I'm a bit surprised to find myself on the front end of a bandwagon, but I guess that's what happens when an issue sneaks up on the public. The affordable housing crisis in the United States has been a moderate thorn in the sides of America's lower class for generations; now it's a middle class problem. It used to be an inner city issue; it's migrated to the suburbs.
As part of the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce's Greater Richmond Challenge, I recently found myself on a team of citizens exploring the affordable housing crisis in Central Virginia. The Washington Post's Michael Grunwald paints a frightening picture of the issue in today's paper. His emphasis is on Fairfax County, but it's happening everywhere.
In the past five years, housing prices in Fairfax County have grown 12 times as fast as household incomes. Today, the county's median family would have to spend 54 percent of its income to afford the county's median home; in 2000, the figure was 26 percent. The situation is so dire that Fairfax recently began offering housing subsidies to families earning $90,000 a year; soon, that figure may go as high as $110,000 a year.
Seventy years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that the Depression had left one-third of the American people "ill-housed, ill-clothed and ill-nourished," Americans are well-clothed and increasingly overnourished. But the scarcity of affordable housing is a deepening national crisis, and not just for inner-city families on welfare. The problem has climbed the income ladder and moved to the suburbs, where service workers cram their families into overcrowded apartments, college graduates have to crash with their parents, and firefighters, police officers and teachers can't afford to live in the communities they serve.
Homeownership is near an all-time high, but the gap is growing between the Owns and the Own-Nots -- as well as the Owns and the Own-80-Miles-From-Works. One-third of Americans now spend at least
30 percent of their income on housing, the federal definition of an "unaffordable" burden, and half the working poor spend at least 50 percent of their income on rent, a "critical" burden. The real estate boom of the past decade has produced windfalls for Americans who owned before it began, but affordable housing is now a serious problem for more low- and moderate-income Americans than taxes, Social Security or gas prices.
Yet nobody in national politics is doing anything about it -- or even talking about it.
