Because of rising housing costs and stagnant wages, slightly more than half of all poor renting families in the country spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs,
and at least one in four spends more than 70 percent.
It’s around this point that the conversation gets snagged in the weeds with questions about home prices, political ramifications or the administrative hurdles of reform — escape routes
that allow us to lose sight of people like Cris Diaz, low-income renters who are not entitled to any housing assistance and who are giving most of their income to landlords and utility companies.
Diane Yentel, the president and chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, believes
that in the long run this will make the MID “untenable to retain.”
Yentel’s coalition supports the idea of lowering the size of deductible mortgage debt to $500,000
and reallocating the savings to housing assistance for low-income families.
“Today, as in the past,” writes the historian Molly Michelmore in her book “Tax and Spend,” “most of the recipients of federal aid are not the suspect ‘welfare queens’ of the popular imagination
but rather middle-class homeowners, salaried professionals and retirees.” A 15-story public housing tower and a mortgaged suburban home are both government-subsidized, but only one looks (and feels) that way.
As black homeowners, Asare and Jean-Charles are exceptions to the national trend: While
most white families own a home, a majority of black and Latino families do not.
