New Housing Policy Foundation Seeks to Illuminate Affordable Housing Crisis

Recently, the J. Ronald Terwilliger Foundation for Housing America’s Families released The Silent Housing Crisis, a white paper documenting the significant housing challenges facing the country and making a call to action by the nation’s political leaders. The nonprofit organization seeks to bring housing policy issues to the forefront as the 2016 presidential race gets underway.

The paper points out that nearly half of all renters were cost-burdened, spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, and more than one in four were severely burdened, devoting more than half of their income to rent. This translates into 21 million cost-burdened households, including 11 million with severe burdens. Low-income households in this situation are forced to make painful tradeoffs between housing and other fundamental necessities of life; among households in the bottom expenditure quartile, those with severe housing cost burdens spend 40 percent less on food, 70 percent less on healthcare, and 49 percent less on retirement savings each month.