Carmen Lorentz: State should invest in creating housing affordable to people with low income

To The Daily Sun,

The root cause of homelessness is a lack of housing that is affordable to people with low income.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, New Hampshire has 40,683 renter households with extremely low income. Examples include a widow in her 70s living on a fixed income of less than $24,000 a year; a single parent who works but makes less than $35,000; or a single person with a disability who cannot work. For every 100 of these households in our state, there are only 39 apartments affordable to them.

What’s more: 86% of these households spend more than 50% of their monthly income on rent and utilities, meaning they are severely housing cost-burdened. This leaves them vulnerable to housing instability and homelessness.

The root cause of homelessness is not drugs or mental illness. The root cause is that we do not have enough housing supply that is affordable for people with very low income.

We have, and always will have, people with very low income in our communities. They are working at local businesses, they are older adults who worked hard their whole lives, they are young parents raising the next generation, and they are people with disabilities.

Our state should be investing in creating more housing that is affordable to people with low income and investing in making sure there is a continuum of emergency shelter available to help people who are experiencing homelessness.

The NH Senate is at this very moment debating the state budget. They can address the root causes of homelessness by supporting the development of affordable homes through the Affordable Housing Fund (SB 81), increasing funding to our emergency shelters (SB 113), and expanding the Community Development Finance Authority’s Tax Credit Program (SB 158).

Carmen Lorentz

Laconia