Solving the Homeless Crisis

What is causing people to become Homeless?

February 27, 2020

By Steve Stieler           

            As home prices continue to ascend, many aspiring buyers are priced out of homeownership or as one study found, priced out of having a home at all. The housing market itself is so overinflated, a $650,000 house has maybe $80,000 of building material in it. So why is my house over-priced and my mortgage payment is $3,500 a month for a house that sits with $80K cost of building it? Perhaps the answer is to redefine the words “affordable housing” by making the existing houses we live in now “affordable”. The DataFace, a San Francisco-based data agency, combed through the pages of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) latest Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) found that eight of the 10 states with the highest homelessness rates also have the nation’s highest median home price (inman.com). 

            People that are defined as middle-class Americans are struggling to afford the existing houses they are in now, causing migration to happen at an alarming rate. Portland is an example all too familiar lately. Middle-class families are being pushed out of their homes and city, replaced by wealthy people from other large cities, who are being displaced by their over-inflated housing market and then moving here because it’s cheaper, while driving out the people that can only afford the house they have been living in. The city politics being what they are in a demographic like Portland, do not seem to be bothered by this movement because the people that are replacing the middle-class are wealthy people from other states. The city has done their diligence to help fight the homeless situation but, the problem is even bigger than that. What is causing the homeless population? The bad housing market. We should take a stand on the housing market and fix the nationwide housing problem and make the homes we are in now affordable, so we all can have a place to call home. We should all care on this matter, home prices are rising at twice the rate of wage growth. This affects everyone in the workforce and will be a determining factor if you can afford to live in a home or not.

If you want to get involved and care about this crisis, email your State/Congress representative, please go to this link: https://www.candyusa.com/advocacy/communicating-with-congress-an-overview/writing-or-sending-e-mail-to-your-senators-or-representative/

Work cited:

Study on the housing crisis and homelessness:

https://www.inman.com/2018/03/21/rising-home-prices-lead-to-increased-homeless-population-study-finds/

https://www.curbed.com/2019/5/15/18617763/affordable-housing-policy-rent-real-estate-apartment

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/01/16/home-ownership-is-the-wests-biggest-economic-policy-mistake