Pay rent or feed family? Housing crisis on US voters’ minds as presidential election nears

BALTIMORE: Zakiya Francis faces a tough choice every month: Pay her rent or feed her two young children.
The Baltimore resident, who has a five-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old son, was evicted twice in the last year. The family lived out of her car until they moved to their current apartment.
She is now confronted with another judgment for failure to pay rent, with the Maryland District Court giving her just a month to find a job and get rental assistance – or potentially face another eviction.
She told CNA that while she secured good jobs in the past, she lost them because she had to prioritise childcare over work.
Hers is a common story across the United States, with the housing crisis becoming a major source of stress as well as a hot-button campaign issue as the presidential election approaches on Tuesday (Nov 5).
Median home prices in the US have risen about 50 per cent in the last five years, according to figures from the National Association of Realtors.
Property prices are now so expensive, relative to salaries, that a quarter of renters are spending more than half their income on just housing and utilities alone.
Rents have increased 19 per cent nationwide in the past five years. Researchers say as many as seven million people a year face eviction, often due to them not being able to afford to pay rent.
Both Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump have made pledges to tackle the soaring cost of housing.
Harris, the Democratic Party’s candidate, has promised to build 3 million new affordable housing units and provide help for new buyers to get downpayment credit if she wins the election.
She has also pledged a US$40 billion housing innovation fund to help local governments build more affordable housing, streamline regulations and expand rental aid, among other initiatives.
Meanwhile, Republican candidate Trump has promised to lower inflation and ease mortgage rates to allow more homes to be built cheaply. He also said his restrictive immigration policies would ease housing demand.
However, experts have warned that some of Trump’s policies, including tariffs, would make inflation worse.
Both Trump and Harris have called for the freeing up of more federal lands for housing.
Researchers have voiced concerns over how bad evictions have become in the US.
The Eviction Lab at Princeton University linked the burden of housing costs to a record-high number of 250,000 people found last year to be living without shelter. 
The lab studies and publishes eviction patterns, and conducts research about the causes and consequences of the housing crisis.
“We … track and collect data on evictions nationwide. We do so because the federal government doesn’t, on a systematic basis, collect or know the number of evictions occurring across the country each year,” the lab’s senior research specialist Jacob Haas told CNA. 
“It’s a little bit of a blind spot in the data world. We don’t know how many families are necessarily displaced due to not being able to afford housing each year from rental markets.”
In the mid-Atlantic state of Maryland, several government housing reforms have been passed, such as providing a lawyer to those who cannot afford one if they face a tenant-landlord dispute.
Many in the state’s most populous city of Baltimore struggle to find and maintain employment amid high housing and rental prices, said Katie Davis, director of the Courtroom Advocacy Project at the Pro Bono Resource Center of Maryland.
“Baltimore is a city with a lot of poverty … there’s often a huge disparity between income and rent,” she added.
The programme that Davis runs provides pro bono representation to consumers and tenants in Baltimore.
She noted that when some residents pay rent, it goes into the back rent they missed. They also have to pay court fees and costs, causing them to be stuck in a vicious cycle.
“A lot of times, what we can do is we can negotiate with the landlord. They just need a little bit of time, maybe some sort of agreement that can get them caught up,” she added.
While the overall number of eviction cases has gone down in Maryland in recent years, there were still 400,000 failure-to-pay-rent notices filed in the state last year alone.
Francis, the mother-of-two, is just one of many Americans struggling to make ends meet.
“It’s very hard to stay employed and receive help. I’ve been a working woman and not have been able to pay my rent and feed my children,” she said.
“So where do you go from there? You start to feed your children, and then it results in you not having a place for them to eat or sleep.”
Despite these challenges, Francis said she remains determined to do what she can to get things in order – and keep a roof over her family’s heads.