Home is where health is: A stable, affordable home is a prescription for good health

As Children’s HealthWatch regularly demonstrates to policymakers, opinion leaders, and the public: a stable, affordable home is a prescription for good health. Unfortunately, that prescription is out of reach for tens of millions of people.

At the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), we work to ensure that the lowest income people in the United States have safe, accessible, affordable homes. Today, over 8 million households with extremely low incomes are either homeless or pay unaffordable rents that force them to make untenable choices between paying the rent and paying for other life necessities like nutritious food, heat, and medications. In 99% of counties in the United States, a full-time worker earning minimum wage cannot afford a modest one-bedroom rental home. The number of households with “worst-case housing needs” – that is, households with very low incomes that either pay more than half their income for rent or live in severely substandard housing and receive no aid – has risen by 66% since 2001. Nationally, there are only 37 affordable and available homes for every 100 extremely low-income renter households.