HUD: 'Worst Case Housing Needs' Only Getting Worse

"The number of poor families struggling to pay their monthly rents or living in deplorable accommodations has grown 41 percent since the beginning of the Great Recession a decade ago," reports Tracy Jan.

That information comes from a recent report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development—the department's biennial assessment of "worst case housing needs."

"More than 8.3 million very low-income households in 2015 qualified for, but did not receive, federal housing assistance because there is not enough to go around," adds Jan to explain the reports findings.

"The report blamed growing competition for a shrinking supply of affordable residences for the increase, a result of declining homeownership and rising rents, in addition to a widening gap between the number of renters in need and the availability of federal assistance."

As Jan reported in an earlier article in May (and picked up by Planetizen via another article from The Washington Post), the Trump Administration's budget blueprint "calls for the most dramatic cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development since President Ronald Reagan slashed the agency’s funding in the early 1980s." The budget proposal, which is still far from a political reality, also "leaves a wide opening for introducing work requirements for people who receive federal housing subsidies."