Shelf Life: The Other War We’re Not Winning

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The Perennially Unsexy Issue of Housing

It’s widely agreed that the poverty threshold, with its 1960s-derived focus on food as a household’s primary expenditure, is set too low to be helpful to many of the country’s poor. For those struggling to get by, housing—a perennially unsexy issue, though it’s less so in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis—is paramount. Most working-poor families spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, reports Shelterforce (Fall 2007), the magazine of the National Housing Institute. Of the poorest households, those that earn less than $19,000 a year, 55 percent spend more than half their earnings on housing.

Most of these people aren’t receiving any housing subsidies, according to Shelterforce, and some of them are dealing with the pressures of gentrification on top of that. The Chicago Reporter (Jan.-Feb. 2008) offers an in-depth look at low-income seniors who are losing homes to development faster than new affordable-housing units can be built for them. In Los Angeles, a push to develop the city’s skid row is forcing out many poor people of color, reports ColorLines (Sept.-Oct. 2007). And as the “criminalization of homelessness” escalates, writes Street Spirit (Dec. 2007), many cities have passed legislation that prohibits organizations from feeding homeless people in public spaces such as parks or sidewalks.

When he started at the New York Times in the 1960s, Shipler says, poverty was an issue “on the political front burner.” That probably won’t happen again anytime soon, but it may move up in the ranks: We’re halfway through an election year in which the middle class is feeling squeezed by many of the same pressures that plague the poor. Health care, education, housing, jobs, and Social Security are hugely important to a growing bloc of voters.

Post–John Edwards, the candidates may not be calling it poverty—the issues “get relabeled as problems of the middle class,” Shipler says—but they are putting it on the agenda, which is already more progress than we’ve seen in nearly a decade.

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