Fair And Affordable Housing = A Civil Right

That's the headline in this opinion piece posted yesterday Thursday, April 14, 2016 3:16 p.m. Terri Jett
In recent remarks at the National Low Income Housing Coalition Policy Forum, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Julian Castro stated, “Our nation can’t fulfill any of our major goals — from tackling inequality and improving folks’ health, to keeping neighborhoods safe and making sure every child gets a good education — unless we also focus on housing.”
Julián Castro was in Phoenix yesterday.

He's an American Democratic politician, who has been the United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development since July 28, 2014.
He continued to state in Dr. Jett's opinion piece, “That’s because housing is one of the most basic needs we have — a need that’s as much about how we live as about where we live.”
The organization to which he was addressing his remarks distributes an important yearly study called “Out of Reach,” which it has done since 1989. The study details what it costs on average across the nation and state-by-state to rent a modest two-bedroom apartment.
The 2015 report brings up this information, “A renter earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour would need to work 85 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom rent at the Fair Market Rent (FMR) and 102 hours per week to afford a two-bedroom FMR.” For Indiana where the reporter lives an hourly wage of $14.31 per hour is required to afford a two-bedroom apartment without paying more than 30 percent of one’s income, with the FMR cost at $744. In other words, a household must earn $2,480 monthly or $29,764 annually, assuming a 40-hour workweek, 52 weeks per year. Quite honestly, no one works a 40-hour workweek any more, but that’s another discussion on work-life balance and the ever-increasing productivity demands on the 99 percent with the ever-decreasing level of recreational activity in our lives, which is important to enhancing our quality of life, as noted by the World Health Organization. The bottom line is that housing should be much more affordable in relationship to wages.
And yet reflecting on Castro’s speech, there are other considerations beyond income that are also critical: the issues of fairness and opportunity, which have required federal intervention for the past 50-plus years. In terms of addressing the urgent housing needs of the very low income households, for the first time we now have the National Housing Trust Fund, which will begin providing grants this summer to address the shortage of 7.2 million affordable homes for the nation’s more than 10 million extremely low income families. The Obama administration has secured more than $170 million dollars for this program so far, which will be used to build, preserve and rehabilitate rental homes.

Dr. Terri Jett is an associate professor of political science and special assistant to the provost for diversity and inclusivity at Butler University. Comments can be sent to tjett@butler.edu.