RENT SQUEEZE IS NEW CRISIS

“The struggle to pay the rent may sound like a problem the poor have always faced. It’s not. Into the 1970s, low-income housing, though often squalid, generally didn’t squeeze budgets. The wind whipped through the tar-paper shacks, but the shacks were abundant and cheap. Demolition and gentrification claimed the cheap units, and sputtering incomes swelled the number of needy renters. In 1970, the US had nearly a million more affordable units than poor households, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Two decades later, the situation had reversed: there were five million more poor households than affordable units. Housing was better but cost a lot more.”

Jason DeParle, “Kicked Out in America,” a review in the New York Review (March 10, 2016, pp:25-27) of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond.