With just a few months left in the year, Congress must do its job and address the housing crisis.
According to recently released survey data by the U.S. Census Bureau, 43% of households earning $50,000 or less were spending over half of their income on rent. It’s a common rule of thumb that your housing cost should be no more than 30% of your gross income. But with rising housing costs and stagnant wages, that’s becoming more and more unachievable.
Right now, a full-time worker needs to earn $25.82 per hour to afford a modest, two-bedroom rental home and $21.25 per hour to afford a modest, one-bedroom rental home.
Eviction rates are back to pre-pandemic levels, with Black people and Latino people disproportionately facing the highest rates. 13% of Black renters have faced the threat of eviction, which is nearly double the rate of white renters.
The affordable housing crisis has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic and rising inflation. The time for Congress to act is now. We demand:
An expansion of housing vouchers to at least an additional 200,000 households.
Significant funding to preserve and operate public housing ($5.125 billion for the Public Housing Capital Fund, and $5.06 billion for the Public Housing Operating Fund).
$3.6 billion for HUD’s Homeless Assistance Grants program to address the needs of people experiencing homelessness.
$100 million for legal assistance to prevent evictions.
$300 million for the competitive tribal housing program, targeted to tribes with the greatest needs.
If Congress can afford to give billions of dollars in tax breaks to the wealthy and major corporations, they can certainly afford to house people living in the U.S.
The they-warned-us-and-we-didn’t-listen edition. For months, medical experts warned us that COVID-19 cases likely would spike in the winter. It is happening. 4,112 new COVID-19 deaths were reported in the U.S. on Thursday, January 7 alone – the first time deaths in a single day exceeded 4,000. The daily death toll in New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania also set records. Illinois became the fifth state to record its one millionth case since the pandemic began. In Arizona, which right now has a higher infection rate than any other state in the U.S., hospitalizations and deaths set records in the past few days; the state has seen more than 8,000 new cases a day, more than double the summer peak.
But, as a nation, are we paying attention? Are we listening to the experts? “Most Americans don’t want to know, don’t want to acknowledge, don’t want to recognize, and certainly – even as it is descending upon us – do not appear to understand the dire circumstances that we are facing,” Dr. Marjorie Bessel, Chief Clinical Officer at Arizona’s Banner Health, told The New York Times.
Before the last Congress adjourned, it passed, as part of a COVID-19 relief package, $69 billion to purchase and help states distribute vaccines. The funds also will help states with COVID-19 contact tracing, treatment, and mitigation. The funds include $2.5 billion targeted toward communities of color and rural communities – both hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic. When the new Administration is sworn in, scaling up the distribution and administration of the vaccines will be a priority in bringing the pandemic under control; to date, health officials have expressed disappointment at the pace of the vaccine roll-out.
255,728
The number of new COVID-19 cases confirmed in the U.S. on Wednesday, January 6 alone. That’s an 8 percent increase over two weeks ago. Tweet this.
240,000
The number of COVID-19 cases confirmed in the Los Angeles metropolitan area in just two weeks. That is more cases than at least 19 entire states have reported during the course of the pandemic. Tweet this.
Indigenous, Black, and Latinx Americans were at least 2.7 times more likely to have died from COVID-19 than white Americans, adjusted for age, in 2020. Tweet this.
1 in 800
By early December, COVID-19 had taken the lives of 1 in 800 Black and Indigenous peoplein the U.S. In Michigan and New Jersey, it was 1 in 470 Black lives lost; in Mississippi, it was 1 in 140 Indigenous lives lost.
71%
71 percent of Black Americans say they know someone who has been hospitalized or died from COVID-19, according to a Pew Research survey released in December.
60%
The percent of Americans who say they will get a COVID-19 vaccine, according to the same survey. 42 percent of Blacks say they will do so, compared with 83 percent of Asian Americans, 63 percent of Latinx, and 61 percent of whites.
29.6 million
The number of people in households that sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the previous week, or 14 percent of all people in households. That was true of 24.5% of Blacks, 21% of Latinx, 10% of whites, and 7% of Asians – and 18% of adults in households with children. The numbers appeared to reflect a sharp increase from a previous reporting period in November.
89.7 million
The number of people whose household found it somewhat or very difficult to meet usual expenses during the previous week, or 37.5 percent. That was true of 55% of Blacks, 51% of Latinx, 32% of Asians, and 31% of whites – and 45% of all adults living with children.
