National Housing Trust Fund Will Help APAs

By Donna Tam
Special to AsianWeek

Imagine living in a small, one-room apartment that is about the size of a walk-in closet. Now add four or five other people who live with you in the same cramped room. People all across the country have to experience this each day, as housing situations continue to worsen.

This housing shortage crisis has led to the creation of the National Housing Trust Fund Campaign, which has been working since 2001 to secure monies for affordable housing. The National Housing Trust Fund would provide, over the next 10 years, the lowest income families with 1.5 million units of rental housing — 25 percent of which would be set aside for home ownership.

“People’s income have not risen at the same pace as housing costs have,” said Kim Schaffer, communications director at the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), an organization dedicated to housing issues advocacy. According to Schaffer, there have been many reports of people paying for housing they can’t afford, or not having enough money after housing cost for their essentials. Even working people who are employed have resorted to living in their cars.

“Through the API community, in the lower-income population, you can’t afford to have separate houses for each family,” said Susie Wong, director of housing at the Chinatown Community Development Center (CDC) in San Francisco.

In a Current Population Survey done by the U.S. Census Bureau, almost 30 percent of all households that were below 200 percent of the poverty level were APA.

“There is the Asian perspective of not being homeless. Because we don’t ‘see’ homeless APA, we think that the problem doesn’t exist. But that’s not true,” said Lisa Hasegawa, executive director of National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development. “Instead of having someone be homeless, they put 10 people in a room — that’s still being homeless.”

These cases of overcrowding, Hasegawa says, are more hidden and harder to document. She also points out that policies that are created to provide a solution to homelessness are often only focused on building homeless shelters, and are not really solving anything.

“When you have people who are lower income [or] who have service jobs, they don’t have a high enough income to get housing in the regular market,” said Sue Taoka, executive director of the Seattle Chinatown/International District Preservation and Development Authority (SCIDPADA). “There is a limited amount of affordable housing, so there are families doubling or even tripling up to a room.”

The SCIDPADA provides services and affordable housing to residents, who are mostly APA, and particularly to the elderly — which make up about half of their resident population. While some might be able to receive Social Security, the elderly, who are usually newly immigrated, face very tough housing situations.

“They really struggle because the Chinatown housing stock is not set up to accommodate the elderly, and especially not those with disabilities,” explained Wong. “Many [apartments] have two to three story walk-ups.” Wong also points out that many apartments are not fire safe, or are very old and have deferred maintenance.

“Our goal is to see the affordable housing crisis to an end,” said Schaffer on behalf of the NLIHC, which is a sponsor of the National Housing Trust Fund Campaign. “For so long now we have been accustomed to living with high-cost housing. We need to know that with our public investment in housing, the gap between what people can pay and what housing costs, cannot be crossed.”

In late May, the supporters of the campaign were very excited to learn that the Millennial Housing Commission’s report supported its cause and have even called on Congress to respond to the need of low-income housing. In June, the House Financial Services Committee approved an amendment to a bill, H.R. 2349, which will establish a National Housing Trust Fund.

Though the National Housing Trust Fund, which contains almost 3,000 members, achieved a great victory on June 20, the Financial Services Committee met again on July 10 to reconsider the amendment. As a result, the National Housing Trust Fund will now give less money to already existing state and local housing trust funds.

“We have over 2,900 endorsements from all 50 states. We need to do something big and fight for incremental increases,” said Schaffer. She said that the campaign is going to continue pursuing development of these funds.

“We need a lot more help. [The National Affordable Housing Trust Fund] definitely will help some,” said Tan Chow, senior community organizer at the Chinatown CDC in San Francisco. “We need more housing and housing counseling services. We need to have more affordable housing, and we need it from the federal level.”