Only a third of Connecticut’s extremely low-income families can find affordable rental homes.
Extremely low-income is a federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) designation for families earning below 30% of the area’s median income (AMI). Connecticut has nearly 150,000 extremely low-income households.
Connecticut needs to build more deeply affordable housing, targeting extremely low income renters, said Chelsea Ross, executive director of local housing advocacy nonprofit Partnership for Strong Communities..
“Two-thirds of people are going to have to pay more,” Ross said. “They're going to have to be cost burdened. They're going to double up. They're going to experience homelessness. They're going to have some sort of instability.”
A recent study, called The Gap report, published by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, shows the majority of these tenants are spending more than half of their monthly income on rent.
There is a severe shortage of affordable rental homes in the state, according to the study. And there are only 33 affordable homes available for every 100 extremely low-income families in Connecticut.
The affordability options dropped since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019, Connecticut had 42 available and affordable homes for every 100 extremely low-income families.
The report, which is published annually by the Coalition, investigates the affordability and availability of rental homes nationwide.
“Connecticut's shortage of affordable homes has reached a critical point,” Ross said. “Seventy-one percent of Connecticut's extremely low-income renters are severely housing cost-burdened, spending more than 50% of their income on housing, with little left over for food, health care, or other basic needs.”
This requires “immediate and long-term solutions,” Ross said. Some of the solutions Ross suggested are increasing tenant protections and changing local zoning codes to have communities across the state take on the challenge of providing affordable housing.
“Nationally, only one in four eligible households receive federal housing assistance, so expanding federal rental assistance and state rental assistance is part of the picture here,” Ross said.
Nationally, the report found there’s a shortage of 7.1 million affordable and available rental homes for extremely low income families.
"Our neighbors with the lowest incomes face staggering challenges with housing affordability,” Coalition Interim President Renee Willis said in a statement. “Three quarters of the lowest-income renters nationwide are severely cost-burdened.”
Cuts to federal programs are also putting pressure on the affordable housing options, Willis said.
“We also need to support, not undermine, agencies like HUD to ensure that housing assistance programs are administered as efficiently as possible,” Willis said.
“There is no path to addressing the housing crisis for the lowest-income renters that doesn't involve increasing resources for assistance and supporting the agencies that administer our housing programs."
