Raising the Spotlight on Affordable Housing Despite research
illustrating the presence of an acute affordable housing crisis, the issue remains below the national radar, experts say
By Ronald Roach

To Dr. Victoria M. Basolo, a professor of urban planning at the University of California-Irvine, the desire to play a part in making sure all Americans have adequate housing motivated her to pursue an academic career in urban and regional planning. "In a country as wealthy as the U.S., every one should have access to adequate housing," she says.

The work of Dr. Michael P. Johnson at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, which focuses on improving the operations of public housing authorities, also springs from a motivation similar to that of Basolo. "My research explores how public housing authorities could better serve their clients, but there's a larger issue of whether this society is willing to produce affordable quality housing for all Americans," he notes.

It's not surprising that among scholars who study housing in the United States, a deep-seated concern about housing conditions informs their work. For scholars who attained their doctoral training during the 1990s, such as Basolo and Johnson, their careers have coincided with what many see as the rise of one of the most acute affordable housing crises in the United States since the postwar period of the late 1940s.

Last month, a major coalition of housing advocacy groups issued a study reporting that the number of low- to moderate-income working families in the United States spending more than half their income on housing increased by 67 percent between 1997 and 2001. That put the total at more than four million families who are at least 20 percentage points above the recommended 30 percent threshold for household spending on housing.

While many of those households experienced affordable housing crunches in the nation's most expensive markets, like Boston and San Francisco, the salaries of many other low- and middle-income families failed to keep up with increasing housing costs. This is a dilemma throughout the country, even with the booming economy in the late 1990s, according to the report.