SHADOW CONVENTION PLATFORM: Jobs & Housing

What if housing and community development were based on a massive jobs creation program with political leadership provided from the White House on down? Instead of stigmatizing low wage workers, unemployed people, and disabled folks as somehow unfit to compete in the housing market, what if we adjusted the housing market to meet the needs, and economic realities of everyone in our country? What if the President provided leadership and concrete policies that would engage our building trades unions to expand training, and union membership opportunities, to hundreds of thousands of people throughout the U.S., stabilizing communities: truly ending homelessness and hardship for million of families and individuals.  

 

Housing is the largest monthly expense for most people in the United States. It stands to reason that the cost of housing – rental or home ownership – must directly relate to income. But for millions of people the numbers don’t add up. A full time minimum wage worker, at the federal minimum wage, earns just $262.00 per week before taxes, roughly $1,048.00 per month. $10.00 used to be a good job. But that worker only earns $1,600 a month before taxes! There is no place in the entire country where those workers can afford rental housing without sacrificing other basic life necessities. This is the fundamental cause of the rise of homelessness, and overcrowded housing in the United States today.

 

Our federal governments’ housing policies are full of contradictions and it is the very poor, low wage workers and even lower middle class households falling through the cracks. On the one hand the federal government says that households should pay no more than 30% of their income for rent. That would mean that full time minimum wage workers would pay $314.40 a month for rent. Well, not in E. Harlem, and not anywhere else in the United States that we know about. On the other hand, when federal dollars finance affordable housing construction, the real incomes of households in communities like E Harlem are not taken into account.  Eligibility for affordable housing developments are based on federal Area Median Income formulas for Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) that artificially skews the Area Median Income.  Our income is thrown into the pot with incomes of folks from Long Island, the Upper East Side and even Michael Bloomberg and Donald Trump! So how this plays out on the ground is that the affordable housing going up in our community is beyond the reach of many of the households living in our community.  Affordable housing dollars are gentrifying our community just as much as luxury condo developments. 

 

What else does E. Harlem have? We have the second highest concentration of vacant, warehoused apartments in the borough of Manhattan. We have high rates of unemployment. A progressive urban agenda would call for a housing construction and jobs creation program. Jobs and true affordable housing is the anti-poverty program that many of us would be willing to fight for, and what millions of people will vote for.

The Area Median Income (AMI) for the New York City MSA is $70,900 for a family of 4, although a family of 4 in E Harlem has a median income of $27,000.00.  When “affordable” housing is created, it is priced based on the AMI, making it unaffordable for anyone with an income significantly lower than the median income. The current funding structure relegates the working poor and those with extremely low incomes to seek housing assistance through the homeless service system or to live in overcrowded housing conditions; at the same time, it turns “affordable housing” into a Trojan Horse for gentrification of low-income neighborhoods.