Affordable housing addresses a lot more than putting a roof over people's heads
By Kazmyn Ramos
We grow up hearing that hard work alone will lift us
above the hardships we’re born into. But many of us also watched as our parents
worked two and three jobs, relied on extended family to watch us, and still
struggled to afford stable housing. Far too many of us are living that same
struggle ourselves.
It’s not that we aren’t resourceful. My grandmother, who barely scraped by with factory work and countless odd jobs, pulled together with neighbors who supported each other through a mutual aid network.
Thanks to
her resourcefulness, our community, and luck, we had someplace to call home.
That gave my mother the chance to become the first one in our family to go to
college. I followed in her footsteps to attend graduate school.
We made it work. But I’ve learned through generational
poverty that the lack of affordable housing is one of the biggest obstacles to
thriving. I learned even more through my work with Healthy
Families, a national, research-backed program.
I conducted home visits with low-income mothers,
addressing maternal health, birth outcomes, and child development. Their
poverty was different from what I grew up with. Many of these mothers were
immigrants with language barriers and no access to the extended networks,
mutual aid, or stable housing that I had.
Evictions were rampant. I saw conditions that you wouldn’t believe existed in the richest country in the world.
I’m a strong believer in mutual aid. But in the world’s
wealthiest nation, should we really have to rely solely on working people
sharing their meager resources among themselves? To eradicate poverty and
housing instability, we’re going to need more than that.
Nationally, a worker would need an hourly wage of at least $28.58 to
afford a modest two-bedroom rental — or nearly $24 an hour for just one
bedroom. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. Almost half of low-income
renters spend over 30 percent of their incomes on housing alone.
Building on my mother and grandmother’s work in mutual
aid, I’ve found community engagement to be invaluable — not only to connect
families to housing, but also to organize our collective voices to push
lawmakers toward solutions.
Solutions like building more affordable housing, more
public housing, and more housing in general. Guaranteeing workers a living wage
for their hard work. Making sure we have a strong social safety net so families
can survive lean times.
Unfortunately, housing policy often takes human rights
and the need for community out of the policy process. It focuses on zoning,
commerce, profit-maximization, and “protecting” wealthy communities from
low-income neighbors. This does a disservice to the rich sense of community
affordable housing can create.
Housing should be seen as a human right and a community
builder, not a wealth builder. It should be a way to lift us all up rather than
segregate us and perpetuate the cycle of poverty.
The more we separate ourselves from our fellow humans, the more damage we do to all of us as a society. My mother and grandmother taught me that. I bet yours did too. So let’s work together to make the dream of housing for all a reality.
Kazmyn Ramos is a Program Manager for an
NGO that delivers cash to people in poverty, founder of the affordable housing
nonprofit Seeking 1610, and a Poverty Expert at RESULTS. She lives in
Indianapolis. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.