Housing & the Census Illinois has only 36 affordable rental homes for every 100 extremely low-income households, but the 2020 census could help bring more funding for programs to meet this need, according to “The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes,” report recently released by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) and Housing Action Illinois. Extremely low-income renter households are those with incomes at or below the poverty line, or 30 percent of Area Median Income (AMI, which is $63,575). There are 450,590 extremely low-income households in Illinois. “We need to count every single person in Illinois – and that includes renters, students, babies, non-citizens, people experiencing homelessness, and other populations that are hard to count,” said Bob Palmer, Housing Action Illinois’s policy director. “During the last census, 1 in every 4 Illinoisans went uncounted. We can’t afford to let that happen again. For each person who goes uncounted, we leave as much as $1,800 on the table. That’s money we need to build housing, assist low-income renter households, address homelessness, fix roads, put toward health care and to do so much more.” Vital federal programs such as the HOME program, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit and Housing Choice Vouchers support the creation of more affordable housing and all of them are pegged to the federal census taken every 10 years. According to the George Washington University Institute of Public Policy, in Fiscal Year 2016, Illinois received: • $40 million+ for the HOME program, the largest federal block grant for non-luxury home purchase or rentals, (including demolition or site development costs) which is matched 25 percent by participating jurisdictions like Chicago. • Nearly $346 million for the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, created by the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which issues 10-year tax credits to state agencies that generally sell them in turn to private investors to fund acquisition, rehabilitation, or new construction of rental housing – an average of 1,411 projects and 107,000 units annually between 1995 and 2017, according to the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Qualified census tracts must have half their households earning below 60 percent of AMI or poverty rates above 25 percent. • $926 million for the Housing Choice Voucher program, in which public housing authorities pay a subsidy directly to a landlord and the tenant pays the difference between the actual rent and the subsidy. Voucher families must pay 30 percent of their monthly adjusted gross income for rent and utilities and if the unit rent is greater than the payment standard, they must pay the additional amount, but not more than 40 percent of adjusted monthly income, according to HUD. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that vouchers supported 94,500 Illinois households in 2018. -Suzanne Hanney, from prepared materials and online resources
10
The Women’s Justice Institute (WJI), another YWCA Metropolitan Chicago subcontractor, has been reaching out to treatment and transitional housing programs with care packages for women who are being discharged after time in the corrections system. These packages contain not only hygiene products and COVID masks, but information about why the census is important. Alexis Mansfield, senior advisor, children and family at WJI, said her favorite presentation was when spoken word artist Bahhs went down to the Logan Correctional Center and told people who were being released before April 1, the official census day, that they should fill it out once they get home – not in prison. “You have the right to be counted in your community so the money goes to your community and not some overwhelmingly white community, which will get additional congressmen and additional money because they counted people in prison who don’t have the right to vote,” Mansfield said. “Even if they get out next month, the prison has the right to count them for the next 10 years.” Taking a page from Bahhs, she compared prison census counts to the 3/5ths compromise in the pre-Civil War South, where individual slaves had no rights and counted as less than whole people, but collectively racked up numbers for slave state representatives in Congress. “Bella started out with her spoken word piece regarding the census and woke the crowd up,” said Melissa Hernandez, program organizer for the census project and outreach specialist at WJI. ”Then I came and did a presentation on what the census is, what’s at stake, how it affects federal programs: SNAP, Medicaid, Section 8, grants to local education agencies, national school lunch – without that program some of our children wouldn’t eat. [And also] how it represents us, what stakeholders need to know about counting people in jail, the 3/5ths compromise. Confidentiality, which is huge. People of color – brown, black people – don’t trust government because we’ve been victimized so many times by the same people who are supposed to protect us. “Everyone was pretty grateful because they had no idea,” Hernandez said of the Logan women. “People were so energized they said they were going to call home and tell their families it was an act of resistance,” Mansfield said.
