The Housing Authority of the City of Alameda breaks ground on Rosefield Village prnewswire.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from prnewswire.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Policymakers have taken several actions in recent months to mitigate housing-related hardship. The Trump Administration and Congress provided $25 billion for rental assistance in December’s COVID-19 relief package, for example, and the Biden Administration recently extended a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention order prohibiting most evictions through the end of March. This assistance, while substantial, will likely be enough to help only a fraction of the 13 million renters who have fallen behind on their rent. Analysts’ estimates of the amount of back rent these renters owe vary from $1,700 to $6,000 per household, yielding an average estimate of the total back rent owed of nearly $27 billion.
Congress answers Habitat s call, providing nearly $10 billion in emergency mortgage payment assistance for low-income homeowners habitat.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from habitat.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
March 10, 2021
The American Rescue Plan Act, which Congress has passed and President Biden is expected to sign on March 12, will provide needed help to tens of millions of people, reduce high levels of hardship, help school districts address student learning loss, and bolster the economy.
The economy remains weak, the jobs recovery has lost momentum, and there are 9.5 million fewer jobs than in February of 2020. Black and Latino unemployment is 9.9 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively, well above the white unemployment rate of 5.6 percent which itself is too high. The economy won’t return to its full potential until 2025, the Congressional Budget Office projects; the number of people employed won’t return to pre-pandemic levels until 2024; and unemployment won’t fall below 4 percent until 2026.
As the pandemic exacerbates the nation’s housing crisis, President Biden and Acting Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Marcia Fudge have declared support for opening up Housing Choice Vouchers (also known as Section 8 vouchers) to every eligible American.
“Housing vouchers are the best, most flexible tool in our arsenal,” when it comes to tackling housing equity issues, Dr. Eva Rosen, a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, told GGWash in an interview. By expanding them to all eligible recipients, she continued, and increasing their value to allow renters to live in more well-resourced neighborhoods, it could prevent lower-income renters from being restricted to underinvested, and often red-lined, areas as they have often been historically.