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Alex Carter is a food security policy advocate at Maine Equal Justice.
Around the country and across Maine, tenants have seen their household budgets crushed by skyrocketing rents, soaring inflation, and stagnant incomes, and people are going hungry as food budgets get maxed out.
Our family, friends, and neighbors with the lowest incomes are facing the hardest choices right now: paying rent or buying groceries, medications, or fuel. This year, members of Congress have a real opportunity to expand proven solutions – like rental assistance – to help address both homelessness and hunger.
We see it all around our communities: incomes are just not keeping up with the rising cost of homes and apartments. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a full-time worker in Maine needs to earn at least $22.69 per hour to afford a modest two-bedroom home. Child care workers, whose typical hourly wage in 2021 was $14.16, and personal care aides, whose typical hourly wage was $14.28, need to work at least 63 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom rental.
An alarming 77 percent of Maine’s most marginalized renters spend more than half of their limited incomes on housing and, on any given night in Maine, more than 3,400 people have no place to call home.
Despite the incredible need, Congress has not invested in housing solutions at the scale required. Only a quarter of those whose incomes qualify them for housing assistance get any help.
When the rent takes up most of a household’s paycheck, families have little if any money available for other necessities like nutritious food and medical care. Renters with extremely low incomes are often forced to prioritize shelter over other needs, with the lowest-income, most severely cost-burdened renters spending 38 percent less on food and 70 percent less on healthcare than their peers with higher incomes in 2020.
Poverty and food insecurity are associated with some of the most serious and costly health problems in the United States, and a growing body of research finds that food insecurity negatively impacts children’s physical, social, cognitive, and behavioral development. Our failure to address the housing crisis harms individuals, families, and our communities.
Fortunately, Congress has the power to expand rental assistance to ensure more of our neighbors can afford housing and, in doing so, help alleviate hunger. Later this year, Congress must pass its annual spending bills. This provides policymakers the opportunity to expand rental assistance to more than 200,000 more households, as proposed by President Joe Biden. Sen. Susan Collins – as chair of the subcommittee that oversees funding for housing programs – is in a key position to reach across the aisle to deliver for Mainers.
Unlocking more rental assistance would make a huge difference for Mainers’ livelihoods and their educational and health outcomes, and improve racial equity. Children learn better and are more likely to graduate when they live in stable, affordable homes. A safe and affordable place to call home helps prevent long-term health problems and it supports economic mobility — allowing low-income people to climb the income ladder and achieve financial stability.
Simply put: less money going toward housing costs leaves more resources for necessities like groceries, utility bills, winter clothes, school supplies, and prescriptions.
To address the root causes of hunger in America, we must do more to truly solve our housing and homelessness crisis. Expanding vouchers in this year’s spending bill can put our nation on a path to ensuring every eligible household gets the help they need to afford a roof over their head. Other key solutions include preserving and building more homes that are affordable to extremely low-income households through proven solutions like the national Housing Trust Fund and public housing, stabilizing households before they face evictions and homelessness, and strengthening and enforcing renter protections.
The moment for housing solutions has arrived, and this nation-wide problem is too great for Maine and our heroic community-based organizations to shoulder on their own. Congress must lift some of the untenable pressures on Maine households so that families can have a safe, warm home and enough to eat this winter.