Presidential candidates finally talk about housing crisis

Presidential candidates from both parties toured New York City over the past week, schmoozing with locals and eating pizza without a fork.

All the while, these candidates should have been talking about one of the biggest issues impacting voters here and around the country: the lack of decent, stable and affordable housing. New York City remains one of the most expensive places to live in the country. In Brooklyn, where Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders debated last week, the median rent for an apartment is almost $3,000 per month. After adjusting for inflation, renters in the city have seen their housing costs increase by 15 percent over the past decade while their income went up by just 2 percent, resulting in an unprecedented affordability crisis.

At the same time, our city’s public housing, a critical source of affordable housing, is in desperate need of federal support. Decades of funding cuts have left public housing properties across the country in disrepair. The New York City Housing Authority alone has a $17 billion backlog in needed improvements.

Both Clinton and Sanders released housing plans and toured public housing developments in New York, and it is a relief for many that this topic finally received some attention. But the rental housing crisis isn’t isolated to places like New York and other expensive cities. It is a critical problem facing millions of families nationwide, and it deserves more attention in every state. That’s why ALL candidates need to push housing to the top of their agendas for the next primaries in Connecticut, Maryland, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and beyond.

According to analysis from the Make Room campaign, renters in every state are being squeezed by rising rents and stagnant wages. Nationwide more than one in four families who rent their homes – 11.4 million households total – pay more than half their monthly income on housing.

Absent meaningful changes to public policy, the problem is only expected to get worse in the years to come.

The good news is that we already have the tools to fix this problem. The federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit program, which has broad bipartisan support, has financed virtually all of the country’s affordable housing construction since the mid-1980s.

Unfortunately, the supply of tax credits falls woefully short of the need. The need is more than three times the amount of tax credits that were available in 2013, meaning thousands of people didn’t gain access to affordable housing.

The problem isn’t necessarily a lack of federal resources, but how those resources are being allocated. The federal government spends roughly $200 billion to help people buy or rent their homes, but the bulk of that money is being used to subsidize the mortgages of higher-income homeowners who don’t need government support in order to afford housing. Meanwhile, after a series of federal budget cuts in recent years, today only 23 percent of households who are eligible for federal rental assistance actually receive it, leading to decade-long wait lists and lotteries for rare openings. We need to recalibrate our priorities in housing policy to direct scarce subsidy dollars where they're needed most.

We should all be concerned about the affordable housing crisis, even if we are not feeling the pinch ourselves. The shortage of affordable rental housing has ripple effects on the economy as a whole. When families can’t afford their rent, they have to make choices like paying rent or buying groceries, paying the electric bill or filling their prescription. Lack of stable housing negatively affects kids at school and our workforce.

We know how to solve this problem. We need the political will to do it, and that starts with our next president. It’s time for all of the candidates to talk about housing, and to do so in every state.

Judi Kende is vice president and New York market leader at Enterprise Community Partners, Inc., a national organization that creates, preserves and advocates for affordable housing linked to good schools, jobs, transit and health care.