Housing Affordability Act Case Study

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The housing affordability in the Washington D.C. area has not been up to par in accordance to the Housing Affordability Act. The Housing Affordability Act is meant to reduce housing cost for low-income households, but the opposite effect has been taking place over the past decade. A large amount of low end, hard workers of the city are struggling with budgeting with the continued rise of rent they owe each month. While there is an issue with low-income household affordability and statistical data show ongoing rises to the rents and ownership, there are effective solutions that can improve low-income living and the city’s economy as well. The city’s government has been under fire due to the lack of effort to improve the lives of the lower …show more content…

In turn, this created a higher demand for expensive housing, which hiked up the overall housing market (Sturtevant & Artemel 2010). The city overall, a highly economical area overall for high income jobs, has been growing greatly. This means that there needs to be homes that support high-income households as well. The growth equality of the city’s citizens has been a struggle to balance, and every function city needs to have all classes of citizens working to help the economy succeed for a long-term basis. Lower class citizens are leaving the area for a less expensive means of living, which means the Washington economy is decreasing with less spending. Efforts to save on housing expenses often lead to higher transportation costs, with the result that an even larger portion of household budgets is consumed by the combined burden of housing and transportation costs” (Beltway Burden, 2009). On page seven of the same article, it portrays data that show where the highest monthly housing cost is concentrated in Washington. The data shows that most of the highest rent is concentrated in the heart of the city and less expensive on the outskirts of the city. Households are trapped in areas close by Washington D.C. due to the job needs and high transportation further out of the city. A change needs to be implemented regulate the economy and decrease the burden on households with small