By Gabby Ross, NLIHC Manager, IDEAS
NLIHC recognizes May as National Affordable Housing Month by continuing to raise awareness around the importance of equitable solutions that ensure housing is affordable and accessible, regardless of income level. Evidence shows that housing determines overall quality of life. It impacts physical and mental health, economic stability, education, access to needed resources like healthcare and grocery stores, and risk of homelessness. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a longtime theoretical framework for human motivation, lists five levels of categorical needs human beings need to live and thrive. The immediate and most basic level of the pyramid is physiological needs, including food, water, and shelter. The rest of the levels on the pyramid—safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization—are all contingent upon basic human needs being met. Without housing and shelter, all other human needs and resources needed to survive become exceptionally harder or impossible to meet.
Public policy has been a tool to oppress and disenfranchise, especially through housing policy. The history of housing policy throughout the 20th century shows how it effectively codified racism and segregation into law, leading to detrimental impacts on racially marginalized, poor communities and families. Through policies like redlining, racial covenants, and exclusion from social programs aimed toward attaining stable housing, the federal government and the agencies that enforced discriminatory policies were strategic in the killing of communities through systemic divestment and neglect. The impacts of these policies and practices continue to be visible to this day, continuing to manifest through iterations of urban renewal, gentrification and displacement of residents, and zoning regulations that prevent the development of affordable housing in cities and localities across the country. This is apparent through NLIHC’s own research reports, The Gap and Out of Reach, which consistently show renters of the lowest incomes and renters who are people of color are still struggling with the limited amount of affordable housing available and rising rents. The exclusion of the country’s most marginalized and vulnerable groups has no doubt played a role in the condition of the current housing system, which has been facing a growing and exacerbated affordability crisis.
While there has been a tradition to use policy to harm, NLIHC’s work on the federal level aims to address that harm and make a path for systemic, communal, and individual healing. Policy has the ability to have a real impact on people’s lives, for better or for worse. Through investing and designing programs to combat housing unaffordability and instability that increase protections for low-income renters and make rental assistance accessible to those who need it, there can be a start to reckoning with this country’s history of systemic violence, leading to positive social change.
Learn more about NLIHC’s policy priorities here.
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