Congress has failed to address the affordable housing crisis in the United States of America.
Each year, Congress spends about $200 billion to help house American families. A full three-fourths of these resources go to help subsidize the homes of the richest families through the mortgage interest deduction and other homeownership tax benefits.
We spend about $11 billion each year to subsidize the houses of the top 1% .
This means that we provide more housing assistance to help the richest 7 million households – who earn more than $200,000 a year – than to help the 55 million households that earn less than $50,000 each year, even though these families are far more likely to struggle to keep a roof over their head.
The 2017 national Housing Wage is $21.21 per hour for a two-bedroom rental home, or more than 2.9 times higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour
The high cost of rental housing has resulted in more than 11.2 million severely cost-burdened renter households spending more than half of their income on housing (NLIHC, 2017c).
These two deductions combined cost the federal government nearly $100 billion annually, more than 83% of which benefits homeowners with incomes greater than $100,000 (Joint Committee on Taxation, 2017). The mortgage interest deduction (MID) alone costs $65 billion to assist higher income homeowners, most of whom would be stably housed without the government’s help.
The U.S. has 7.5 million affordable rental homes for the 11.4 million extremely low income renter households.
The MID is a federal tax expenditure of more than $65 billion per year, 84% ($54.6 billion) of which goes to households with annual income greater than $100,000. Nearly 46% goes to households with annual income greater than $200,000 (Joint Committee on Taxation, 2017).
The HTF received nearly $174 million in 2016 and will likely receive approximately $220 million in 2017, but needs much more to meet the housing needs of extremely low income households.
For a more detail check out National Low Income Housing Coalition and download the full report.
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