The Housing Equation No Longer Adds Up

Nearly half of renter households in the United States — about 22.6 million families — now spend more than a third of their income just to cover rent (Harvard JCHS, 2025). Two decades ago, the gap between paychecks and housing costs wasn’t this severe. Since 2001, rents have risen by more than 21%, while renter incomes, adjusted for inflation, have grown only 2% (Harvard JCHS).

For the lowest-income renters, the pressure is crushing. More than 87% are cost-burdened, and three out of four devote over half their income to housing (NLIHC). That leaves little left for food, healthcare, or transportation. The burden also falls unevenly: 56% of Black renter households are cost-burdened, compared with 44% of white renters (U.S. Census Bureau, 2024).

When Poverty Is Treated as a Crime

Instead of fixing the economics of housing, many leaders are responding with enforcement. Encampments are bulldozed, belongings destroyed, and unhoused people displaced as though survival itself were illegal. In Chicago, housing advocates are bracing for National Guard sweeps of encampments (WBEZ, 2025).

The consequences are dire. In Atlanta earlier this year, a man living unhoused was killed when bulldozers cleared a site without checking if people were inside (The Guardian, 2025). Militarized sweeps, framed as crime prevention, only escalate the danger — punishing people for having nowhere else to go.

Cities lean on these tactics because federal housing policy has withered. The U.S. stopped building public housing at scale in the 1980s. Today, only about one in four eligible households receives federal rental assistance. Funding for affordable housing hasn’t kept 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

Housing as the Center of a Wider Web

The cost of rent doesn’t just affect shelter. When half a paycheck goes to housing, food budgets shrink. Families are uprooted, forcing children to switch schools. Stress over eviction and overcrowding worsens chronic illness and depression. And those pushed onto the street face tickets, arrests, or worse.

To talk about housing is to talk about hunger, education, health, and justice.

Who Is Pushing Back

Across the country, nonprofits are working to close the gaps. The Coalition for the Homeless in New York provides shelter and meals while also securing legal victories for the right to housing. The National Alliance to End Homelessness advances evidence-based policies, while groups like Family Promise focus on keeping families housed and stable.

But nonprofits cannot undo decades of disinvestment. They are plugging holes in a system that Washington has allowed to erode.

Choosing Justice Over Punishment

The housing crisis is not about bad choices or dangerous people. It is the outcome of decades of policy neglect and a market that has far outpaced wages. Cities cannot shoulder this alone. Without federal leadership — large-scale investment in affordable housing, stronger tenant protections, and a recognition that housing is as essential as food or water — the cycle of eviction and criminalization will continue.

If nearly half the country struggles to afford rent, the failure isn’t with the people. The failure is with the system — and with a refusal at the national level to treat housing as the human right it is.