Two unrelated events recently highlighted the emotional value of “home” and just how out of reach home ownership remains for our community’s low-income working households.
While Savannah was galvanized around the heroic construction of a new home for the television show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” City, County and United Way of the Coastal Empire leaders championed a new “Community Indicators” database that revealed a dismal 26 percent home ownership rate among those Chatham County residents whose income is 250 percent or less of the federal poverty rate.
Many of us watched as volunteers built a new 3,837 square-foot house in just over 100 hours for the Simpson family, demonstrating not only what can be done when a community comes together but how dearly we all hold the notion of home. Still, a secure and safe home is virtually unattainable for too many of our low-wage working families.
The community indicators data also showed that an unacceptably high proportion of our low-income households have to pay more than 30 percent of their monthly income on housing—more than 76 percent of these families spend their lives relentlessly juggling costs for basics, such as utilities, food, healthcare, and more because the cost of housing is so high.
Our community has done much to address the lack of sound housing that our working families can afford; however, more can and should be done.
A housing trust fund is an innovative tool to attract untapped private funds to build and rehabilitate properties. Unlike existing efforts, this mechanism can leverage public investment to provide more flexible assistance for the development of housing that low-income families can afford.
Housing trust funds have been created in hundreds of cities around the country. We need to work to create such a fund locally so that more working families are able to realize their dreams of owning or renting a place that doesn’t take such a bite out of their monthly household income.
