In every state throughout the United States, full-time minimum wage workers do not earn enough to afford modest housing. For instance, Massachusetts, where the minimum wage worker earns 12 dollars an hour, requires 113-hours per week in order to afford fair market rent for a two-bedroom rental. Kentucky, where minimum wage remains 7.25 dollars, requires 82-hours per week. In terms of cost burden, extremely low-income renters (those at or below the poverty line or 30 percent of the area median income) experience the most acute struggle; however, broad gaps exist between income that exceeds minimum wage and housing cost demands. The problem with inadequate wages is compounded by the national shortage of more than seven million affordable homes.
Various programs including public housing projects and tenant-based rental assistance, known as Section 8, attempt to combat the unaffordable housing problem. These programs are allocated funds predominately through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and are administered by nearly 3,800 state and local public housing agencies who determine eligibility based on area median income. The assistance benefits approximately 10.4 million people within 5.2 million households; however, an additional 23 million qualifying people are unable to receive assistance due to limited funding.
Populations and Impact
As a direct consequence to structural determinants including past and current discriminatory policies, people of color are more likely to fall into the category of extremely low-income renters. In comparison to six percent of White non-Hispanic households, 20 percent of Black households are extremely low-income renters. This is followed closely by 17 percent of American Indian or Alaska Native households, 15 percent of Hispanic households, and 10 percent of Asian households.
Among recipients of rental assistance, 68 percent are people with disabilities, children, or elders, and 60 percent of the remainder come from working households. For qualifying non-recipients, 75 percent pay more than half their overall income on rent, and more than 500,000 people experience homelessness. Moreover, an estimated 1.3 million children currently live in unstable housing situations including shelters, hotels and motels, as well as in combined family households.
Families who lack access to decent, affordable housing are at increased risk of socioeconomic disparity by way of intermediary determinants, such as poor-quality education, reduced access to health care, limited employment opportunity, and increased exposure to crime. Affordable housing interest groups, led by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, insist that improved access to affordable housing will offset negative determinants, reduce intergenerational poverty, and increase economic mobility. However, on-going, conflicting political discourse, reflected by various political ideologies, disagree on the approach to take to resolve the affordable housing crisis.
Competing Sides: Neoliberalism and Social Democracy
Perhaps the quintessential divide among neoliberal and social democratic thinking is in regard to what constitutes an inherent right of an individual. From the neoliberal perspective, the free market is the preferred method for establishing conditions necessary to meet society’s basic needs, namely by way of supply and demand. Therefore, it is the inherent right of the individual to enter into the free market with use of individual preferences as a tool for influencing consumer demand. In turn, the self-regulated free market meets the demand, undoing the need for government involvement. By neoliberal standards, the path to affordable housing can be met by appealing and adhering to market forces. Yet, neoliberal policy has been the dominant force since the 1970s and a national shortage of more than seven million affordable homes remains. So, why isn’t supply meeting demand?
Current neoliberal policymakers point to government intrusion as the primary interference with the market’s ability to operate effectively. Specifically, strict government housing regulations are seen to drive home prices significantly above home production costs, leading to less, not more housing production. Were the market to be left to its own devices (unregulated) as neoliberal ideology intends for it to be, the individual freedoms, competition, and privatization that encompasses the free market would naturally prevail, and the gap between needs and resources would close, effectively eliminating the need for the welfare state.
In stark contrast to the neoliberal agenda, social democracy deems it necessary that the government, not the market, promote the economic well-being of the people. Under social democracy, rights of the person include the right to a dignified standard of living that extends beyond basic need and allows for full participation in society. Affordable housing, therefore, is intrinsically linked to the social democratic belief in equal opportunity. Even further away from individual-minded neoliberal ideology, is the social democratic value in solidarity (i.e., the good of the community rather than the rights of the individual). Income inequality, for example, should be narrowed and introduced only when the collective population has established community-agreed upon standards of living.
While current neoliberal paternalism treats society as individuals possessing an equal clean slate in the ability to achieve economic success, social democracy recognizes on-going and cumulative systemic disadvantages, which divide and maintain disparity among members of society. In order to shape a more equal society, social democracy proposes drastic changes to structural policy and vast expansion to the welfare state. This includes progressive taxation, government regulation of private ownership, increased affirmative action, and government redistribution of resources. These changes, in the social democratic view, are needed in order to more justly balance the distribution of power, unravel oppression, and further ensure that no group becomes dominant.
Conclusion: The Social Work Perspective
The idea and benefit of the free market as presented by neoliberal ideology, is misleading at best. Capitalism takes an individual approach to economic enhancement and overtly appreciates that where there is demand, there is profit opportunity. Simultaneously, capitalism inherently understands that when demand crosses into the realm of need, what was once opportunity becomes power. In regard to affordable housing, this power includes the ability to reduce housing quality while increasing its cost, and to confine affordable housing to poorly resourced areas, effectively exacerbating conditions of oppression and domination. In short, need for affordable housing in an opportunistic, capitalist society places distributive power into the hands of those who seek to benefit the most: the owners of the means of production.
Social work is anchored in an approach that seeks to preserve the common values of human rights and social justice in order to enhance power, experiences, and opportunities for all members of society. Housing is a fundamental human need, the quality of which shapes the education, safety, occupation, and health outcome of individuals and families. High cost of basic needs, like housing, coupled with structural low wages, forces consumers further into submission and perpetuates poverty. As neoliberal policymakers cling to an idealistic version of the free market, while simultaneously ignoring the reality and influence of capitalism, disparities among socioeconomic status continue to accumulate.
Like other ideologies, social work is a system of ideas and ideals, one that encompasses a human right model. In order to advance basic rights including access to affordable housing, social work must openly join forces with progressive instruments of change and more deliberately incorporate the views of social democracy into its code of ethics. There is no magic policy design that alone can upend disparity within society until the underlying issues of multi-systemic privilege and oppression are dealt with. Social work must be leaders in movements aimed at changing the political discourse away from vilifying socialist values and toward embracing equality as a social goal. To do so will require a revolution in civil, political, and social rights.
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