Affordable housing and homelessness: Issues in good and bad times

Last week I sat in on a conference call about the latest Out of Reach findings. The 2010 report found that rental housing is more expensive at a time when wages are declining. This led many people on the call to question whether this housing problem is really a wage problem. I'm a housing researcher, so I tend to think of most issues from the housing perspective. Maybe I was wrong about this one. 

  
A few days later, I came upon this story in the New York Times about North Dakota, a place that has many jobs and no place for people to live. Sometimes a good job isn't enough.

The same forces that have resulted in more homelessness elsewhere — unemployment, foreclosure, economic misery — have pushed laid off workers from California, Florida, Minnesota, Michigan and Wyoming to abundant jobs here, especially in the booming oil fields.


But in this city rising from the long empty stretches of North Dakota, hundreds are sleeping in their cars or living in motel rooms, pup tents and tiny campers meant for weekend getaways in warmer climes. They are staying on cots in offices and in sleeping bags in the concrete basements of people they barely know.


North Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate in the country, 4 percent, but advocates for the homeless say the number of people they see with nowhere to live — a relatively rare occurrence here until now — grew to 987 in 2009 from 832 in 2008, an increase of about 19 percent.


And the problem is certain to worsen this summer as oil companies call for more rigs and thousands more workers.

This juxaposition of increasingly unaffordable housing for low-income Americans during bad economic times with the situation in North Dakota served as a reminder of the continual need for housing policies that provide a housing options for low- and moderate-income families. In good times, the lack of local housing policies and planning often mean that there are livable wage jobs but no place for people to live.  In bad times, jobs are scarce and as is affordable housing. In the absence of a long-term plan, affordable housing and homelessness will be issues in good and bad times.
To view the NYT video "Homeless in Boom Times" click here.