If I told you the truth would you believe me? If by some chance you were to believe me, what would you be willing to do with that truth? Well, I’ve heard the truth and I believe it. Millions of people around the world, including myself, are living this truth everyday. One of the many things I'm doing is sharing my inside out perspective of this truth with the hope of opening eyes, ears, and minds to a truer telling of a crisis that goes beyond what statistics can express.
The truth is that the battle with unaffordable housing is a silent but huge factor in the physical, mental, and emotional traumas that affect many families daily. Every time I’ve heard government officials speak on the affordable housing crisis it has always been from the black and white perspective of statistics. It has rarely been through the gray area of personal experiences or any actual knowledge that goes beyond stats. I could tell you that 40% of your neighbors are living in substandard housing, or that 18,000 of them are paying more than half their income towards housing. But while those numbers are accurate they still don't tell the whole truth.
Instead, imagine living in a small two bedroom apartment that you share with your pregnant fiance and two young daughters in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe. To let your children go outside and play can sometimes feel terrifying because of the messed-up conditions of the community, and the energy of the atmosphere surrounding your home. So, you don't allow your children to go outside unless they are going to school or somewhere with you.
Just to get downstairs to the parking lot you must walk through large clouds of cigarette smoke, drugs, loud music, foul language, and fighting.
You feel like you can't even make it a few steps outside your front door without being asked for money, asked for drugs, offered drugs, or just witnessing or hearing something you’d simply prefer not to.
These are the same issues you grew up dealing with and watched your parents struggle through. Now you’re a parent trying your hardest to find a way out and a way to provide better experiences for your children. These are the same neighborhoods you were raised in which left you mentally, physically, and emotionally scarred.
Now hold that thought, and add to it the fact that you pay $950 a month to live in an environment like that. When combined with utility fees, just those two bills alone take well over half of your monthly income. That leaves you with far too little for you and your family’s basic costs of transportation, food, healthcare, household products, laundry, clothing for your growing children, and school supplies. That’s not even considering things like birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries; these honestly can sometimes feel like punishments when you’re already struggling to provide and maintain your basic human needs. With so much of your income going towards housing alone, it's a given that some things will have to be sacrificed. You find that you often have to decide between cheap food or healthy food, between using the air conditioner or enduring the summer heat, between paying for a ride to work and not eating that day. Daily, you feel the pressure of your situation, and you wonder if everyone is also pretending to be ok and happy.
This is my story, but it doesn’t belong to me exclusively. Countless people in my community have similar experiences. When hearing stories like this, it's easy to view me and my family as victims and the people smoking and hanging in my parking lot as villains. The truth is we are all damaged and suffering through the same experiences. Each person is just at a different place in their own traumas. My neighbors had to pay the same price I did to live there, and so does everyone else in that neighborhood and others like it. The truth is there’s absolutely no difference between us, expect that you’re getting to hear a small part of my story.
Study after study has shown that poor living conditions and inadequate housing results in poor mental and physical health. So we know that access to safe, affordable housing can actually be the difference between packing the hospitals and jails or increasing graduation rates and reducing violent crime. And yet, despite this knowledge, people in power continue to overlook these issues. Our culture blames the people suffering the consequences of inadequate housing, instead of the system that caused the problem in the first place. People in these situations are often labeled with dismissive terms like lazy, poor, or criminals, and are treated like they are stains on society that are lowering property values. This idea is so far from reality. The truth is that these people are victims of a greater problem: a flawed system created and controlled by the rich for the rich.
If things are going to change, we have to understand that the truth about affordable housing is a lot bigger than money, land, buildings, and property values. I challenge you to take this truth and make it a part of your everyday life in the same way it's a part of my life. I believe only through a drastic, far-reaching change in the way the masses think and behave can this problem truly be eradicated. (R)evolution time is NOW!