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June 13 - June 28, 2025
Residential stability begets a kind of psychological stability, which allows people to invest in their home and social relationships. It begets school stability, which increases the chances that children will excel and graduate. And it begets community stability, which encourages neighbors to form strong bonds and take care of their block.7
high eviction rates have higher violent crime rates the following year,
Today, over 1 in 5 of all renting families in the country spends half of its income on housing.34 America can and should work to make its cities livable again.
Legal aid to the poor has been steadily diminishing since the Reagan years and was decimated during the Great Recession.
The result is that in many housing courts around the country, 90 percent of landlords are represented by attorneys, and 90 percent of tenants are not.
2005 to 2008 in the South Bronx provided more than 1,300 families with legal assistance and prevented eviction in 86 percent of cases. It cost around $450,000, but saved New York City more than $700,000 in estimated shelter costs alone.
food stamps are worth less if groceries in the inner city cost more—and they do, as much as 40 percent more, by one estimate.43
It is the government that legitimizes and defends landlords’ right to charge as much as they want;
The annual income of the landlord of perhaps the worst trailer park in the fourth-poorest city in America is 30 times that of his tenants working full-time for minimum wage and 55 times the annual income of his tenants receiving welfare or SSI.
Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion.
If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.
No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.
the presence of children in the household almost tripled a tenant’s odds of receiving an eviction judgment.
Maybe what we are really asking when we ask if a study is “generalizable” is: Can it really be this bad everywhere? Or maybe we’re asking: Do I really have to pay attention to this problem?
