What is “sustainable” housing cost burden? Implications for HPRP

Increasingly, communities and programs are providing homeless and at-risk families with short-term rental assistance.  In assessing which families to help, one of their primary concerns is to help families that will be able to sustain their housing once the short subsidy ends. To inform their choices, this fact sheet from the National Alliance to End Homelsness examines the level of housing cost burden that poor families typically carry (and that the families assisted with these programs could therefore, presumably, carry). While by no means promoting a high and sustained housing cost burden, and while not looking at all of the factors that could affect a household’s housing future, the fact sheet does show that most poor families carry a high housing cost burden without becoming homeless.

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