Affordable housing crunch persists for poorest people

WASHINGTON -- The average janitor earns enough to rent a one-bedroom apartment and pay for life's other necessities in just six of the nation's 60 largest cities. A retail salesperson can make ends meet in half that many locations. Both can forget about buying a home.

That conclusion from the National Housing Conference, a nonprofit coalition of industry experts, advocates and academics, mirrors the findings of several reports since the summer documenting the struggles of working families to find affordable housing.

The results suggest a worsening of the affordable housing shortage affecting the working poor, even before the recession pushed thousands out of work and squeezed family budgets even tighter.

Crisis proportions

At a Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing last month, lawmakers said the situation has reached crisis proportions.

"These families live one unexpected medical bill, one car repair, one bout of unemployment away from possible homelessness," said Chairman Paul Sarbanes, D-Md.

Rising wages from the long economic expansion landed a record number of Americans in bigger, fancier homes and helped more of the very poorest put roofs over their heads. But it also contributed to the shortage of affordable housing.

Escalating land prices made it less profitable to build new low- and moderate-priced housing. As a result, there still are 5 million fewer apartments nationwide than are needed for people with the lowest incomes, according to the Washington-based National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The shortage forces many to choose from a range of unattractive options: Doubling up with other families, sacrificing other needs to pay rent, or living in a shelter or on the street.

In 60 large cities where the National Housing Conference compared housing costs to median earnings in entry-level occupations, only Oklahoma City, St. Louis and Cincinnati were affordable in 1999 for the typical retail clerk. That employee earned a median income nationally of $7.66 an hour -- compared with a median paycheck of about $16 an hour for all U.S. workers.

The average janitor -- paid a median of $7.90 an hour -- could swing rent and other living expenses in only six cities: the previous three plus Pittsburgh; Columbus, Ohio; and Indianapolis.

Salome Torres lives that reality.

He brings home $560 every two weeks as a janitor in Orange County, Calif., and finds extra money working weekend odd jobs. Covering the rent on his one-bedroom apartment takes $620 a month, leaving the rest to pay for expenses for his wife, Isabel, and their three young children.

"Sometimes we do fall behind if someone gets sick," Torres, a Mexican immigrant, said through a translator. "Sometimes it's even difficult to get food. It's very difficult."

Like the Torres family, nearly one in seven American households must use more than half its income for shelter, well above the 30 percent level considered reasonable for housing.

Nearly 30 percent of those 13 million households include at least one full-time worker, the conference found in its June report.

NLIHC President Sheila Crowley said lower-income Americans have been shortchanged because federal support for affordable housing has not kept pace with inflation. She noted the number of government vouchers that help low-income families pay private-sector apartment rents has increased little in recent years, resulting in a five-year wait for housing in some cities.

And the number of rental units considered affordable for working poor and poor families dropped by more than 1 million between 1997 and 1999, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Congress made small changes this year that could help stem the affordable housing drain. But a long-term solution remains elusive, advocates say.