High Rents Leave Little Room in the Budget for Important Stuff Like Food

Over the last 40 years, the "rent" slice of the family budget has gotten bigger and bigger. For many families, it's now become so big it's like The Blob — consuming every dollar in their pocket until they have almost nothing left.

Harvard's Joint Center on Housing's report on The State of the Nation's Housing 2010 shows that a large number of low-income families are "rent-burdened," meaning that housing takes up so much of their family budget — over 30 percent — that it's hard for them to make ends meet. Their newest study found that even families who make two or three times the minimum wage can't afford their housing and are often paying more than half of their income in rent.

One number from the report stood out to me: low-income families with young children often have less than $600 left over after they pay their rent.

$600? How is a whole family subsisting on $600 each month after they write their rent check?

The USDA estimates that a moderate food budget for a family with two young children is $770 a month. Add to that bills for electricity, water and gas. Top that off with an enormous expense for working families — child care — and then figure in health care, clothes and household necessities like toilet paper and toothpaste.

We've easily gone over $1,000 there. No trips to the movies, no birthday parties, no family vacations.

Single person households and elderly people at the bottom are living on even less — $500 a month or less.

And yet, the report cites, that government programs for affordable housing are being cut, along with every other department's budgets. In a time when state, local and federal dollars are in short supply, it's difficult to depend on Uncle Sam.

We need new solutions to affordable housing. One that springs to mind is the housing coops popping up in countries like Canada. I met a housing activist from Quebec last spring, and she described to me their take on affordable housing: the government sells a building to a group of tenants, sort of like a condo association, for a low-interest rate. The tenants have a board where they decide as a group how much the rent is, how to make repairs, and who to rent vacant apartments to.

But there must be other solutions to our housing crisis. What are your ideas? We can't depend on government or policy analysts to create a solution for us. Too many families don't have the time or the money to wait.

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