Choosing where to live has profound impacts on the family and local communities. For those who have access to loans and wealth, staking out a preferred neighborhood or single-family house has become a source of great pride. At its core, homeownership is a building block of civic life.
America’s heightened acknowledgment and attention to discriminating policies force us to acknowledge this has not been the case for every American, especially African Americans and Latinx Americans who have faced a history of housing segregation. To be sure, owning a home is all but an impossible dream for an increasing number of low-income families. More likely, finding safe and affordable housing is an existential aspiration: a costly struggle of making daily ends meet rather than a joyous reflection of belonging to a community.
Matthew Desmond, an assistant professor of sociology and social studies at Harvard University and affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty, recently outlined the severity of the housing challenge that poor Americans face. He noted that rising housing costs, stagnant or falling incomes among the poor, and a shortfall of federal housing assistance means that the poorest households now spend more than half of their income on housing. Specifically, he wrote:
