I’m no math whiz, but I know how to add and subtract. So I know that when your monthly income is $763, and the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment where you live is $861, you’re screwed.
The Technical Assistance Collaborative and the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities’ Housing Task Force periodically issues a report titled “Priced Out: The Housing Crisis for People with Disabilities.” The latest version that just came out, which analyzes U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development data from 2016, depicts “an unrelenting rental housing crisis for extremely low-income people with disabilities in every single one of the nation’s housing market areas.”
Priced Out says about 4.8 million adults with disabilities received Social Security Supplemental Security Income in 2016, averaging $763 a month. But the report says the average rent for a “modest one-bedroom rental unit” was $861.
What happens to these folks who can’t dream of affording rent? Priced Out says that, in 2016, an estimated 87,000 people with significant disabilities were homeless and between 200,000 and 300,000 more lived in institutions, nursing facilities, and other segregated environments.
I don’t know what’s happening where you live but here in Chicago there’s a whole lot of new housing and urban development going on. But it appears to be addressing a housing crisis of a different sort.
Apparently, our city planners determined that there is a critical shortage of high-rise “luxury” apartment towers featuring a wide range of wonderful amenities from swimming pools and saunas to yoga studios and handball courts. Places like that are popping up all over the city like a black mold infestation. The names of these towers often contain pretentiously misspelled words like Pointe, Centre, or Parc. Their websites are adorned with pictures of happy residents who are all very young and very clean. They’re out and about doing fun city stuff like eating at restaurants with white tablecloths, walking dogs, and sailing.
Just for the hell of it, I looked up some available one-bedroom floor plans at a tower with Pointe in its name. The rent for a 735-square-foot one starts at $1,859. At another place with Parc in the name, 770 square feet goes for $2,113.
So let’s see, if three people living on SSI moved into a one-bedroom apartment at the place with Pointe in its name, they could pay the rent and each have $143 left for everything else. One person could sleep in the bed, one on the couch and one in the bathtub.
Problem solved.