Housing

Housing refers to buildings or other types of shelter construction in which people live. Types of housing have varied across time and geographic location. Housing also varies by structure, layout, building material, shape, and, to some extent, function, depending on location, culture, and socioeconomic status. A house provides semipermanent residence for [Page 458]one or more people, and many consider their house their home—meaning where they return every day, socialize, eat, and sleep. Housing is considered essential for physical and psychological survival in modernized societies. Modern structures generally include single-family homes (detached and sometimes on privately owned parcels of land); semidetached houses (attached to one or more houses, each including one or two housing units); multi-unit dwellings (structures with multiple separate self-contained units, sometimes referred to as tenements, apartments, flats, condominiums, or cooperatives); single-room occupancy units (a room in a multi-unit building that is rented by the week or month and does not include a bathroom or kitchen); and mobile homes (factory-built structures that are purchased and then transported to a specific location, quite often a trailer park that permits mobile homes). Housing units (regardless of type) can be owned by the resident(s) or rented (meaning someone else owns the unit and charges others a monthly fee to live there).

Housing can become the source of social problems for a number of reasons. First there are issues of affordability. If total housing costs exceed the income of those residing in the unit, then the unit is not affordable. In places where the demand for housing exceeds the supply, the cost of housing goes up. This is characteristically the case in large cities with a continual influx of people looking for employment (e.g., New York, London, and Tokyo, among others). In the United States, an accepted guideline for housing affordability is a housing cost that does not exceed 30 percent of a household's gross annual income. However, since the late 1970s, an increasing number of households have had to pay 50 percent or more of their income for housing. Rising costs can thus result in increased foreclosures and evictions, possibly causing homelessness.

People who become homeless are forced to reside in public shelters or other temporary accommodations. Because the number of beds does not meet the need and because length of stay in many public shelters is limited, homeless people are frequently forced to sleep outdoors or find alternative nonconventional lodging, including abandoned buildings, tunnels, tents, and cardboard boxes, all of which are generally unsafe. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, shantytowns known as “Hoovervilles” emerged in major cities across the United States. Families and individuals evicted from their homes would construct makeshift, temporary housing structures with whatever they could find. Hoovervilles were normally located on vacant land right outside the city limits.

For others, rising housing costs result in “shelter poverty.” This is the circumstance in which households are forced to use a substantial proportion of their income to cover housing costs, leaving little to cover other essential nonshelter needs. Rising housing costs can also result in doubling up, where families or unrelated individuals share a housing unit initially built for fewer occupants. This can lead to overcrowding. Extreme overcrowding has health and safety issues associated with it.

...