The Housing Math Doesn’t Work Anymore
Nearly half of all renter households in the United States — about 22.6 million families — now spend more than a third of their income just to keep a roof overhead (Harvard JCHS, 2025). Two decades ago, the gap between wages and rent wasn’t nearly this wide. Since 2001, rents have climbed more than 21%, while renter incomes rose just 2% after inflation (Harvard JCHS).
For the lowest-income renters, the squeeze is almost total. More than 87% are cost-burdened, and three out of four spend over half their paychecks on housing (NLIHC). That leaves little to nothing for groceries, medicine, or transportation. The burden also falls unevenly: among Black renter households, 56% pay more than they can afford for housing, compared with 44% of white renters (U.S. Census Bureau, 2024).
When Poverty Is Treated Like a Crime
Instead of addressing the broken math of housing, leaders are increasingly turning to enforcement. Encampments are bulldozed, belongings destroyed, and unhoused individuals displaced as though their existence were illegal. In Chicago, housing groups are preparing for National Guard sweeps of encampments (WBEZ, 2025).
The consequences are severe. In Atlanta earlier this year, an unhoused man was killed during a clearance when workers used bulldozers without checking if anyone was inside (The Guardian, 2025). Militarizing sweeps under the guise of crime prevention only heightens this danger, treating survival as a public threat rather than a public need.
Cities are boxed into this approach because federal housing policy has withered for decades. The U.S. stopped building public housing at scale in the 1980s. Federal housing assistance now reaches only about one in four households who qualify. Funding for affordable housing has failed to keep pace with demand. Instead of resources to build or subsidize homes, local governments are handed troops and policing — the wrong tools for the wrong problem.
Photo by Edward Kimmel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Web of Injustice
Housing doesn’t stand alone. When rent takes half a paycheck, food budgets collapse. Parents are forced to pull children from one school and enroll them in another, disrupting education. Stress over eviction and overcrowding fuels chronic illness and depression. And when people end up on the street, they often face ticketing, arrests, or worse.
To talk about housing is to talk about hunger, schooling, health, and justice itself.
Who’s Fighting for Change
Across the country, nonprofits are trying to fill the gaps. The Coalition for the Homeless in New York not only provides food and shelter but has won legal battles to protect the right to housing. The National Alliance to End Homelessness or evidence-based policies, while groups like Family Promise focus on stabilizing families on the brink.
But even the most committed nonprofits can’t undo decades of disinvestment. They are patching holes in a dam that Washington has refused to reinforce.
Choosing Justice Over Punishment
The housing crisis isn’t about bad choices or dangerous people. It’s about decades of policy failure and a market that has sprinted ahead of reality. Cities can’t solve this alone. Without federal leadership — major investments in affordable housing, stronger tenant protections, and a recognition that shelter is as basic as food or water — we’ll keep circling the same cycle of burden, eviction, and criminalization.
Because if nearly half the country is struggling to pay rent, the problem isn’t the people. The problem is the system — and the refusal at the national level to treat housing as the human right it is.