Affordable Housing

Helping Minnesota’s Homeless

Adele DellaTorre, a CTK parishioner who is a strong advocate for social justice issues throughout the community, especially in the areas of affordable housing and homelessness, wrote an article about homelessness for the February issue of Northwest Dentistry. Following are the first few paragraphs of that article which relate specifically to homelessness. If you’re interested in reading the entire article, go to http://www.mndental.org/features/2009/02/02/94/helping_minnesotas_homeless.

Do you remember when the classic face of the homeless was that of the skid row bum? We all recall the typical character, a down and out male drunkard, living off the city streets. But times have changed, and so has the face of homelessness. Today the population of the homeless includes families with children. Between 2.3 and 3.5 million people, including 1.35 million children, are likely to experience homelessness in a given year in the United States. Although the numbers had been fairly stable over the last decade, our current brutal economy is deepening this devastating and costly national problem.

Cold Numbers
Homelessness exists throughout Minnesota. However, most homeless people gravitate to the cities because that is where services and shelter programs are most available. On any given night about 9,200 people are homeless, most in Hennepin and Ramsey County. About 38% are children under the age of 17. In fact, in the 2007-2008 school year, six percent of the children attending Minneapolis Public Schools were homeless or “highly mobile” (no permanent address, but living with various family members or friends). Think about this: At some time during that school year, 5,458 Minneapolis children went to school without having a permanent home, up 18.6% from the previous school year! The expense to the school district to support these homeless or precariously housed children as students is staggering, but not as great as the long-term expense to the state as these children grow up educationally deficient and psychologically damaged.

A Mortgage on the Future
In response to the Great Depression, our government set up a series of safety net and social welfare policies designed to address the shortcomings of the free market. These policies did not eliminate homelessness, but they effectively minimized it and sparked the greatest sustained economic growth in our country’s history.

The history of contemporary chronic homelessness that is increasingly evident in our society began in the 1980s. Over the years, our government has appropriated less and less funding to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for the development of affordable housing and other housing programs. This has left our nation’s low-income population with far fewer housing options, essentially creating an imbalance in the basic safety net, the ability to earn a wage that sustains a place to call home.

Financially, a low-wage-earning family who pays more than 30% of their income for housing is considered a cost-burdened household and is identified as financially at risk. According to a recent Wilder Foundation report, about 75% of low income households are cost-burdened, compared to 33% of all people in the Twin City seven-county metro region. A cost-burdened family cannot create their own safety net, so they live on the edge, just a paycheck away from financial ruin. A loss of a vehicle needed for transportation to work, a hospitalization for an uninsured illness, or an eviction due to a landlord’s foreclosure can send a family tumbling into homelessness. And the cost to our society to help this family survive through a series of shelters and programs outstrips the cost of simply providing affordable housing options.