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In the past five years, housing prices in Fairfax County, Virginia have grown 12
times as fast as household incomes. Today, the county’s average family would have to spend 54% of its income to afford the county‘s average home; in 2000, the figure was 26%. 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.
THE HOUSING CRISIS GOES SUBURBAN
Michael Grunwald
1. Seventy years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that the Depression had left one-third of the American people \Americans are well-clothed and increasingly over nourished. 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.
2. Home ownership 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-Work. One-third of Americans now spend at least 30% of their income on housing, the federal definition of an \burden, and half the working poor spend at least 50% of their income on rent, a \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.
3.America used to care a lot about affordable housing. Roosevelt signed housing legislation in 1934 and 1937, providing mortgages, government apartments and construction jobs for workers down on their luck. In 1949, Congress .set an official
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goal of \and in 1974, President Richard M. Nixon began offering subsidized rent vouchers to millions of low-income tenants in private housing. For half a century, most housing debates in Washington revolved around how much to expand federal assistance.
4. But for the past two decades, the only new federal housing initiative has been HOPE VI5, a Clinton administration program that has demolished 80,000 units of the worst public housing and built mixed-income developments in their place. The program has eliminated most of the high-rise hellholes that gave public housing a bad name and has revived some urban neighborhoods. But it has razed more subsidized apartments than it has replaced.
5. Overall, the number of households receiving federal aid has flatlined since the early 1990s, despite an expanding population and a ballooning budget. Congress has rejected most of President Bush's proposed cuts, but there has been virtually no discussion of increases; affordable-housing advocates spend most of their time fighting to preserve the status quo.
6. And it's a tough status quo. Today, for every one of the 4.5 million low-income families that receive federal housing assistance, there are three eligible families without it. Fairfax County has 12,000 families on a waiting list for 4,000 assisted apartments. \—nobody wants to give it up,\Egan, chairman of the Fairfax housing authority. It sounds odd, but the victims of today's housing crisis are not people living in \projects\but people who aren't even that lucky.
7. Some liberals dream of extending subsidies to all eligible low-income families, but that $100 billion-a-year solution was unrealistic even before the budget deficit ballooned again. So even some housing advocates now support time limits on most federal rent aid. The time limits included in welfare reform 10 years ago were
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controversial, but studies suggest they've helped motivate recipients to get off the dole. And unlike welfare, housing aid is not a federal entitlement, so taking it away from one family after a few years would provide a break for an equally deserving family.
8. \a no-brainer,\says David Smith, an affordable-housing advocate in Boston. \
9. The root of the problem is the striking mismatch between the demand for and the supply of affordable housing —or, more accurately, affordable housing near jobs. Fifteen million families now spend at least half their income on housing, according to Harvard's Joint_Center for Housing Studies: many skimp on health care, child care and food to do so. Others reduce their rents by overcrowding, which studies link to higher crime rates, poorer academic performance and poorer health; Los Angeles alone has 620.000 homes with more than one person per room. Other workers are enduring increasingly long commutes from less expensive communities, a phenomenon known as \
10. This creates all kinds of lousy outcomes—children who don't get to see their parents, workers who can't make ends meet when gas prices soar, exurban sprawl, roads clogged with long-distance commuters emitting greenhouse gases. \we're creating strong communities by forcing people into their cars four hours a day,\says Cathy Hudgins. chairwoman of the housing committee for the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. Affordable housing also helps make communities competitive; it's not clear how Fairfax can keep creating jobs if workers can't afford to live there.
11. The best thing local officials can do to promote affordable housing is to get out of the way—stop requiring one-acre lots and two-car garages, and stop blocking low-income and high-density projects.
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