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Millions of Homeowners Suffer Housing Crisis

by Broderick Perkins

America's housing crisis isn't confined to decaying inner-city neighborhoods or people considered destitute, homeless or otherwise "needy".

People with a chronic need for housing assistance do comprise the bulk of the nearly 14 million families facing America's housing crisis. They include older Americans, people with physical and emotional disabilities, unemployed people and those otherwise dependent upon public assistance.

Among them, however, are three million families, most of whom own their homes and work full time at "middle-class" income jobs but, when it comes to housing, they are just as "needy".

They are teachers and day care workers, police officers and firefighters, nurses, tradespeople and other vital workers who comprise the backbone of many cities' work force. They live next door.

Left out of the so-called "new economy" they are one in seven American families who can't make ends meet because they spend most of their income on skyrocketing housing costs.

"The issues discussed here are not about welfare and poverty. On the contrary, our focus is on families who work and play by the rules, yet pay more than half their income for housing or live in severely dilapidated units," according to "Housing America's Working Families," a new, 56-page treatise that takes an atypical approach to America's festering housing crisis.

Exclusively focusing on very low-income families misses how deeply rooted America's housing crisis has become, says the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Housing Policy. The center developed the study -- one of four major housing-crisis studies this year -- and is an affiliate of New Century Housing, a 70-year-old public/private coalition of housing organizations created to help solve the nation's housing needs.

The center's chilling report focuses on a segment of the population largely ignored by current housing policy.

Home owners account for the majority of all working families with critical housing needs and the lack of decent, affordable housing is a condition that short circuits local economic growth and threatens to stymie the nation's longest economic boom.

The center found:

Fifty-one percent of all moderate income working families with critical housing needs own their homes. The report defines a "working family" as households that earn at least half its income from employment. Their total family income ranges from $10,700 a year -- the equivalent of a full-time job at the minimum wage -- to 120 percent of a given area's median income.

Having a job does not guarantee a working family a decent place to live at an affordable cost.

Some 650,000 working families occupy seriously substandard housing.

In just two years, from 1995 to 1997, the number of working families with critical housing needs rose by about 440,000, or 17 percent.

The number of working families with critical housing needs is higher in the suburbs (1.3 million) than it is in urban areas (1.2 million).

It takes two to provide housing. Moderate-income, single-earner families are 1.6 times more likely to have a critical housing need than families with two or more working adults.

Workers whose wages tied to the old economy struggle most. More than 730,000 working families with one or more blue-collar workers spend more than half their incomes for housing, as do more than 550,000 service workers and a similar number of retail sales workers. More than 220,000 teachers, police, and public safety officers across the country spend more than half their income for housing.

The incidence of critical housing needs among working families in some metropolitan areas is at least double the national rate. While about 10 percent of the nation's moderate-income working families suffer critical housing needs, the rate is 27 percent in San Jose; 26 percent in San Francisco; 20 percent in Boston and Tampa; 17 percent in Providence, and 16 percent in Washington, D.C.

To meet the housing needs of moderate- and middle-income American families, without diverting resources from the poor, the study calls for a national policy of flexible housing programs supported by tax incentives and appropriations, along with a curtailment of cost-prohibitive development restrictions

"In America, families who work and play by the rules should not have to pay more than half their income for housing nor live in severely dilapidated homes. A decent home in a suitable environment is a basic tenet of American life, yet our housing policy does not support this promise for working families of moderate income," the study says.

Published: June 29, 2000

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

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Broderick Perkins parlayed a career in old-school journalism into a contemporary digital news service that really hits home.

The award-winning consumer journalist, originally from Wilmington, DE, is founder, publisher and executive editor of the bootstrap DeadlineNews Group, a Silicon Valley-based editorial content and consulting service specializing in residential real estate, consumer news and related editorial consulting services.

The DeadlineNews Group includes the website, DeadlineNews.com, offering real estate editorial content and consulting services, and its back shop, the Deadline Newsroom, an open house on news that really hits home.

Perkins obtained his formal journalism education from University of Delaware and a journalism boot camp, the Institute of Journalism Education at the University of California-Berkeley. He went on to 20 years of service as a daily newspaper journalist at the Wilmington, DE News Journal and San Jose, CA Mercury News.

Perkins covered housing on the San Jose Mercury News reporting team which earned a General News Reporting Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake.

He has also produced real estate, consumer and small business content for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, RealtyTimes.com, Nolo.com, Better Homes and Gardens, the National Association of Realtors, Homestore/Move and Intuit/Quicken among more than three dozen publications.

In addition to managing the DeadlineNews Group, Perkins most recently served as chief editorial consultant for Nolo's Essential Guide To Buying Your First Home, Nolo, and writes real estate television scripts for RealtyTimes.com.

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