more than half their incomes on rental or purchased housing has jumped 30 percent in just two years.³
• One in seven Americans either live in substandard housing or spend over half their incomes on housing.⁴
• Families with children make up 39 percent of the homeless population.⁵
• There is a nationwide shortage of five million affordable rental units.⁶
• One million Americans will be homeless tonight.⁷

President Bush will introduce affordable housing legislation in Congress next month. Community leaders across the nation are mobilized to take action to alleviate homelessness and the scarcity of affordable housing, but this will require political will and a recognition of already existing, successful approaches. Through innovative housing and employment programs, these winners of the Ford award are enabling their communities to give Americans the real security of a place to call home.

Three themes in their work stand out:

• Creating affordable housing demands thinking outside the box, using common sense and common lessons — but no single solution fits all communities.
• The affordable housing crisis and homelessness are related, but housing is only part of the solution to homelessness. Community housing leaders describe the need for "supportive housing" or a "continuum of care."
• Successful, replicable models do exist — but many Americans do not know about them.

These leaders challenge the widely held beliefs that all homeless people are single, mentally ill men who live in big cities and do not work (because they either do not want to or cannot); that affordable housing comes in one form — federally funded, high-rise projects; that shelter, alone, is what the homeless need; and that homelessness is an inexorably rising tide.

Lack of information and the mythology of hopelessness are exacting an increasing toll. Many cities are simultaneously turning away from the American dream of affordable housing and turning their backs on the homeless. On Oct. 30, the Washington Post reported: "Fed up with growing hordes of homeless people begging and sleeping on their streets, cities across the country have begun taking desperate new steps to restrict their behavior, or to run them out of town."

But the future does not have to be this way.

Attachments

• Editorial Memorandum: Five Myths About Homelessness and The Affordable Housing Crisis
• Op-Ed: Affordable Housing, Reinvented: Now Can We Build Some?
• Op-Ed: The Other Affordable Housing Crisis: The Unfortunate Secret of the HIV/AIDS Crisis
• Op-Ed: The Truth About The "Real Beverly Hillbillies"

Sources

¹ Twenty-five-city survey released December 18, 2002 by U.S. Conference of Mayors
² National Low-Income Housing Coalition (as quoted in USA Today)
³ America's Working Families and the Housing Landscape, by the National Housing Conference's Center for Housing Policy, analyzing Federal data from 1997 to 2001
⁴ America's Working Families and the Housing Landscape, by the National Housing Conference's Center for Housing Policy, analyzing Federal data from 1997 to 2001
⁵ Twenty-five-city survey released December 18, 2002 by U.S. Conference of Mayors
⁶ Housing advocates (as quoted in USA Today)
⁷ National Alliance to End Homelessness

Copyright © 2009 Institute for Sustainable Communities
Leadership for a Changing World, Institute for Sustainable Communities
1629 K Street, NW  Suite 200  Washington DC  20006-1629
p 202.777.7560    f 202.777.7577

Site by NetCampaign